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Abstract
This paper sheds some light on the new landscape of digital feminist activism in Saudi Arabia, which has been rarely analyzed using the lens of social movements theories. I specifically focus on the Twitter campaign to end the male guardianship system, in which a growing number of Saudi women have reclaimed the use of Twitter to disseminate their claims and demand social reforms, maneuvering by that a constraining political environment that is characterized by a dearth of channels for civic engagement, lack of traditional forms of feminist organizing, and different calculations for mobilization, and in this way the women’s movement does resemble a state of abeyance. Consequently, the paper presents new evidence that challenges the traditional take on abeyance by emphasizing on how Twitter can be used as a catalyst for the emergence and preservation of ad-hoc abeyance networks that enables and sustains the feminist movement activities.
Notes
1 Taylor, “Sources of Continuity in Social Movements: The Women’s Movement in Abeyance”, American Sociological Review 54.5 (1989), p. 766.
2 Ibid., p. 761.
3 Doaiji, “Saudi Women’s Online Activism: One Year of the ‘I Am My Own Guardian’ Campaign”, AGSIW Reports, 19 Oct. 2017, p. 17.
4 Staggenborg, Social Movements (2008), p. 165.
5 Minkoff, “The Sequencing of Social Movements”, American Sociological Review 62.5 (1997), p. 796.
6 Taylor, “Sources of Continuity in Social Movements”, p. 726.
7 Ibid., pp. 765–70.
8 Diani, “The Concept of Social Movement”, The Sociological Review 40.1 (1992), p. 12.
9 Cristancho and Anduiza, “Connective Action in European Mass Protest”, presented at the Social Media and Political Participation conference, NYU, 10 May 2013, p. 19.
10 Bennett and Segerberg, “The Logic of Connective Action”, Communication and Society 15.5 (2012), p. 752.
11 Chadwick, “Digital Network Repertoires and Organizational Hybridity”, Political Communication 2.4 (2007), p. 294.
12 Bennett and Segerberg, “The Logic of Connective Action”, p. 748.
13 Wright, “Populism and Downing Street E-Petitions: Connective Action, Hybridity, and the Changing Nature of Organizing”, Political Communication 32.3 (2015), p. 424.
14 Bennett and Segerberg, “The Logic of Connective Action”, p. 743.
15 Ibid., p. 752.
16 Lim, “Framing Bouazizi: ‘White Lies’, Hybrid Network, and Collective/Connective Action in the 2010–11 Tunisian Uprising”, Journalism: Theory, Practice & Criticism 14.7 (2013), p. 937.
17 Pavan, “The Integrative Power of Online Collective Action Networks Beyond Protest. Exploring Social Media Use in the Process of Institutionalization”, Social Movement Studies 16.4 (2016), p. 434.
18 Pavan, “Collective Action and Web 2.0. An Exploratory Network Analysis of Twitter Use during Campaigns”, Sociologica 7.3 (2013), p. 6.
19 Human Rights Watch, “Boxed In: Women and Saudi Arabia’s Male Guardianship System”, 16 July 2016.
20 Hansen, Schneiderman, and Smith, Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL: Insights from a Connected World, p. 4.
21 Barash and Scott, “Twitter. Conversation, Entertainment, and Information, All in One Network”, Analyzing Social Media Network with NodeXL, ed. Derek, Schneiderman, and Smith (2010), pp. 146–7.
22 Pavan, “Collective Action and Web 2.0”, p. 11.
23 Pavan, “The Integrative Power of Online Collective Action Networks Beyond Protest”, p. 437.
24 Ibid., p. 439.
25 Hansen, Schneiderman, and Smith, Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL, p. 76.
26 Himelboim, Mccreery, and Smith, “Birds of a Feather Tweet Together: Integrating Network and Content Analyses to Examine Cross-Ideology Exposure on Twitter”, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication 18.2 (2013), p. 163.
27 Lipschultz, “Social Media Communication in the Classroom: A Pedagogical Case Study of Social Network Analysis”, Digital Media in Teaching and Its Added Value, ed. Conway et al. (2015), p. 195.
28 Neuman, Social Research Methods, Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches (1991), p. 31.
29 Wright, Mass Communication: A Sociological Perspective (1986), p. 125.
30 Creswell and Clark, Designing and Conducting Mixed Methods Research (2011), p. 86.
31 Qu, Wu, and Wang, “Online Community Response to Major Disaster: A Study of Tianya Forum in the 2008 Sichuan Earthquake”, Proceedings of the 42nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (2009), p. 3.
32 Melucci, Mier, and Keane, Nomads of the Present: Social Movements and Individual Needs in Contemporary Society (1989), p. 60.
33 Moghadam, “Transnational Feminist Networks: Collective Action in an Era of Globalization”, International Sociology 15.1 (2000), p. 66.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Huda Alsahi
Huda Alsahi is PhD candidate in Political Science and Sociology at Scuola Normale Superiore, Institute of Humanities and Social Sciences, Piazza Strozzi 1, 50123 Florence, Italy