Tsujigami Namie

"Where there is power, there is resistance." Michel Foucault suggests unstable power relations whilst also demonstrating repetitious and self-reproducing characteristics of power. This paper tries to investigate whether this power relation is applicable to the gender order in Saudi Arabia. And if so, how is it applied? Based on these questions, I examine how Saudi male and female intellectuals conceptualize the gender order through their literary works. The study also explores the strategies and tactics of their discourses including their approaches to Islam. An analysis on intellectuals' discourses illustrates divergent attitudes towards patriarchy based on a variety of interpretation of sacred texts: some hope to strengthen the patriarchal gender order seeking for the benefit of being protected by male guardian and maximizing the benefit of the weak whilst others doubt and resist male dominance and subsequent female dependence upon men, and suggest a drastic change in the sexual division of labour. Diverse discourse produced among the intellectuals is a proof that the patriarchal gender order is a multiple processes of power relations of ceaseless struggles, confrontations and st

"Where there is power, there is resistance." Michel Foucault suggests unstable power relations whilst also demonstrating repetitious and self-reproducing characteristics of power. This paper tries to investigate whether this power relation is applicable to the gender order in Saudi Arabia. And if so, how is it applied? Based on these questions, I examine how Saudi male and female intellectuals conceptualize the gender order through their literary works. The study also explores the strategies and tactics of their discourses including their approaches to Islam. An analysis on intellectuals' d...

What is the genesis of the gender norm in Saudi Arabia that justifies and reproduces distinct gender inequality? And why and how is it maintained? In order to answer these questions this study aims to explore gender order through examining fatwa(a legal opinion) issued by well-known Saudi Arabian 'ulama. An analysis of fatwa demonstrates how 'ulama's discourses stipulate women's body whilst discourses of this genre are rarely produced about men; woman's body is subject to intervention and often disparaged as coquettish being. Stigmatized as "sexual other" vis-a-vis male "we," female Muslims...