State-Building Feminism and Private Lives: Shifting Gender, Class, and Family Relations in the United Arab Emirates

Abstract

Through state intervention, citizens of the United Arab Emirates have experienced stark versions of global trends toward rising women’s employment, shared breadwinning, and economic precarity. I call this postcolonial, authoritarian state effort to expand women’s opportunities while creating a modern national reputation and strong economy state-building feminism. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 64 Emirati women and men and 15 follow-up interviews, I demonstrate that to see women’s rising employment rates as clear evidence of their empowerment misses women’s more ambivalent, unequal experiences. Across class lines, citizens feel disenchanted by economic shifts that restrict men’s provision, necessitating multiple household incomes while precluding Emiratis from forging egalitarian work and family lives. I trace how families use daughters’, sisters’, and wives’ wages to meet basic household needs but obscure their provision to preserve men’s dignity, maintaining unequal domestic gender relations despite women increasingly working for pay. I find that men, despite feeling frustrated and emasculated by the challenge of breadwinning while the state supports women’s entrance into the workforce, transform their emotions into unaffected pride, not backlash; they enact a modern masculinity institutionally supported by state-building feminism. I also demonstrate how the elite women at the forefront of state-building feminism’s display work leverage the state to manage family challenges to their career advancement but will require institutional support to respond to organizational cultures hostile to their inclusion, notably in the expatriate-dominated private sector. Finally, I show how young Emiratis dream of sharing the responsibility to provide and caretake with their future spouses but through institutional and social experiences come to understand those aspirations as implausible futures; this gives way to a stratified liminality, as those with the class resources to pursue graduate degrees and professional careers react by postponing family formation, forging elite identities predicated on not yet having relinquished egalitarian ideals. This research provides insight into the relational and emotional impacts of gender and labor policy amid economic shifts, bridging gender and family studies with economic and political sociology. While challenging Orientalist assumptions, it advances understanding of how gender relations interact with citizenship and class inequality in the Arab Gulf.