Hanna* runs a consultancy firm in Saudi Arabia. She is one of 16 Saudi women entrepreneurs, working in healthcare, PR, fashion design, marketing, events planning, consulting, retail and IT services, whom I have interviewed on a regular basis since 2010. Hanna lives under a totalitarian regime, in a nation ruled by absolute monarchy, and with strict Wahhabi interpretations of Islam according women a secondary position in society. But despite the obstacles in her way, and the quiet nature of her political activity, Hanna’s story is one of inspiring change for other women, of starting to address social and cultural transformation, of quiet activism. Like many of those women with whom I have spoken for more than a decade, Hanna was on a journey to find a platform through entrepreneurship to connect to other women, with an aim to raise their feminist consciousness and empower them. Hanna volunteers at the a centre for businesswomen at the Chamber of Commerce, giving educational lectures on how to become an entrepreneur. She is expected to deliver instructions on how to register a business, how to do accounting, and cover other similar areas. “Once I am in the room, I become a mentor, an advocate of women, an activist for women!” Hanna told me. “I talk about how they should believe in themselves, work together, support and lean on each other, employ other women!” Her actions come in a country where social transformation cannot take place through democratic engagement, where there is no space for critique or dissent, no legal platform for collective political activism. With such political activism banned, and those who are explicitly seen to be campaigning for change – such as 47 women who in November 1990 took to the streets for a secretly organised driving protest in the capital of Riyadh, or members of the Women2Drive campaign in the wake of 2011’s Arab Spring – arrested, punished, publicly shamed and imprisoned, it is necessary to find another way. What Hanna and her fellow women entrepreneurs have done is to use their entrepreneurship as a political form of feminist organising in (almost) silent, protracted ways – nothing like the popular activism in Western cultures, where we see organised protests in public spaces, calling out leaders and advocating reforms on gender equality. They have quietly encroached onto the previously forbidden political space over a decade where Saudi women witnessed unprecedented economic and political change to their position and rights in society. From setting up their own businesses with an ethos to support women’s employment, what followed was a desire for political engagement towards social and structural change. Their activismwas for ‘all Saudi women’ – they are patriotic, proud and hopeful that the country is talking slow but sustainable steps towards achieving legal equal rights between men and women. Over the decade, I found that the women engaged in a three-step ‘quiet encroachment’ process from entrepreneurship to political activism. That is, a process of social change through entrepreneurship, which included subtle everyday solidarity practices, which eventually evolved into feminist activism and political change. 8 |
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