Social media and feminist activism in Saudi Arabia: a corpus-aided critical discourse analysis of the #EndMaleGuardianshipSystem campaign

In 2016, a social media campaign with the hashtag #EndMaleGuardianshipSystem, particularly on Twitter, was launched by a group of (largely female) activists in Saudi Arabia, calling for an end to the male guardianship system. Under this system, a Saudi woman must have a male guardian (one of her close male relatives) provide written consent for her to participate in a wide variety of activities, such as enrolling in higher education, applying for official documents (e.g. passport, family ID, or personal ID), and so on. In such a conservative society, the campaign has unsurprisingly attracted considerable opposition, leading to some highly charged debates in both social and news media, in which women and their position in Saudi society have been placed in the spotlight. This thesis investigates those debates by applying a critical discourse analysis with the help of corpus linguistic analytical tools. It examines the representation of Saudi women, as well as the argumentation strategies used by proponents and opponents of the campaign, in order to reveal the discursive strategies underpinning this feminist social movement. It combines the corpus linguistic software tools with a range of text analytical methods, including systemic functional grammar and van Leeuwen’s model of social representation to analyse a corpus of tweets from 2016 to 2018. This ‘Twitter corpus’ was further divided into four corpora in order to compare representational choices by male and female tweeters on both sides of the debate, namely proponents and critics of the guardianship system. In addition, the content of YouTube videos (a corpus of 32 videos) and online Saudi newspapers (52 news articles) was analysed following Toulmin’s model of argumentation (1958), and the arguments evaluated in light of Aristotelian appeals (2008). The analysis of Twitter found that salient patterns: categories of women, men and institutional actors in the textual representation of social actors served as legitimation strategies used to variously support or undermine the #EndMaleGuardianshipSystem (#EMGS) campaign. It also showed that, on both sides of the debate, the general attitude towards women was negative; campaigners against the male guardianship (MG) system reflected on the negative circumstances of Saudi women living in a restrictive patriarchal society, while somewhat surprisingly, those in favour of the MG system also represented women in a negative way, although this was largely due to their criticism of women who support the system. In terms of their social agency, lexico-grammatical patterns construe a representation of Saudi women which aligns with the competing ideological viewpoints on women’s rights in the debates surrounding the campaign. This is realised on the one hand through personalised narratives about specific women, and on the other through more generalised claims about the position of women in Saudi society. Intertextual analysis of the Twitter data sought to identify the range of voices, texts and practices which were used to support the main arguments on each side of this debate, as well as to construe social relations of power and solidarity by means of the relations, values and roles associated with those ‘borrowed’ practices. These intertextual patterns helped texture arguments which drew liberally on religious and political discourses in particular, with men being the dominant source of these intertextual voices. In addition, the analysis of intertextual references in Twitter indicated that the #EMGS discourse is truly heteroglossic. In addition, YouTube and online newspaper articles revealed the strategic arguments used by both positions to (de)legitimise the end of the male-guardian system, and showed that both of these media share a number of key argumentative themes: discussion of the MG system from an Islamic perspective, the legal foundations of the system, and the aims of the #EMGS campaign. In addition, the thesis theorises the online debates on the MG system in a wider socio-political frame, which reflects women as a subordinated social group and their struggle against patriarchy in Saudi society. While the dynamic of the (counter-)discourse was taking place online, the offline world has witnessed a number of changes in favour of women, for example, the partial removal of the guardian’s consent requirement when providing services to female citizens in April 2017, and the granting of travel rights without a guardian’s permission for women above the age of 21, as of August 2019. However, these changes cannot be claimed with any confidence to be the outcomes of this online activism