Piety,Glamour,and Protest: Performing Social Status and Affiliation in the United Arab Emirates

Abstract

This article focuses on the fashion choices and performances that female Emirati students attending public university in the UAE create across different social and physical spaces, as well as the ways in which these feed into dynamic and fluid presentations of self. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which these self-presentations are constructed in relation to on-campus social interactions, as well as the novelty of many of these interactions and performances. The university campuses allow forms of socializing, performative interactions, and body adornment to develop that often could not be replicated in other physical spaces, off-campus. In the process, women assess and re-craft important sociocultural values, forms of reciprocity, and ways of being in the world that dominate other areas of their lives.

Keywords

Arab Gulf UAE performance higher education women fashion habitus

Introduction

Between 2009 and 2011, I conducted an ethnographic study of young Emirati women attending university in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). This work highlights the ways in which university campuses served as pivotal sites where young women participated in particular types of social interactions constructed around specific presentations of self. I also use this case study to illustrate broader trends in global flows of information, media, peoples, fashions, products, and infrastructures.

Building from Butler’s work (1990, 1997, 1993), I focus on young women’s constructions of identity via particular types of performativity and the ongoing processes by which they actively engaged in “self-making” through behaviors, speech, gestures, and fashion. I also propose that UAE universities provided a performative space (Goffman 1959; Le Renard 2013, 2014; Mendoza-Denton 2008) in which young women could “try on” different presentations of self and identity that they would not otherwise have been able to experiment with. Universities were thus not only spaces for education but also for social performance, performances moreover that reflected the contradictory forces flowing through women’s lives on- and off-campus. I demonstrate—through a discussion of the specific fashion choices of four participants in my study—that fashion choices, socializing patterns, and performances in this particular population were not only inextricably linked but were heavily reliant on the physical and social spaces of the universities.

Young women in the UAE engage with many aspects of globalized culture but also must integrate such messages into their locally grounded lives (Attwood, Dajani, and Naylor 2010; Bristol-Rhys 2010; Davidson and Mackenzie 2008; Findlow 2000; Gulf News Report 2008; Masud, Salvatore, and Bruinessen 2009; Al-Sharekh and Springborg 2008; Al-Saayegh 2008). As I have written about elsewhere (Trainer 2012, 2013, 2016), Emirati women in the UAE of the twenty-first century must constantly negotiate local traditions and moral frameworks, and their emphasis on timeless community expectations of behavior for “good” young women (Bristol-Rhys 2010), with the social realities that characterize the country today, after several decades of globalized development (Davidson 2008, 2009; Heard-Bey 2004; Narayan 1997). As a result, women’s ongoing, bodily based constructions of identity occurred across shifting sociocultural contexts, under the surveillance of family, friends, community members, school administrators, employers, and the government itself (Becker 1995; Bourdieu 1984, 1990; Vom Bruck 1997; Edmonds 2010; Kanna 2010; Al-Sharekh and Springborg 2008; Sobh, Belk, and Gressel 2012, 2014).

Changing identities mapped onto different physical spaces, as well as the social scenes that characterized them, as women managed the demands of their daily routines. Bourdieu’s work (1984, 1990) on social fields and the negotiation of habitus across different spaces is central to understanding the decisions made by these young women. Emirati women continuously (re)negotiated their own identities and social interactions via fashion choices and specific types of performances. Key to this analysis is the often-marked disparity between women’s on-campus performances versus the performances enacted off-campus, amid the social and family milieus outside the universities.

Research Site

The UAE is a federation of seven states: Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Sharjah, Ras Al Khaimah, Ajman, Fujairah, and Umm Al Quwain, each with its own ruling family and history. Prior to Independence and Federation in 1971, the region was called the Southern/Lower Gulf, the Trucial Coast, and/or the Trucial States by the European powers active in the area—and for several centuries before 1971 the British had a monopoly on the area (Davidson 2008, 2009; Heard-Bey 2004). Feuds and raids were common until at least the 1970s among the tribes of the Trucial States. Likewise, the families that now rule the seven emirates often clashed with one other. These tensions persist today, manifested in political maneuverings over oil revenues and resource distribution rather than in overt warfare, although Dubai and Abu Dhabi wield significantly more power and resources than the other five emirates (Davidson 2008, 2009; Heard-Bey 2004).

Each emirate has a central port city of the same name (i.e., Dubai Emirate has the city of Dubai, Sharjah Emirate has the city of Sharjah, etc.). Historically, these cosmopolitan port cities differed significantly from the conservative “Bedouin” interior. Today, the cities of Abu Dhabi and Dubai in particular have international clout, some of the world’s busiest Free Trade Zones, mega-building projects, huge expatriate populations, and constantly expanding infrastructure and resources. A drive through the emirates reveals the contrast between the small towns and long stretches of desert that characterize the northern emirates and the glittering coastal cities (Acuto 2010; Pacione 2005; Ponzini 2011).

Two public universities, one in the coastal city of Dubai and one in the oasis town of Al Ain in Abu Dhabi Emirate, served as the primary sites for this study. I also conducted extensive participant observation and other research activities across a range of public and semipublic spaces throughout the other five emirates. Emiratis access different tiers of higher education within the UAE. Private universities charge high tuition, draw many students from the expatriate populations living in the UAE, and have roughly equal numbers of male versus female students (e.g. AUD website 2011); by contrast, public universities are free for all Emirati citizens, attract mainly Emirati students, and—because of a relative lack of male interest in pursuing higher education—have predominantly female student populations (e.g. UAEU website 2011).

The Dubai university campus within which I was embedded was almost entirely enclosed. Security was strict: students swiped ID cards upon entering and leaving campus, and guards at the gates ensured that the students were authorized to leave campus at specific times by their families. Faculty and visitors showed ID upon arrival. These security measures, together with the university’s status as a commuter school, allowed the institution to reassure parents that although their daughters were obtaining a Western-style education, they were doing so within a “safe,” “culturally sensitive,” controlled environment. The self-contained and regulated nature of the campus made it a valuable place to conduct fieldwork. Most students spent four to five days a week on campus, and many were there all day. At the time of my fieldwork, the student body of this university was 100 percent female and almost entirely Emirati. Most students came from Dubai or neighboring Sharjah and Ajman.

The other university, in the town of Al Ain, had a student population mostly drawn from Al Ain itself, and also from the northern emirates of Ras Al Khaimah, Fujairah, and Umm Al Quwain. At the time of my fieldwork, the student body was >85 percent female and overwhelmingly Emirati. Its size, age, and geographic location all made the institution an interesting foil to the Dubai-based university. The Emirate of Abu Dhabi has a reputation for being more conservative than Dubai, and the towns in the interior are considered particularly conservative. Al Ain, in particular, invokes a sense of nostalgia and tradition among Emiratis, although it lacks the economic activity of the cities of Dubai and Abu Dhabi. The university there has a more socially and religiously conservative reputation than the one in Dubai, particularly with respect to the types of students it attracts (i.e., they tend to be from more conservative families, smaller towns, etc.). A percentage of students at the university in Al Ain live on campus in dormitories, a continuing source of stress for the university’s administrators, who must reassure parents that their daughters are not allowed to move through public spaces or interact with men without chaperones, restrictions, and rules, day or night.

