Digital Scheherazades in the Arab World

Abstract

The Arab Gulf's previously all-male ruling elite is investing in female brains as the winning card for information-fueled power.

Challenges of orientalist productions and frames of an imagined other: a media monitoring analysis

“…Information technology for example has produced a great shift in contemporary times for women to collect and articulate these visions. Mernissi (2006, p. 121) asserts that new “technologies have destroyed the hudud , the border frontier that divided the universe into a sheltered private arena, where women and children were supposed to be protected, and a public one where adult males exercised their presumed problem-solving authority”. These shift the private to the public and internalize public discussions to matters of domestic life and the family, and vice versa, thus blurring the fragmentation of women's spheres within and across societal realms.…”

“…Women thus contest moral superiority on two patriarchal fronts and through alternative means of surveillance and reinvention: “self-confidence and ability seem to be key characteristics of the new Digital Scheherazades. When you start looking for them instead of focusing on the veiled women, as many Europeans do, you are amazed by their rapidly growing number” (Mernissi, 2006, p. 125). Rethinking what is thought to be imported and measured by Western methodology deconstructs imposed languages and patriarchies which define emancipation in contrast to the polarized other.…”

The ‘Migrant Crisis in the Mediterranean’ as a Threat to Women’s Security in the EU? A Contrapuntal Reading

“…While everyday portrayals presume such insecurities to have autonomously developed in the South/east and arrived in the North/west via migration, a contrapuntal reading of Moroccan scholar Fatima Mernissi's writings together with everyday portrayals of the 'crisis' points to the ways in which such insecurities have been constituted through contemporary geopolitical encounters. I chose to look at Mernissi's writings because her sociological analyses of women in Muslim societies across history offer valuable insight into dealings between South/east and North/west of the Mediterranean (see, for Mernissi 1975Mernissi , 1992Mernissi , 1991Mernissi , 1993Mernissi , 1996aMernissi , 2001Mernissi , 2006. Decentring the study of EU migration governance through adopting the method of 'contrapuntal reading' allows me to underscore that differentiated experiences of women in different parts of the Mediterranean have not come about autonomously but are products of contemporary geopolitical encounters.…”