Armed with critical opinions on the United Arab Emirates’ Yearbook Chapter on ‘Women’, I learn what women of the UAE really feel about this chapter dedicated to them. On the United Arab Emirates main news website for tourists and non-residents, uaeinteract.com, there are annual e-books explaining various aspects of the country. In the most recent 2010 version, the Table of Contents lists chapters on everything from Humanitarian Aid (Chapter 5) to The Economy (Chapter 6) to Electricity & Water (Chapter 10) to, more surprisingly, Women (Chapter 17).
I glanced at all of those chapter titles on government-run systems and social services lumped in with ‘Women,’ and blinked a few times to make sure I had read it correctly. There were no other categories of people, such as ‘Men’ or ‘Foreign Labor’, or ‘Children,’ or ‘Family Life,’ only ‘Women.’ Was the UAE government grouping all women of the UAE together and writing about them as monolithic category? Were ‘Women’ of the UAE somehow akin to categories like Foreign Policy (Chapter 4), Infrastructure (Chapter 9) and Telecommunications & Post (Chapter 13)? It seemed very wrong to me.
After having lived in Abu Dhabi and Dubai for two years and writing a travel memoir about my experiences, and recently returning to Dubai to conduct PhD research, which including interviewing around 40 young Emirati women and men, I felt I owed the country a lot. It gave me a job out of graduate school teaching English at two private universities; it gave me material for a travel memoir and now a PhD thesis. I felt I knew the place deeply. I had experienced as many personal frustrations as great moments of connection and revelation. I wanted to believe the intentions of this e-book, and this Chapter 17, were positive. Yet I had also experienced enough disappointment in the country to remain wary.
I read the chapter. It focuses on the government’s strategy for empowering women and its implementation by Sheikha Fatima, the most prominent wife of former UAE president the late Sheikh Zayed. It also boasts about the government’s success in educating women, their responsibility to ensure women’s work through legislation and various women’s leadership and business federations, their international recognition of women’s progress, and their increasing push for women’s political participation within the UAE’s advisory legislative council. There is also a clear lack in addressing personal identity, family and relationship shifts in light of modernization, or the changing role of Islam in daily life, not to mention much recognition or encouragement for creative or artistic expression.
The National Media Council, who is in charge of producing these yearbooks, are representing women’s (and therefore the whole country’s) modern and traditional identity to the Western world, the primary target audience of this book, which is produced in English and French. First, this representation seeks to demonstrate to the western world that this Arabian Gulf country is indeed modern, “civilized” and egalitarian. By stressing women’s place in the public sphere and highlighting their educational achievements and political participation, the UAE is showing that women hold and will continue to take up prominent places in UAE society, marking the rulers of the country as modern and progressive rather than dismissive of women’s potential. They are very strongly reacting against Orientalist notions that Arab women are oppressed and secluded.
I returned to Dubai for my field research armed with these criticisms of the government’s plan to promote itself through this chapter and asked the nearly all the young Emiratis I interviewed their opinion After hearing the same response over and over, I wondered why I kept on asking.
First of all, nearly all of the women I spoke with put themselves in the mindsets of visitors—people who didn’t know much about the UAE, but had absorbed the stereotypes of Arab women in Western media. They immediately sensed that this chapter would attempt to dispel the misconceptions they often felt burdened by: Arab women are oppressed, locked up at home and are forced to wear those black cloaks and headscarves. Nearly all intuited without even reading the chapter that these pages on Women highlighted the many achievements of UAE women. Another point often stressed was the comparisons with Saudi Arabia’s treatment of women. Nearly all of the Emirati women I spoke with wanted to be sure that the rest of the world knew that the UAE was not at all like Saudi, and they were grateful for it. They could drive, work, be out in the world everyday; they felt respected and were given equal opportunities, sometimes even favored over men. For this they thanked their leaders immensely. Many of the men I spoke with stated that they are going to need to be ‘empowered’ soon, because the women are taking over.
One female artist stated that if she were the intended audience for this book she would jump right to this chapter on women because the treatment of women always illustrated so much about the country as a whole. Whether I liked it or not, she was right. Even though I found fault with the ‘Women’ chapter, the women themselves did not. In fact, they were unsurprised and very proud. They didn’t feel as though the government was pointing their empowerment efforts and women’s accomplishments to manipulate Western readers, but inform them of women’s realities here. The chapter reflects how significant women’s changing roles have been within the country, celebrates their achievements and does serve as a symbol for how far the country as a whole has developed. Nearly all the women I spoke with felt that the government had noticed how diligent and intelligent women are, and then decided to create strategies to help them empower themselves. While I’m not convinced that the government didn’t have any ulterior motives in promoting women’s roles in the UAE, my field research still provided a strong lesson for me. I understood Emirati women’s positive and appreciative perspective, and not only my (and popular scholarship’s) more cynical view.
(Photo Credit: UAE Yearbook)
Jillian Schedneck is a PhD candidate at the University of Adelaide in South Australia. She has written the travel memoir Abu Dhabi Days, Dubai Nights, published by Pan Macmillan Australia. Her work has appeared in Brevity, Redivider, Gender Across Borders and Equality 101, and she has received an MFA from West Virginia University.