The UAE’s current emphasis on national unity often obscures socioeconomic, ethnic, and religious diversity among Emiratis (see Trainer 2012, 2013, 2016 for more discussion). Moreover, universal access to health care, housing, and education are powerful homogenizing forces among young locals. Nevertheless, it was possible to draw some conclusions about the socioeconomic, ethnic, and religious backgrounds of university students. A sizeable minority of the women at the Dubai-based university who participated in my study, for example, came from families of Persian rather than Arab origin. Some of these families were Shi’ite, some Sunni; regardless, most adamantly did not want to discuss the subject.

Similarly, students’ socioeconomic status was extremely difficult to pinpoint, both because of the homogenizing influences of the benefits available to Emirati citizens, and because the issue was a sensitive one.¹ I was only able to determine general categories of low, middle, and high socioeconomic status, based on the following variables: (1) a participant’s feedback (if volunteered, unsolicited) about her family’s socioeconomic status; (2) her parents’ educational background; (3) her parents’ employment; (4) the quality (i.e., cost) of her abayas and shaylas, as determined by the researcher; (5) her own educational history, that is, did she attend (free) public or (expensive) private schools before university; and (6) her family’s international travel history, for example, did they travel in Europe regularly? Parental education and employment were particularly unreliable without the other variables, as Emiratis may have little formal education and hold what may appear to be low-paying jobs, but at the same time have access to considerable income from family businesses.

Importantly, the attitudes, lifestyles, and ideas about identity and body observed among the study participants were markedly similar between the universities and, furthermore, were echoed both in the larger population of university-educated local women living in the UAE and, in some instances, among young women living elsewhere in the Arab Gulf. Almost three-quarters of young Emirati women currently attend an institution of higher education, reflecting exponentially increasing female attendance in the region (Davidson and Mackenzie 2008; Fakhro 2005; Kemp 2013; National Media Council 2013; UAE Government 2014; UAE Ministry of Education 2014; UAE Ministry of State 2008; United Nations and League of Arab States 2013). The views of these participants, therefore, likely reflect those of a significant segment of the population.

Methods

The core of this research consisted of participant observation throughout the university campuses, combined with interviews with 103 female Emirati students who were drawn from the two public universities that served as my primary points of entry for research. Participants represented a range of academic majors and social groupings and were eighteen to thirty years of age.

All 103 women consented to an initial semistructured interview. Interviews ranged from forty-five minutes to one and a half hours. Fifty-eight of these 103 women agreed to return two to six months later for an additional semistructured interview, in response to an e-mail follow-up requesting a second interview. In ensuing months, I followed up informally with eighteen of these fifty-eight participants, meeting two to four times with each for unstructured interviews. The interviews covered topics relating to body image, health, weight, identity, national development processes, transnational trends in advertising and ideas about beauty, socializing patterns among young people in the UAE, and family-centered activities. All interviews took place in English, as it is the primary language used in academic settings within the UAE and is spoken fluently by students.

Additionally, informal interviews were conducted with administrators, professors, and health care staff at both universities. These interviews were bolstered by extensive participant observation inside classrooms and in public spaces on each campus, as well as within the dormitories of the university in Al Ain. I spent several days of the week at each campus throughout my months in the UAE, interacting with, observing, and speaking to students, faculty, visitors, and administrators.

Visits to other university campuses in the more urbanized and developed southern emirates of Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Sharjah provided further context, as did general participant observation throughout public spaces in the urban centers of the UAE. All of these activities took place within the larger context of living in Dubai and Al Ain.

Thus, participant observation and interviews allowed me to track young women’s presentations of self across spaces both on- and off-campus. Themes that emerged in the first set of interviews and initial participant observation were confirmed in both follow-up interviews and further participant observation. I then analyzed interview and participant observation notes to inductively draw out and explore these themes, including the social-fashion choices described in detail in subsequent sections. These choices need to be considered within the context of the globalizing Islamic Fashion industry.

The Growth of the Global Islamic Fashion Industry and Its Implications for the UAE

The growth of “Islamic Fashion” as an industry catering to female Muslim consumers has been well documented. The term “Islamic Fashion” may refer to fashion shows, web-based clothing stores, design competitions, expensive specialty shops, and street market vendors; it may refer to clothing (such as the hijab) designed specifically for Muslim women or to Western-style clothing purchased from Western chains and layered in specific ways. Scholars point to the growth of fashion centers throughout the world and the outsourcing of clothing production as evidence that “fashion” is a global phenomenon (Moors and Tarlo 2007; Niessen, Leshkowich, and Jones 2003; Tarlo and Moors 2013). According to Wilson (1985), “fashion” is dress characterized by rapidly changing styles, relies on continuous consumption, and depends on certain technological advances . Other scholars have debated interpretations that view fashion as a means of cementing socioeconomic difference versus as a more collective group process and project aimed at modernity (Davis 1991).

Scholars focusing on the trajectory of the “Islamic Fashion” industry cite a few pivotal turning points in its growth (Abaza 2007; Gökariksel and McLarney 2010; Kilicbay and Binark 2002; Moors 2009; Mahmood 2005; Tarlo 2010; Tarlo and Moors 2013). European-style dress spread throughout the Middle East in the early twentieth century, particularly in urban settings and among professional classes. The 1970s brought widespread disillusionment with Western models of development to the region, with a sociopolitical backlash against secular, Western-led development gaining momentum throughout the 1980s and 1990s. This backlash was mirrored in women’s clothing choices, as increasing numbers of young, educated, urban, Muslim women adopted clothing that covered more of their bodies, including the hijab/headscarf (El-Guindi 1999; Mahmood 2005; Tarlo 2010; Tarlo and Moors 2013; Tiilikainen 2003).

The Arab Gulf only peripherally experienced the state-led adoption of Western clothing (and other experiments with Westernization and secularization) seen elsewhere in the Middle East (Davidson 2008, 2009; Heard-Bey 2004). Covered outerwear remained the norm for Gulf women, at least in public (Bristol-Rhys 2010; Hellyer 2014; Zacharias and Leech 2014). By the closing decades of the twentieth century, however, a global Islamic consumer culture centered on the consumption of fashionable and Islamic clothing had saturated the Arab Gulf (Gökariksel and McLarney 2010; Kaiser 2013; Al-Qasimi 2010; Shaheen 2010; Stratton 2006 ). Moors makes the important point that in a Muslim-majority country such as the UAE, where there is considerable pressure to cover, wearing fashionable Islamic dress is “a form of aesthetic consumption that is only weakly related to [individual] religious convictions” (2009, 190).

In the modern nation of the United Arab Emirates, the abaya and shayla (the overgarment and head covering worn by most Emirati women in the UAE today) possess powerful symbolic status for female Emiratis: they signal adherence to tradition, culture, and religion, as well as access to the privileges of “belonging” as citizens to the UAE state (Kaiser 2013). They also constitute the cultural norm. Indeed, Al-Qasimi (2010) argues that the abaya worn by young Gulf women today still accommodates, despite changes in presentation and style, both “the hegemonic order of Islamic patriarchy” and national ideologies because its “essential qualities” (49) have not been altered. As such, most Emirati women wear the abaya and shayla because they are required to by their families, because it signals their claim to exclusive benefits as Emirati citizens, and/or because it signals their respect for “The Tradition” (a term associated by participants with an ill-defined set of behaviors primarily rooted in local interpretations of Islam and pre-development local cultural practices). Women thus signal their “Emirati-ness” by wearing an abaya and shayla.

