Twelfth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

On October 25th, 2017, Saudi woman named Amna, who was abused by her father and male guardian, posted a call pleading for help onto her YouTube channel. On the same day, Sophia the robot came to the Saudi public sphere through a YouTube video broadcast by the Future Investment Initiative, a conference that brings together companies and international investors to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in which we learn that she is given Saudi citizenship. Having been appropriated as political symbols, for decades, Saudi women had little control over their image; There’s a “complicated” history of the face and image of the Saudi woman and what her citizenship looks like. Three years since Saudi women began to drive legally, a plethora of images of “empowered women” permeated the screens, magazines, and even billboards in New York and London. Examining modern images of Saudi women requires us to think in historical terms and contexts: how these visibilities and mobilities evolved. This paper investigates the politics of display of Saudi women being symbolically problematized and contested. It explores the impact of the changes enacted during the post Vision 2030 era: driving rights, reduced guardianship powers, and the blurring of gender lines in certain public and private spaces. I argue that 2017 marks an important temporal juncture for Saudi women, the feminist discourse, and the overall collective consciousness of gender inequality and discrimination. This is the climax of what was an undeniable movement of women in Saudi Arabia, before they even started driving.