Abstract
This paper explores how Twitter has been used in the debate on women’s right to drive in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA). The overarching aim of this investigation is to explain how gender roles and the relationship between the genders are navigated in these debates. For Saudi Arabian women, social media platforms such as Twitter provide a unique space to express opinions and highlight areas of concern in a way that they are unable to in any other public sphere. The exploration of the debate on women’s right to drive in the KSA was achieved by collecting a body of tweets in Arabic addressing this topic from the last three months of 2015. Following a corpus-assisted discourse studies approach, this paper analyzes arguments by Twitter users discussing the KSA’s ban on women drivers, which may have contributed to women being granted the right to drive and also raised awareness of the restrictions imposed on women.
Highlights
When Saudi Arabian women’s rights activist Manal Alsharif used Twitter and Facebook to post a video of herself driving the streets of Khobar in 2011, the world took notice
Campaign astounded many in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) and elicited a forceful response on social media platforms
Establishment is central to the Saudi Arabian society, so it is unsurprising that the tweets in support of women’s right to drive featured a strong religious element
Summary
When Saudi Arabian women’s rights activist Manal Alsharif used Twitter and Facebook to post a video of herself driving the streets of Khobar in 2011, the world took notice. On Twitter, the debate over women’s right to drive has been fierce and Alsharif has received messages of both support and criticism from those who see her behavior as contrary to traditional religious life. Years later, after more online campaigns, women have been granted the right to drive. Women in the KSA will be issued driver’s licenses and will be able to drive starting in June 2018. The change comes as part of the recent plan known as the Vision
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