Photograph by the author, taken at a public event of young Emirati women, all wearing versions of the abaya-shayla combination. The overall impression of sameness from afar is belied by personal styles and accessories.

Abayas-as-fashion² constitutes a big business in Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and other Gulf cities. A cheap abaya with minimal decoration cost about the equivalent of US$30–50 at the time of my fieldwork, but many students wore abayas ranging in price from a few hundred to a few thousand U.S. dollars. These expensive abayas included embellishments such as embroidery with Swarovski crystals. Some participants told me that they had their abayas made by personal tailors, but stores exclusively selling abayas and shaylas were also located in most of the shopping malls found throughout the Emirates. Additionally, online “Islamic boutiques” have proliferated in recent years. The expense of purchasing abayas and shaylas, as well as the Western-style clothing worn underneath, can be considerable and contributes to the perception common in the UAE that Emirati women are often too extravagant (Al-Qasimi 2010; Gerson 2010; Sobh, Belk, and Gressel 2012, 2014). This perception is not limited to those within the UAE’s border: an article in Elite Daily, for instance, highlighted the fact that, in the wake of the global recession, the market for luxury goods relied heavily on the extravagant purchasing power of Gulf Arabs and chose to focus specifically on the spending habits of women in the Gulf, who have become “the world’s biggest buyers of high fashion” (Waters 2011).

The clothing that participants and other students wore underneath their abayas also varied widely in expense. Many female students wore expensive labels every day while others wore considerably cheaper clothing, either by choice or necessity. An over-focus on the ultra-rich within the UAE may hide the economic diversity that is actually characteristic of Emiratis. Similarly, though fashion was important to the female university students I studied, not all (or even most) came from families with the buying power or desire to allow them to routinely dress expensively. That said, fashion and dress did serve as key elements in ongoing constructions of self and social identity among the students (Miller 2004, 2006). Women constantly expressed individuality, heterogeneity, and style, not only in the ways in which they wore the abaya and shayla—experimenting with colors, decorations, draping, sheerness, costliness, etc.—but also in their selections of what to wear under the abaya.

Photograph by the author of Jamila, a popular Barbie-type doll available in the UAE, dressed in a fairly conservative version of the female national dress. Note the contrast with the clothes of the “American-style” Barbies in the background.

Fashion and Local Practices of Self-Presentation

Within Emirati communities, streams of nonverbal communication rooted in material self-presentation code expectations and behaviors (Bourdieu 1984). Female students’ handbags, for example, spoke volumes about the owners’ socioeconomic and familial position. The local specificity of these cues amid state-led rhetoric about the global, cosmopolitan nature of the UAE (Fakhro 2005; Patrick 2011; Al-Sharekh 2007; Al-Sharekh and Springborg 2008; National Media Council 2013; United Nations and League of Arab States 2013) often produces contradictory discussions on such interactions.

Several participants talked about the importance of certain styles, behaviors, and products in nonverbal communication within their communities. Lara, for example, remarked, “I can just sit in the [university] atrium or the mall and watch women go by and tell you all about them, just based on the way they wrap their shayla, wear their abaya, what their shoes look like.” Much of the nonverbal communication centered on particular kinds of self-presentation, including women’s fashion choices: the detailing added to the abaya and shayla, the outfits selected to wear underneath, the all-important accessories, and women’s comportment (e.g., their manner of walking or interacting with others, their volume of speaking, etc.). Accessories, especially handbags and shoes, were key components of this fashion-as-language, both because they served as obvious economic signposts and because they fell outside the cultural norms governing the wearing of abayas and shaylas.

The observation that dress is an important means of nonverbal communication that can signal adherence to particular social groups has been firmly established by notable scholars working in diverse settings (Eckert 1989; Mendoza-Denton 2008; Miller 2004, 2006; Taylor 2006). “Emirati dress,” however, is typically treated as a monolithic category, echoing the tendency to treat the national category of “Emirati” as equally monolithic (Patrick 2011; Al-Sharekh 2007; Al-Sharekh and Springborg 2008; UAE Ministry of State 2008). There are important exceptions to this “black box” narrative, both among scholars (e.g., Al-Qasimi 2010) and in popular media pieces (e.g., Hellyer 2014; Zacharias and Leech 2014). Research elsewhere in the Arab Gulf (e.g., Meneley 2007; Le Renard 2013, 2014) contributes to such analysis. Nevertheless, in the UAE, connections between fashion choices, socializing patterns, and different physical spaces remain underexplored. These links are pivotal in explaining the interactions and actions I observed on- and off-campus among young women.

Most of this study’s participants (and their friends) wore abayas and shaylas while out in highly public venues. This practice, on the one hand, increased their visibility—publicly signaling their Emirati citizenship—but also signaled their conformance to expectations of how Emirati women should behave and present themselves in public spaces. On campus, however, many female students prioritized their desire to fit in with certain peers’ fashion trends, and subsequent socializing patterns showed interesting links with these fashion choices.

In this context, I aim to explore several fractures that divided women socially on campus, as well as the ways in which these social divisions were expressed on bodies, via specific fashion choices. I do this by describing four participants’ fashion and performative choices, as observed by and communicated to me over the course of my fieldwork. Each of these four participants is representative of certain patterns that were influential among the female university student populations I studied at the time of my fieldwork. For consistency’s sake, all four are drawn from the university in Dubai, but the trends they illustrate were echoed in the sample from the university in Al Ain as well. The social/fashion trends identified, while by no means social cliques, were constructed around specific fashion choices that had very clear social repercussions that structured peers’ expectations concerning the behaviors and performances an individual would express. Fashion has social power because it is treated as predictive of behavior and in so doing, attracts or repels potential friends and acquaintances (e.g., Miller 2004).

Lara: Too Fashionable, too “Modern”?

When Lara showed up for her first interview with me, she wore her hair loose down to the middle of her back and uncovered by a shayla, her silk abaya was open in front to show designer jeans, and she wore hot pink stiletto heels. I saw her for six subsequent interviews and ran into her on campus on a regular basis; each time, her hair was uncovered. Once when we met at the campus coffee shop, she appeared with an enormous pink and gold purse (and matching shoes), then whipped out a bejeweled purse hook, which she hung from our café table. Prior to university, Lara had attended a private secondary school, where foreign students were a sizeable contingent within the student body. Of Lara’s friends, some did not wear shaylas and some wore them (and their abayas) loosely. On campus, none of them covered up more extensively than loosely draped, often-sheer abayas and shaylas.

