The Dialectic of Presence: A Virtual Ethnography of Online Subjectivities in Saudi Arabia

Abstract

This dissertation conducts a virtual ethnography that aims to study the situated, and context specific, digital media subjectivity of the ‘fashionista’ as an agentival site for enacting presence. I ask, how have fashionistas acts of everyday presence worked to shape the Saudi Arabian public sphere through using alternative modes of dissemination, and to challenge the Western script of rescue, by which Western media has defined its relationship to Saudi Arabian women as subjects of liberation since 9/11. My analysis is located within Leanne Simpson’s decolonial feminist praxis of ‘presencing’, which I use to illuminate the ways in which ‘fashionistas’ articulate their everyday acts of presence. In developing an understanding of ‘fashionistas’, I analyze their identity performance within the larger social context, through examining how they enact a different type of agency, that locates their presence within and against flows of power. I additionally examine how fashionistas’ navigation of networked algorithms has contributed to their reclamation of women’s faces. My discussion takes place against a historicization of the sociopolitical context of women’s visibility in, and outside of, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.