Nora Jaber - Women, workers, and dis/empowerment in Saudi Arabia

In recent years, Saudi Arabia has implemented major reforms to encourage women’s participation in the workforce as part of Vision 2030, the government’s strategic blueprint designed to diversify the economy and reduce dependence on oil. This has been bolstered and legitimised by Saudi women’s struggles for legal reform, which have been articulated in a language of rights and citizenship that reproduces the state’s neoliberal narrative. Saudi women’s empowerment has been celebrated both locally and internationally as a sign of the nation’s progress and prosperity, and of the ‘success’ of Saudi women’s activism in obtaining legal rights and empowerment for women citizens.
This talk examines the relationship between Saudi Arabia’s legal gender order for citizens and its labour regime. It shows how ‘women’s empowerment’, while beneficial to some, is implicated in the reproduction of material inequalities that are invariably racialised and gendered, particularly as they affect migrant workers. It considers how future feminist struggles can be articulated and directed so as to dissolve, rather than reproduce, the social relations through which the Kafala system and all forms of exploitation are sustained.
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https://Universityofexeter.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJYrfuCrqDojGte4Mis4A3SCTK-AsIoSOZet