Importantly, Lara and her friends at the Dubai-based university—and their counterparts at the university in Al Ain—were an amorphous collection of women with disparate family backgrounds, friendships, towns of origin, and interests. What they shared was a common approach to fashion and self-presentation: long, carefully coiffed hair; shaylas worn loosely or not at all; abayas worn in a relatively revealing manner with tight Western clothing underneath; and fashionable heels or flats, purses, makeup, jewelry, etc. Although others have pointed out that the expensive abayas-as-high-fashion phenomenon in Al Khaleej necessarily precludes women of lower socioeconomic status (Meneley 2007; Le Renard 2014; Wynn 1997), my data did not show such clear-cut trends, with some variation in socioeconomic status across the female students who chose an appearance that was read by their counterparts as sophisticated, feminine, and cosmopolitan (following Le Renard 2014).

Because of the continuing importance of “modesty” amongst Emirati families, assumptions about the women who chose glamourous and cosmopolitan fashions tended to ascribe to them, at best, an unseemly preoccupation with shopping (e.g., Sobh, Belk, and Gressel’s 2012 use of a vain-to-modest continuum to describe variations in dress styles) and, at worst, loose morals. Some of the most negative stereotypes about “spoiled” and “shallow” Emirati women, which served as a popular subject in local media discourse (e.g., Bardsley 2010; Gerson 2010; Ismail 2012; Shaheen 2010; Moussly 2010), centered on these women. Such dismissals glossed over characteristics that did not fit the “too modern” profile, including religious piety and familial loyalty, despite the fact that such themes came up repeatedly in my conversations with Lara and her friends as powerful influences in their daily lives.

As a result of negative stereotypes, some of these women modified their self-presentations when off-campus. Lara’s friend Dana, for instance, who also participated in the study, typically wore her hair loose whenever I encountered her on-campus. On one occasion, however, I encountered Dana with her sister in the Dubai Mall and both had their heads covered because they were out in a very public space. Dana informed me, though, that Lara never wore a shayla, regardless of context. Lara herself told me that when she went to the gym, she just wore shorts and a tank top and threw an abaya over them while in transit, saying that as long as she was careful to keep up appearances to some extent, she should be able to modify her outfits as she saw fit

Salma: Fashionable but “Modest”

Salma was another participant with whom I interacted routinely during my fieldwork. Salma always wore both abaya and shayla, well wrapped but draped well. In other words, her abayas and shaylas were flattering, often quite tight, and decorated with embroidered designs and crystals. At the same time, the clothes she wore underneath, as well as most of her hair, were successfully covered. I never saw Salma without makeup, jewelry, and high-heels accessorizing her outfits.

The vast majority of my participants—at both university campuses—dressed similarly to Salma. This suite of style cues could be crafted to be very flattering but also appeared to attract the least negative attention from peers, older Emiratis, and foreigners alike. Thus, it had the fewest social repercussions, on- and off-campus. If, as Sobh, Belk, and Gressel (2012) argue, “tensions [in the Gulf] between rising consumer desires to adapt and be part of the increasingly global environment and the desire to remain loyal to local culture and preserve national identity are reflected in many aspects of consumption” (358), where “the outcome of confronting these conflicting forces is a local glamorous fashion that straddles the line between the modest traditional and the vain modern by incorporating elements of both in the creation of new fashion styles” (360), then the women I observed were consistently choosing a balance that appeased most in-country critics because they were perceived as “modest-modern.” Another Dubai-based study, focused on the negotiations young professionals make in the workplace, labeled this balancing act as trying to “be modern in a respectful way” (Kanna 2010, 100). This self-presentation was thus versatile enough that it seemed to require less modification across public and private social spaces. For example, when I met Salma at a café one afternoon in a wealthy, expatriate-dominated neighborhood, she arrived alone, dressed similarly to the way she did on campus. I noticed the same thing when I encountered two other participants at a Starbucks in that same neighborhood a few weeks later: they sat together enjoying coffees, dressed just as they usually were on the university campus.

Nisa: Enacting Piety and Tradition

Nisa was another participant I met with frequently both on- and off-campus. Possessing a forceful personality with well-honed critical faculties, she provided valuable feedback across a range of interview topics (and frequently let me know when she thought I was barking up the wrong research tree). She was also kind, inviting me to her sister’s wedding and introducing me to her family when I encountered them at cafés and coffee shops off-campus. Nisa (along with the other women in her family) almost invariably wore no makeup, few accessories, and heavy and enveloping (albeit extremely expensive and well made) abayas and shaylas. In this context, her fashion choices explicitly branded her as religiously and socially conservative.

Those women who chose—even when on-campus and away from their families—to dress as Nisa did, in either a very plain, tightly wrapped shayla and abaya where only the eyes and hands showed or in a full niqab where the face and hands were completely covered (sometimes with an eye slit), did so for clear reasons. Participants who wore the all-enveloping niqab or the comprehensively wrapped shayla-abaya combination throughout the day on campus reported that they did so because they wished to, as it was “The Tradition” or because they believed the Qu’ran dictated it. Sheihka, for example, told me that “her family was more respectful of tradition” and that “the shayla and abaya are religious, because of the Qu’ran,” and that was why she chose to wear such plain and enveloping outer garments. Her interpretation stood at odds with the opinions of other participants, who informed me that such adherence was not only old-fashioned but also not actually Qu’ranic in origin. Sheihka’s friend, Nadia, told me “There are the girls who wear lots of make-up and are too interested in clothes and there are the girls like me, who don’t wear make-up and are respectful with The Tradition and The Culture.” Although she sounds disapproving in this quote, she also admitted to me, “the girls who are like that” intimidated her and made her feel “less.” The mix of intimidation-disapproval of “the girls who are like that” was expressed by several participants whose dress seemed “religiously conservative.” Such differences in interpretation did not eliminate friendly relationships between munaqabaat (those who wore the full niqab) and other students, but it certainly sometimes soured them.

In this regard, Nisa was interesting because she was neither intimidated by nor (outwardly) disapproving of women who did prioritize glamour. In part, this stemmed from her outgoing personality, but also important here is the fact that she was able to successfully “do” glamour when she wanted, in settings deemed culturally appropriate: private, single-sex affairs. This was most obvious at her sister’s wedding, a family-controlled, female-only occasion³ for which she had been preparing for months. When I saw Nisa at her sister’s wedding, she was dressed in a fuchsia haute couture dress so tight she could barely walk, matching stiletto heels, an elaborate updo, and makeup that included eyelash extensions. All of her female relatives were in attendance, so her successful performance of Western glamour occurred within a “traditional” setting approved of by a socially and religiously conservative family. In no other public space did Nisa adopt such a presentation of self.

Fatimah and Al Boyaat: Fashion and Performance as Social Protest

A highly visible and controversial social group (or groups) found on all university campuses I visited—and indeed, outside the university system as well—al boyaat were the women-who-dressed-like-men.⁴ Participants, nonparticipant students, and faculty referred to them using a variety of mostly derogatory labels, including “the butch girls,” “the girls who are like that,” “the girls who want to be men,” “an interesting social problem for us,” “the lesbians,” “the gangs,” and “the girls who are not normal.” Al-Qasimi (2011, 2012) takes a more scholarly approach, referring to al boyaat’s embodiment of and engagement with “butch subjectivities.” On the campuses I visited, al boyaat usually wore abayas but they also adopted big, masculine shoes—loafers, trainers, big sneakers usually marketed to teenage boys, etc.—and short hair, worn uncovered (at least on campus). Baggy jeans, colored shirts, abayas with cuffs and cufflinks, masculine-looking belts, and big aviator-style sunglasses were all popular.

