“[T]he Saudi state has been globally celebrated, including by international institutions. And this is no surprise – the gender reforms announced by the state, and formulated with the help of consultancy firms, largely align with the United Nation’s women’s empowerment agenda, which adopts a liberal model of gender equality that works to include ambitious women within the existing capitalist order, leaving its structural inequalities intact.
What is obvious from these celebratory accounts is that gender reforms in Saudi Arabia are almost always discussed only in relation to Saudi women, rendering their implications for non-citizens invisible.”
As of 2022 more than foreign female servants and house cleaners alone numbered more than 1 million.
“This calls for a broader reflection on what emancipatory possibilities are foreclosed by liberal feminist justice frameworks that seek autonomy and equality for some, within unequal structures, rather than more meaningful forms of transnational solidarity that work to dismantle those structures.”
Saudi women’s rights activists have … conflated the interests of a narrow group of relatively privileged women with a singular category of ‘Saudi woman’… In addition to reproducing notions of the racialized other as irredeemably violent and criminal, and of Saudi women as disempowered victims in need of saving, they entirely overlooked the harms migrants, both women and men, are subjected to on an individual and structural basis, including at the hands of Saudi women.”
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