Abstract/Summary

There is a considerable body of work that has explored the representations of women in the media. Yet, there are relatively few studies that have examined multimodal representations of Saudi women, who can be considered a marginalized social group. Existing research suggests that in the Western media, Saudi women have been perceived through an Orientalist lens with two representations dominating the picture: (1) as passive victims of an ultraconservative society or (2) as violent extremists (Abid & Al-Khazraji, 2017; Bashatah, 2017; Elyas et al., 2020; Mustafa & Troudi, 2019). Against the background of the recent societal reforms in Saudi Arabia that have contributed to the rights and improvement of women’s lives, this study attempts to re-assess and expand on the previous research by considering larger datasets, multimodality and comparative perspectives. The main aim of this study is to investigate how Saudi women have been represented in the UK and Saudi news media across two historic time periods in Saudi Arabia (SA): between 2011-2013 (when 2 highly publicized protests against the female driving ban took place) and 2017-2019 (when the driving ban was lifted, and women started driving in SA). Whereas past research has focused either on text or images, this study utilizes an innovative research-friendly Corpus-Assisted Multimodal Discourse Analysis (CAMDA) (Baker, 2020; Ledin & Machin, 2020) to examine both quantitative and qualitative representations (van Leeuwen, 2008) including their newsworthiness (Bednarek & Caple, 2017). By analysing and comparing both textual and visual representations in two different demographic and historic contexts, a more comprehensive understanding has emerged of how the media, within the Saudi and UK contexts, perceived Saudi women, while identifying representational shifts that occurred over time. The multimodal findings reveal that Saudi women are activated more frequently than passivized in both historical contexts and a significant shift in Saudi women agency over time (i.e., pre-/post-driving ban lift) in both the UK and SA news media can be observed. Substantial shifts in beneficializing Saudi women are also detected which attests to the provisions that the Saudi government has made in terms of enabling Saudi women to become more empowered by taking up a greater variety of roles than was possible previously. The findings point to a greater functionalization of Saudi women but in the SA context only. And as demonstrated by the DNVA, active agency representation outcomes and shifts are further reinforced by positive attitudes, especially in visual representations. As for representations of passivation, it was found that depictions of Saudi women as victimized agents emerged significantly more in the 2011-2013 time period in both the UK and SA press. However, passivation continued as well as other Orientalizing biases in the UK press in the more current 2017-2019 even after the driving ban had been lifted. Furthermore, the analysis of cultural categorization suggests multimodal shifts in Saudi women’s public physical appearance and identity from conservative to more relaxed, unconservative tendencies, especially within the UK visual context; however, textually, it is the SA press that reflects more balanced representations – the diversity of current-day attire norms and the attitudes associated with those. The analysis of cultural representation also reveals that Saudi women were individualized more frequently than collectivized in both geographical and historical contexts, and no significant shifts in being portrayed alone or in mixed groups were detected over time. Overall, it can be claimed that combining both visual (which were generally more positive in terms of social actor agency and attitude, and better reflecting on-ground cultural identity) and textual representations (which often revealed Orientalizing and marginalizing depictions) offered a more balanced understanding of the media representation of Saudi women that reflect on-ground realities, practices, and developments in the Saudi society. This study contributes to the growing literature on minoritized group representations, more specifically shedding light on UK vs. Saudi representations of women in Saudi Arabia, and to the fields of Corpus-Assisted CDA and multimodal analysis frameworks at large by providing a more manageable multimodal analysis toolkit for scholars interested in investigating representations and newsworthiness of any social actor(s).