According to participants, al boyaat were diverse in terms of ethnicity, socioeconomic status, place of origin, etc., but were united by the fact that they were usually from conservative families and were thus dressing and performing in protest of the limitations they experienced at home. As such, they certainly were not able to dress in boyaat style at all times, across all social and physical spaces. Most non-boyaat participants recognized that these groups were engaging in a form of protest or rebellion and that this was a stronger pull than actual sexual orientation. Some al boyaat, I was told, were “not really lesbians, they just like to pretend, to shock” and similarly, not all lesbians were boyaat. When non-boyaat participants critiqued the boyaat, they thus focused more on the performative masculinities exhibited by the boyaat than on their private sexual orientation. Al boyaat are a clear reminder of Butler’s (1990) assertion that gender and sexual orientation are constantly performed, rehearsed, and interacted with. Women from other social groupings that were accepted locally as more “traditionally feminine” were also, of course, continuously performing gender, but the mechanics of their performances, because they were more expected/accepted, were less visible than were those of al boyaat.

Fatimah was a case in point. I did not get to know her well until several months into my fieldwork, and initially she spent a great deal of time assessing me from behind big aviator sunglasses, with her huge sneakers propped up on a table and her abaya hiked up above her knees, displaying baggy jeans. Once she decided I was a relatively safe audience, however, she was not only an intelligent and lively conversationalist but also a fount of inflammatory gossip. Fatimah “boyaat-ified” her dress when she came on campus, specifically because she knew it would upset and anger her family and she had no other means at her disposal to show her displeasure with her life under their roof and dictates. Yet because she could not afford to anger her family too much, she reverted to a conservative shayla-abaya combination when she left campus. Fatimah never told me what her sexual orientation was precisely (although she was married), but her reasons for “performing” masculinity while on campus had very little to do with who she was attracted to and everything to do with familial and cultural protest.

Space and Place and Their Effects on Fashion and Self-Presentation

Discussions about women in the Middle East typically engage with the classic division between public and private spaces, the ways in which women navigate them, and the differences that this division creates in women’s dress and behavior depending on their context (e.g., Deeb 2006; Fernea 1985; El-Guindi 1999; Inhorn 1996; Kilicbay and Binark 2002; Abu-Lughod 1986, 1993; Mahmood 2005; Masud, Salvatore, and Bruinessen 2009; Meneley 2007; Mernissi 1987; Le Renard 2013, 2014; Tschirhart 2014; Wynn 1997). This division centers on the idea that in the private space of the family home (or the home of a close relative or female friend), women have freedom of movement, self-presentation, and dress, as well as control over many household affairs, whereas the public spheres are male-dominated. Public spaces, and in particular public spaces full of men who are not close relatives, are areas that women approach with caution, if at all—accompanied by family members (preferably male), covered, etc. In practice, this division has rarely been all-encompassing. Rural women engaged in agricultural practices on family farms, for example, had considerable freedom of movement, born of the necessity of their labor and the fact that few non-familial witnesses were in the vicinity. Low-income women, whether urban or rural, could seldom afford to adhere closely to these stipulations either.

Today, an idealized vision of “traditional” gender segregation and the “modest” ways in which Emirati women should behave/used to behave in public spheres winds through the conversations of Emiratis and foreigners alike, as well as in the more official statements produced by the state. This notion of traditional roles is juxtaposed against the constant use by the state and other in-country institutions of women’s “progress”—in higher education, in the workforce, etc.—as a barometer of the UAE’s “progress” more generally (e.g., National Media Council 2013; UAE Ministry of State 2008; United Nations and League of Arab States 2013). Confusingly, such progress necessarily entails women entering public spaces (such as universities and offices) in increasing numbers. Although the public universities tended to be gender-segregated at the time of my fieldwork, they certainly were not all-female environments. Work environments in cities such as Dubai and Abu Dhabi typically make even fewer concessions in terms of controlling space, allowing male and female colleagues to mix fairly freely. As Al-Qasimi (2010) points out, the solution to the contradictions between these two apparently opposing forces has been stricter societal and familial pressure on Emirati women to wear the abaya when out in public. This tactic parallels the veiling strategies of Muslim professional women elsewhere in the world (e.g., Gökariksel and McLarney 2010; Tarlo 2010), although the abaya is a more comprehensive garment than the headscarf, and one with specific connotations of citizenship when worn in the Gulf.

Wearing the abaya does not solve all issues in terms of “protecting” Emirati women in the urbanizing and globalizing UAE, especially in the more urbanized southern emirates. As a result, many women lead circumscribed lives outside of work/school demands. The majority of participants, for example, described weekday routines that revolved around campus, the family household, and commuting between the two locations; the women typically spent the weekend at home or on outings with family members. On the other hand, there were numerous exceptions to the circumscribed daily routine. Participants reported going out on the weekends with family members and friends for meals, movies, and shopping, as well as to relatives’ houses. I regularly encountered participants at shopping malls and in all instances, they were with female friends and/or sisters. Most participants wore abayas and shaylas while out in such highly public venues, both to signal their ties to the local community and their conformance to expectations of how Emirati women should present themselves in public.

The young women also systematically used the harder-to-classify spaces created by the exponential growth of social media and other online forums. The ways in which young people in the Middle East use social networking sites, blogging, and other online venues was a huge topic of conversation among my participants, and remains a hotly discussed subject among popular and scholarly audiences (e.g., Chraibi 2011; The Fifth Arab Social Media Report 2013; Hashem 2009; Pierce 2010; Sokol and Sisler 2010; Tschirhart 2014). The young women I interacted with used the Internet to socialize, shop, watch movies and TV shows, play online games, Google answers to questions on exams, and so on. The use of Facebook, MySpace, online chat forums, online game sites, and other sources of interactions-via-internet was ubiquitous among young Emiratis at the time I was in the UAE, as was texting and chatting on cell phones. Since my fieldwork, Twitter use has exploded throughout the region, as has the use of newer social media platforms such as Snapchat, Tumblr, and Flickr (The Fifth Arab Social Media Report 2013; Snapchat 2014).

All participants in my study reported that they thought carefully about physical self-presentation online. A few used online venues to circumvent clothing regulations and uncooperative bodies, using avatars with Barbie-like proportions and skimpy clothing, for example. Most were very cautious, however, seldom allowing actual photos of themselves to appear in unregulated online forums, with particular attention paid to censoring photos of themselves in which they appeared without an abaya or shayla. In this way, behavior online mirrored behavior in physical space: the more open-access the online space, the more careful young women had to be about the image they projected. Fashion choices, and decisions about when and how to employ abayas or shaylas, did not lose their significance when participants were online.

Space, Place, and Fashion on the University Campus

Attending university involved almost daily time spent on campus. On the one hand, the campuses were highly regulated spaces, predominantly female, and were full of close friends. Consequently, many students did not dress while on campus as they dressed in the public space of a mall or a park (or online) and did not behave as they would have in “true public.” Instead, on-campus they showed more face and hair and under-abaya-clothing, were more boisterous, etc. On the other hand, the campuses were not the equivalent of a family home, nor were friends the equivalent of family members. As a result, some students used the semi-safe space of the campuses to act and dress in defiance of family rules enforced at home. These findings parallel Le Renard’s work (2013, 2014) in Riyadh, which documented young Saudi women’s dress across different kinds of public spaces, including gender-segregated university campuses, and explored the ways in which shared decisions about fashion and self-presentation can build “shared feelings” among young women.

