The Twitter Campaign to End the Male Guardianship System in Saudi Arabia

Abstract

This paper sheds some light on the new landscape of digital feminist activism in Saudi Arabia, which has been rarely analyzed using the lens of social movements theories. I specifically focus on the Twitter campaign to end the male guardianship system, in which a growing number of Saudi women have reclaimed the use of Twitter to disseminate their claims and demand social reforms, maneuvering by that a constraining political environment that is characterized by a dearth of channels for civic engagement, lack of traditional forms of feminist organizing, and different calculations for mobilization, and in this way the women’s movement does resemble a state of abeyance. Consequently, the paper presents new evidence that challenges the traditional take on abeyance by emphasizing on how Twitter can be used as a catalyst for the emergence and preservation of ad-hoc abeyance networks that enables and sustains the feminist movement activities.