![]() That is to say: people in power interpret Islam differently in different times and places. The second is that public discourse in Saudi Arabia is based almost exclusively on references to Islam and such references are inevitably historically specific. For example, Egypt – despite having a large number of female presenters in radio and television – has very few women in parliament. The first is that women’s visibility in the media does not necessarily tell us much about their status in other areas of public life. However, before setting out the evidence, three background observations are in order. At the same time, the contradiction itself merits an explanation, which my presentation will attempt to give. ![]() This contradiction can help to account for pressures to renegotiate the status of female journalists. The second shows that, despite the increase in visibility, there was very limited change in the status of women working as journalists. The first indicates a big increase in women’s visibility in the Saudi media in 2004-06. For that purpose there are two contradictory sets of evidence. My aim here is to assess how far women’s personal and political status in Saudi Arabia has been renegotiated through the media. After the deaths, responsibility for girls’ education was transferred from religious clerics to the Ministry of Education. Families of the victims blamed the religious police for obstructing evacuation because of rules about contact with uncovered females. An extreme example was the fire at a girls’ school in Makkah in 2002. Several scholars have picked up on this point, showing how the contradictions between official discourse about women and practical realities have direct ramifications for Saudi women in their everyday lives. Contradictions are interesting because they indicate that there is intrinsic pressure for renegotiation. ![]() In 2005, they were promised the vote in municipal elections that were due to take place in 2009 but were postponed. Women have been authorized to apply for identity cards without a male guardian’s consent. Professions and university courses that were once barred to women have been opened up. On the other, there have been some big changes in government policies on women’s education, employment and legal standing. On one hand official rhetoric talks of ‘women’s nature’ as if this ‘nature’ imposes self-explanatory restrictions on what women may do and where they may go. It is also necessary to recognize that Saudi Arabian public discourse on the issue of women’s status is full of contradictions. The crucial factor, however, is that it signed the convention for reasons that seemed to be related to a bid for increased foreign investment and membership of the World Trade Organization and had nothing to do with external pressures experienced in the wake of 9/11. The government placed multiple reservations on its adherence to the convention. But, since the focus is also on women, it is relevant to note that Saudi Arabia signed the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) in 2000. Since the focus here is on media, there may be no call to look back much further than the start of television in the kingdom in the 1960s. Although the changes discussed in this article took place in 2004-06, it is important to understand them in the context of a much longer history of change – one that goes back several decades. Any account of these reforms should acknowledge that they started in the 1990s and therefore predated both the terrorist attacks of September 2001 and the international pressure that the attacks triggered for Saudi Arabia to initiate social reforms. The government of Saudi Arabia has introduced numerous internal economic and political reforms in recent years. It is based on the author’s much longer research article, ‘Women and Media in Saudi Arabia: Rhetoric, Reductionism and Realities’, published in the December 2008 issue of the British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Vol 35, No 3, pp 385-404. This paper was presented by the author at the Conference “The East and the West: Women in the eyes of the media”, organised by Resetdoc and held in Doha on April 19th 2009.
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