Abstract/Summary

Before the historic lifting of the ban on women driving (WD) intense debates among men and women in Saudi Arabia took place on Twitter. These discussions were rich that various hashtags about women driving repeatedly reached the Twitter trending list in the Kingdom. The gendered nature of this richness can be explored by taking a critical approach to the study of these tweets. This qualitative research, informed by critical discourse studies, and particularly van Leeuwen’s (2008) and Sunderland’s approach (2004) critically analysed one of the trending Twitter hashtags about women driving that was trending during the ban on women driving. Van Leeuwen's (2008) approach is employed to critically analyse the way female and male opponents and supporters of women driving in Saudi Arabia are portrayed in the hashtag, specifically in tweets by those who were anti-women driving (Anti-WD) and pro-women driving (Pro-WD). This was combined with Sunderland's approach in order to identify and name the various gendered discourses that were drawn upon in the representations of female and male opponents and supporters of women driving. Thematic analysis was also used to deepen the study’s understanding of how the different gender representations are constructed in the tweets, and to categorize repeated themes associated with gender in the analysed data. Combining all of these frameworks, the research objective is to illustrate how language and gender and gender roles, relations, and gendered discourses are connected discursively. The findings showed similar gender related themes in the Anti-WD and Pro-WD tweets and in regard to representations there were also similarities and differences in the representations of female and male supporters and opponents. The study identified several gendered discourses in the representations of the social actors in the tweets made by Anti-WD and Pro-WD Twitter users. All of the identified discourses fall within traditional gendered discourses. The study results show that, despite where the authors of the tweets overtly positioned themselves in regard to women driving, whether advocate or against, they both reinforced and drew on similar gendered discourses, indicating the same gendered ideologies are shared by opposing groups. This study contributes to the field of CDS by providing a non-western perspective rather a Saudi perspective about an issue that exist in Saudi Arabia unlike the Western perspectives generally found in CDS studies that examined Western newspapers and media discussing the issue of women driving in Saudi. The study also contributes to the field of CDS by examining the issue, not from the narrow viewpoint of symbolic elites, such as female activists and male religious clerics, as other studies have done, but from the unique perspective of tweets by Saudi people; people who actively tweeted on trending hashtags regardless of the numbers of followers they had. The study adopts a unique perspective on the examination of women driving because it recognises that both men and women could be either opponents or supporters of the move, transcending the simplistic and narrow men versus women interpretation. It further contributes to the field of CDS and gender studies by addressing gaps in knowledge, particularly with regard to the Arabic language but also in relation to gender and social media in the Saudi context. It presents concrete and substantial linguistic evidence, in Arabic, of the ways in which female and male supporters and opponents have been represented on the Twitter social media platform. Finally, the research is noteworthy and original because it identifies and names previously uncharted gendered discourses, constituting a major contribution to the field.