Regardless of family pressures and expectations off-campus, while on campus many female Emirati students prioritized their desire to fit in with their peers’ fashion trends. One participant, while having coffee with me, gestured to herself and said she only “dresses up, for fun”—in this instance, she was wearing both shayla and abaya but had also put on lipstick, powder, green eye shadow, and high-heeled shoes—when she came to campus. She went on to say that many other students did the same, because the women wanted to follow the “fashions” they saw their friends wearing, because they viewed the campus as a relatively safe and controlled place, and because their male relatives, mothers, mothers-in-law, etc. were not around to interfere.

Bourdieu (1984, 1990) wrote that fields are structured social spaces with their own rules, hierarchies, and codes of legitimacy; within these spaces, individuals develop dispositions (habitus) that match the requirements and structures of the field. Individuals move across a variety of fields as they move between social settings, and many people change their disposition accordingly. Social clusters on Emirati university campuses—in which individuals formed bonds with some people while excluding others—were an example of this. The fuzzy, ill-defined nature of the physical space itself allowed particular performances of self, some of which would not have been allowed in either the private family home or a truly public setting. The space also allowed women to “try on” different outfits and the identities associated with them—and to test fashion styles and modes of self-presentation. Many Emirati women attending university in the UAE transformed physically as they passed through the gates of their university, with women entering campus in enveloping abayas and shaylas; once inside the campus, they often rearranged their outerwear to show more of their faces, hair, and the clothing underneath.

Socializing patterns reflected this campus-specific re-packaging of self, but because of the social implications of particular fashion choices, the degree and extent of re-packaging varied considerably. Women who dressed for glamorous effect—in styles echoing Lara’s example—could be found on every university campus I visited, and some of them retained their glamourous approach to fashion when moving through more public spaces around Dubai and Abu Dhabi. Most of the participants who left hair or significant skin uncovered on campus, however, did modify their appearance when they left campus. In contrast, female students such as Salma were the most flexible in terms of their social patterns, and their self-presentation was versatile enough to require less modification as they moved across different public and private spaces. These women wrapped up enough to enjoy the benefits of being perceived as religious, modest, and respectful of “The Tradition,” but modified their outfits so that they were still flattering and conducive to experiments with makeup and beauty products. Similarly, women who chose to wear the full niqab or at least plainer and more enveloping outer garments also were fairly versatile, and tended not to deviate from their preferred fashion/performative pattern, whether in truly public spaces or on-campus.

Perhaps the women who changed their dress most often at the campus/non-campus interface of the university gates were “al boyaat” precisely because they generated a great deal of criticism, both institutional and peer. A spate of popular articles around the time of my fieldwork attested to the fact that al boyaat were a phenomenon that extended into other populations throughout the Gulf, stirring up a great deal of anger and disapproval in the process (e.g., Cross about cross-dressing 2010; Mustafa 2011; Naidoo 2011). The locals quoted in these popular articles were overwhelmingly negative about al boyaat: “Some called for the death penalty for cross-dressers, while others favoured medical treatment” (Cross about cross-dressing 2010). Al boyaat also inspired criticism from other university students I spoke with. Lara expressed a common view when she told me that it was neither “natural” nor “appropriate” for al boyaat to “prance around the [university] atrium” making a spectacle of themselves. In their opposition to mainstream values through fashion, al boyaat are certainly not a singular phenomenon, as scholarship in other contexts demonstrates (e.g., Mendoza-Denton 2008; Miller 2004). In the case of the UAE, however, it is the semi-autonomous but safe environment created by universities that allowed many women to adopt boyaat personas. On campus, women crafted performances and dress around their boyaat identities, signaling their opposition to mainstream norms and expectations of women through their clothing choices, haircuts, social interactions, language, etc. Off-campus, most of them behaved more circumspectly.

Both women who dressed for glamour and women who dressed for masculine affect often transitioned to more enveloping abayas and shaylas when exiting campus, a phenomenon I observed repeatedly while sitting at the front gates of the Dubai-based and Al Ain-based universities. Many of these students who strategically changed their clothing told me that they wore the niqab or other enveloping outer garments off-campus because their families ordered them to do so, although they themselves had no personal desire to cover so extensively. As a result, such women were far less likely to stay covered while on the university campuses, away from their families, and were also far less likely to associate with women who remained covered on-campus. The proportion of female students who shifted their dress at the campus gates—usually by covering their faces upon leaving campus—was observably higher in Al Ain than in Dubai. Nevertheless, within the respective campus walls of the two central institutions in which I was based, this difference seemed to disappear: a small proportion of women at each university wore a niqab most places on campus, but it was a relatively tiny percentage. This meant that most of the students who entered university fully covered did not stay so, and instead chose to embark on more personal fashion-performance-social experiments while on campus.

Conclusion

For the cohort of young women discussed in this article, the not-private yet not-public spaces created by university campuses served as a stage where performances were constantly created and enacted. These performances, in turn, fed into dynamic presentations of self. In the UAE of the early twenty-first century, young women move across a range of different physical places, all of which are surveilled to some degree. Women thus constantly perform under hyper-surveillance, but cohesive outside understandings of these everyday performances—which are often dismissed as inconsequential or frivolous—are rare. Watching does not necessarily, or even often, lead to embedded understanding. On university campuses, women adopt gestures, attitudes, and dress and then “play” with them, so that they constantly morph and evolve. Attention to appearance, in a time and place that is often confusing and stressful, re-channels material matters into projects that allow young women to craft identities, giving meaning to daily life and everyday interpersonal interactions. The daily performances described in this paper are a means by which women evaluate and re-evaluate life around them, allowing them to construct self (selves) and create solidarity with others along lines that do not adhere to traditional family-tribe affiliations. Via these seemingly ephemeral performances, women assess and even re-form the sociocultural values, forms of reciprocity, and ways of being in the world that dominate other areas of their lives.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Marcia Inhorn (PhD) for her continued support and encouragement on this project. She would also like to thank Erika Jerme for her keen editorial eye, which helped her immensely during the writing process.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The UAE-based research was supported by both a Fulbright IIE Grant and a National Science Foundation Dissertation Improvement Grant (#0851478).

Notes

Author Biography

Sarah Trainer is currently a postdoctoral research fellow affiliated with Obesity Solutions, a joint initiative between Mayo Clinic and Arizona State University. She completed a PhD in medical and biocultural anthropology at the University of Arizona in 2013. Her research interests focus on food and nutrition, obesity, body image, and stigma in contexts of rapidly increasing rates of obesity and associated chronic diseases on the one hand, and fat stigma on the other. Geographically, she has worked extensively in the Middle East and the American Southwest. Her dissertation research was conducted in the United Arab Emirates.

References

Abaza

Mona

. 2007. “Shifting Landscapes of Fashion in Contemporary Egypt.” Fashion Theory 11 (2/3): 281–98.

