Gender boundaries inside pan-Arab newsrooms

Abstract

The focus of this article is on Arab women journalists and how they negotiate their position in news and current affairs programmes. The main aim is to illustrate how gender identity can be appropriated and contested. Drawing on a recent piece of field-work among a large sample of Arab men and women journalists in transnational media, I aim to show how women interpret the boundaries inside the newsroom, and their strategies to overcome these boundaries. Also, drawing on post-feminist debates, I argue that Arab female journalists like to see themselves as free agents responsible for their career routes to consolidate their journalistic experience and professionalism; the reality, however, is that they end up reproducing the dominant structure.

Keywords:

• agency
• empowerment
• female journalists
• pan-Arab media
• post-feminism