Over the past few decades, the Arab Gulf has witnessed tremendous socioeconomic and structural transformation coupled with major reforms to modernize the higher education sector. These reforms have focused on establishing partnerships with foreign universities and/or hosting international branch campuses to promote diverse, liberal, and high-quality educational programs. While these far-reaching reforms have undeniably led to a dramatic increase in the number of academic institutions (Baghdady 2017), these institutions have mostly reproduced traditional educational structures and paradigms, with little contribution to the advancement of more liberal and progressive ideas and/or areas of study, namely, gender and women’s studies (GWS).
The beginnings of the feminist movement in Kuwait can be traced back to the 1940s and the institutionalization of formal education for girls. In 1953, a group of young women advocated for the removal of the
hijab
. The group attracted mixed reactions of both support and opposition, but their activities were restricted to holding meetings and publishing newspaper articles. They did, however, encourage women to consider founding their own societies and organizations modeled after other Arab associations. Saudi women have been participating in charitable organizations since the 1960s, generally under the patronage of princesses. By the early 1970s, the increase of women‐only educational institutions nurtured nascent political activism among Saudi women. Educational institutions, as well as efforts to bring more Saudi nationals into the workplace due to the oil boom, paved the way for the formation of a Saudi intelligentsia and opened up new spaces for their activities.
This paper intends to shed some light on what constitutes a new cyber-mediated practice in the context of Saudi Arabia, that is the use of satire as a communication strategy and a new mode of feminist cultural production, through examining the case of "Noon Alniswa" which is a satirical YouTube show that has been running since 2012. Thus, by focusing on "Noon Alniswa" as a concrete example, I seek to examine the case as a vivid example of the struggles which women are currently facing in the Middle East and beyond, while seeking to address the following questions: (1) what are the prominent issues that have been featured and discussed in "Noon Alniswa"? (2) what are the overall consequences of the emergence of YouTube in particular, in relation to feminist action (3) and thirdly what is the role of producing and consuming online satire as a cyber-mediated practice?
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