Abu-Lughod

Lila

. 1986. Veiled Sentiments: Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Abu-Lughod

Lila

. 1993. Writing Women’s Worlds: Bedouin Stories. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Acuto

. 2010. “High-rise Dubai: Urban Entrepreneurialism and the Technology of Symbolic Power.” Cities 27: 272–84.

Attwood

Karen

Dajani

Haneen

Naylor

Hugh

. 2008. “What Does It Mean to Be an Emirati?” The National, 17 April.

Bardsley

2010. “Skinny Stars Blamed for Rise in Dieting.” The National, 9 January.

Becker

Anne

. 1995. Body, Self, and Society: The View from Fiji. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Bourdieu

Pierre

. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, translated by Nice

Richard

. Boston: Harvard University Press.

Bourdieu

Pierre

. 1990. The Logic of Practice, translated by Nice

Richard

. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

10.

Bristol-Rhys

Jane

. 2010. Emirati Women: Generations of Change. New York: Columbia University Press.

11.

Butler

Judith

. 1990. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.

12.

Butler

Judith

. 1993. Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. New York: Routledge.

13.

Butler

Judith

. 1997. Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative. New York: Routledge.

14.

Chraibi

Khalid

. 2011. “The King, the Mufti & the Facebook Girl: A Power Play. Who Decides What Is Licit in Islam?” CyberOrient 5 (2).

15.

Cross about cross-dressing: A debate about fashion in Qatar. 2010. The Economist, 28 January.

16.

Davidson

Christopher M.

2008. Dubai: The Vulnerability of Success. New York: Columbia University Press.

17.

Davidson

Christopher M.

2009. Abu Dhabi: Oil and Beyond. New York: Columbia University Press.

18.

Davidson

Christopher

Smith

Peter Mackenzie

, eds. 2008. Higher Education in the Gulf States: Shaping Economies, Politics and Culture. SOAS Middle East Issues. London: SAQI Books and the London Middle East Institute.

19.

Davis

Fred

. 1991. “Herbert Blumer and the Study of Fashion: A Reminiscence and a Critique.” Symbolic Interaction 14 (1): 1–21.

20.

Deeb

Lara

. 2006. An Enchanted Modern: Gender and Public Piety in Shi’I Lebanon. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

21.

Eckert

Penelope

. 1989. Jocks and Burnouts: Social Identity in the High School. New York: Teachers College Press.

22.

Edmonds

Alex

. 2010. Pretty Modern: Beauty, Sex, and Plastic Surgery in Brazil. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

23.

Fakhro

Munira Ahmed

. 2005. “The Changing Role of Women in the Gulf Region.” In The Gulf: Challenges of the Future, 391–422. Abu Dhabi: The Emirates Centre for Strategic Studies and Research.

24.

Fernea

Elizabeth Warnock

ed. 1985. Women and the Family in the Middle East: New Voices of Change. Austin: University of Texas Press.

25.

The Fifth Arab Social Media Report . 2013. Dubai: The Dubai School of Government.

26.

Findlow

Sally

. 2000. The United Arab Emirates: Nationalism and Arab-Islamic Identity. Abu Dhabi: The Emirates Center for Strategic Studies and Research.

27.

Gerson

Jen

. 2010. “Women Pushed to Spend, Spend, Spend.” The National, 16 April.

28.

Goffman

Erving

. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books.

29.

Gökariksel

Banu

McLarney

Ellen

. 2010. “Muslim Women, Consumer Capitalism, and the Islamic Culture Industry.” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 6 (3): 1–18.

30.

El-Guindi

Fadwa

. 1999. Veil: Modesty, Privacy and Resistance. London: Berg.

31.

Gulf News Report: Rapid growth threatens to erode identity. 2008. Gulf News, 28 May.

32.

Hashem

Mahboub E.

2009. “Impact and Implications of New Information Technology on Middle Eastern Youth.” Global Media Journal 8 (4). Retrieved form http://www.globalmediajournal.com/open-access/impact-and-implications-of-new-information-technology-on-middle-eastern-youth.pdf

33.

Heard-Bey

Frauke.

2004. From Trucial States to United Arab Emirates: A Society in Transition. Abu Dhabi: Motivate Publishing. Reprinted in 2004 with new Forward, original publication in 1982.

34.

Hellyer

Peter

. 2014. “Emirati Women Carry the Tradition of Abayas in Style.” The National, 14 April.

35.

Inhorn

Marcia C.

1996. Infertility and Patriarchy: The Cultural Politics of Gender and Family Life in Egypt. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

36.

Ismail

Manal

. 2012. “Emirati Women ‘Put Image before Health.’” The National, 12 May.

37.

Kaiser

Susan B.

2013. Fashion and Cultural Studies. London: Bloosmbury.

38.

Kanna

Ahmed

. 2010. “Flexible citizenship in Dubai: Neoliberal Subjectivity in the Emerging ‘City-Corporation.’” Cultural Anthropology 25 (1): 100–29.

39.

Kemp

Linzi J.

2013. “Progress in Female Education and Employment in the United Arab Emirates towards Millennium Development Goal (3): Gender Equality.” Foresight 15 (4): 264–77.

40.

Kilicbay

Baris

Binark

Mutlu

. 2002. “Consumer Culture, Islam and the Politics of Lifestyle: Fashion for Veiling in Contemporary Turkey.” European Journal of Communication 17 (4): 495–511.

41.

Mahmood

Saba

. 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Project. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

42.

Masud

Muhammad Khalid

Salvatore

Armando

Bruinessen

Martin van

, eds. 2009. Islam and Modernity: Key Issues and Debates. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press.

43.

Mendoza-Denton

Norma

. 2008. Homegirls: Language and Cultural Practice among Latina Youth Gangs. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

44.

Meneley

Anne

. 2007. “Fashions and Fundamentalism in fin-de-Siècle Yemen: Chador Barbie and Islamic Socks.” Cultural Anthropology 22 (2): 214–43.

45.

Mernissi

Fatima

. 1987. Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

46.

Miller

Laura

. 2004. “Those Naughty Teenage Girls: Japanese Kogals, Slang, and Media Assessment.” Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 14 (2): 225–47.

47.

Miller

Laura

. 2006. Beauty Up: Exploring Contemporary Japanese Body Aesthetics. Berkeley: University of California Press.

48.

Moors

Annelies

. 2009. “‘Islamic Fashion’ in Europe: Religious Conviction, Aesthetic Style, and Creative Consumption.” In Encounters. Dubai: Zayed University.

49.

Moors

Annelies

Tarlo

Emma

. 2007. “Introduction.” Fashion Theory 11 (2/3): 133–43.

50.

Moussly

2010. “Falling Prey to Eating Disorders: A Study Suggests Women Students in the UAE Are Heavily Influenced by the Media and the Pressure to Look Good.” Gulf News, 23 May.

51.

Mustafa

Awad

. 2011. “Cross-dressing Women Targeted in Dubai Campaign.” The National, 1 June.

52.

Naidoo

Amelia

. 2011. “Shedding Light on the ‘Boyat’ Phenomenon.” GulfNews, 21 April.

53.

Narayan

Uma

. 1997. Dislocating Cultures: Identities, Traditions, and Third-World Feminism. New York: Routledge.

54.

National Media Council. 2013. UAE Yearbook 2013. Abu Dhabi: Elite Media and The National Media Council.

55.

Niessen

Sandra

Leshkowich

Ann Marie

Jones

Carla

, eds. 2003. Re-orienting Fashion: The Globalization of Asian Dress. London: Berg.

56.

Pacione

Michael

. 2005. “City Profile: Dubai.” Cities 22(3): 255–65.

57.

Patrick

Neil.

2011. “National Identity in the GCC States.” Paper presented at the Gulf Studies Conference at Exeter, U.K.

58.

Pierce

Tess

. 2010. “Singing at the Digital Well: Blogs as Cyberfeminist Sites of Resistance.” Feminist Formations 22 (3): 196–209.

59.

Ponzini

Davide

. 2011. “Large Scale Development Projects and Star Architecture in the Absence of Democratic Politics: The Case of Abu Dhabi, UAE.” Cities 28: 251–9.

60.

Al-Qasimi

Noor

. 2010. “Immodest Modesty: Accommodating Dissent and the ‘Abaya-as-Fashion’ in the Arab Gulf States.” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 6 (1): 46–74.

61.

Al-Qasimi

Noor

. 2011. “Ladies and Gentlemen, Boyahs and Girls: Uploading Transnational Queer Subjectivities in the United Arab Emirates.” In Circuits of Visibility: Gender and Transnational Media, edited by Hegde

Radha

. New York: New York University Press.

62.

Al-Qasimi

Noor

. 2012. “The ‘Boyah’ and the ‘Baby Lady’: Queer Mediations in Fatima Al Qadiri and Khalid Al Gharaballi’s Wawa Series.” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 8 (3): 139–42.

63.

Le Renard

Amélie

. 2013. “Young Urban Saudi Women’s Transgressions of Official Rules and the Production of a New Social Group.” Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies 9 (3): 108–35.

64.

Le Renard

Amélie

. 2014. A Society of Young Women: Opportunities of Place, Power, and Reform in Saudi Arabia. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

65.

Al-Saayegh

Fatima

. 2008. “How Can We Maintain a National Identity?” Gulf News, 27 May.

66.

Shaheen

2010. Emirati girls starve themselves ‘to look pretty in a dress’. The National, 19 April.

67.

Al-Sharekh

Alanoud

ed. 2007. The Gulf Family: Kinship Policies and Modernity. SOAS Middle East Issues. London: SAQI Books and the London Middle East Institute.

68.

Al-Sharekh

Alanoud

Springborg

Robert

, eds. 2008. Popular Culture and Political Identity in the Arab Gulf States. SOAS Middle East Issues. London: SAQI Books and the London Middle East Institute.

69.

Snapchat: Your picture might not be deleted. 2014. Reprinted from The Washington Post by http://GulfNews.com at http://gulfnews.com/business/technology/snapchat-your-picture-might-not-be-deleted-1.1182747 (accessed November 1, 2014).

70.

Sobh

Rana

Belk

Russell

Gressel

Justin

. 2012. “Modest Seductiveness: Reconciling Modesty and Vanity by Reverse Assimilation and Double Resistance.” Journal of Consumer Behaviour 11 (3): 357–67.

71.

Sobh

Rana

Belk

Russell

Gressel

Justin

. 2014. “Mimicry and Modernity in the Middle East: Fashion Invisibility and Young Women of the Arab Gulf.” Consumption Markets and Culture 17 (4): 392–412.

72.

Sokol

Dominika

Sisler

Vit

. 2010. “Socializing on the Internet: Case Study of Internet Use among University Students in the United Arab Emirates.” Global Media Journal 9 (16)DOI: 10.1177/0891241615611728.

73.

Sparkle Dipped. 2014. “Abayas, Shaylas, and Other Flavas.” http://www.pinterest.com/sparkledipped/abayas-shaylas-and-other-flavas/ (accessed November 1, 2014).

74.

Stratton

Allegra

. 2006. Muhajababes: Meet the New Middle East—Cool, Sexy and Devout. London: Constable & Robinson.

75.

Tarlo

Emma

2010. Visibly Muslim: Fashion, Politics, Faith. London: Berg.

76.

Tarlo

Emma

Moors

Annelies

, eds. 2013. Islamic Fashion and Anti-Fashion: New Perspectives from Europe and North America. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

77.

Taylor

Nicole

. 2006. “Constructing Gendered Identities through Discourse: Body Image, Exercise, Food Consumption, and Teasing Practices among Adolescents.” Doctoral diss.,, University of Arizona.

78.

Tschirhart

Philip

. 2014. “The Saudi Blogosphere: Implications of New Media Technology and the Emergence of Saudi-Islamic Feminism.” CyberOrient 8 (1). Retrieved from http://www.cyberorient.net/article.do?articleId=8864

79.

Tiilikainen

Marja

. 2003. “Somali Women and Daily Islam in the Diaspora.” Social Compass 50 (1): 59–69.

80.

Trainer

Sarah

. 2012. “Negotiating Weight and Body Image in the UAE: Strategies Among Young Emirati Women.” American Journal of Human Biology 24(3): 314–24.

81.

Trainer

Sarah

. 2013. “Body Image and Weight Concerns Among Emerati Women in the United Arab Emirates.” In Reconstructing Obesity: The Measure of Meaning, the Meaning of Measures, edited by Hardin

Jessica

McCullough

Megan

. Berghahn Books.

82.

Trainer

Sarah

. 2016. “Glocalizing Beauty: Weight and Body Image in the New Middle East.” In Fat Planet, edited by Anderson-Fye

Eileen

Brewis

Alexandra

. SAR Press.

83.

United Arab Emirates Government. 2014. “Official Portal of the UAE.” http://government.ae/en/web/guest/open-data (accessed November 1, 2014).

84.

United Arab Emirates Ministry of Education. 2014. “Education in the UAE.”https://www.moe.gov.ae/English/Pages/UAE/UaeEdu.aspx (accessed November 1, 2014.)

85.

United Arab Emirates Ministry of State for Federal National Council Affairs. 2008. Women in the UAE: A Portrait of Progress. UAE Publication.

86.

United Nations and League of Arab States. 2013. The Arab Millennium Development Goals Report: Facing Challenges and Looking Beyond 2015. Beirut: United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia.

87.

Vom Bruck

Gabriele

. 1997. “Elusive Bodies: The Politics of Aesthetics among Yemini Elite Women.” Signs 23 (1): 175–214.

88.

Waters

Preston

. 2011. “Out of Public Eye, Arab Women Power Haute Couture.” Elite Daily: The Voice of Generation Y, 10 October.

89.

Wilson

Elizabeth

. 1985. Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

90.

Wynn

Lisa

. 1997. “The Romance of Tahliyya Street: Youth Culture, Commodities and the Use of Public Space in Jiddah.” Middle East Report 204 (30). Retrieved from http://www.merip.org/mer/mer204/romance-tahliyya-street

91.

Zacharias

Anna

Leech

Nick

. 2014. “UAE National Dress Is a Living Tradition.” The National, 2 April.