The Palgrave Handbook of Gender, Media and Communication in the Middle East and North Africa

In Egypt, Facebook mediates peer relations among university students, but it also offers young Egyptians ways to nurture family ties. This chapter draws attention to the ways in which people articulate affection and navigate intimate desires and relationships online. The chapter is based on ten months of ethnographic fieldwork in post-revolutionary Egypt between the years of 2011 and 2014 as well as on digital ethnography. It discusses how young, unmarried people use Facebook as a tool for shaping various aspects of the self, young men celebrating Mother’s Day online and young women posting pictures with the family, while also attending online events, such as the National Kissing Day, which can be seen as unmatching to the dominant moral codes of behaviour. The chapter suggests that the usage of Facebook enables the simultaneous shaping of multiple notions of the self so that young people can operate as connective selves who express their love to their kins on their Facebook walls while also contributing to shaping individualistic notions of the self as desiring modern selves. The chapter further shows how intimate actions that may be almost unthinkable in other public spaces can be imaginable on Facebook.

This chapter offers an analysis of an online campaign targeting gay, bisexual, and queer men in Morocco in which young women create fake profiles on Grindr and PlanetRomeo to expose or “out” local men presumed to be gay. The screenshots at the center of this outing campaign are presented as evidence of criminal activity, moral deviance, and shameful queer desire. The chapter discusses how images and texts shared on Grindr and PlanetRomeo are invested with meaning as transparent indicators of same-sex desire by multiple actors within Moroccan social media networks. It then discusses how queer social media users in Morocco and abroad respond to this outing campaign, seeking to maintain Grindr and PlanetRomeo as “safe spaces” for queer men by promoting strategies of increased skepticism toward other users on these platforms, encouraging temporary abstention from using these apps, and appealing for greater online content moderation. The chapter argues that the design features of location-based gay dating apps like Grindr and PlanetRomeo allow for the possibility of both desirable connection and unwanted exposure for queer men in Morocco, challenging the misconception that these apps function as uncomplicated “safe spaces” for queer intimacy and community building.

Upon the Shadow (2017) is a documentary by Nada Mezni Hfaeidh about a group of young queer people in the broadest sense of the word who found themselves in the home of Amina, the famous Tunisian activist and the former member of the radical feminist group FEMEN. These queer persons have been rejected by their families because of their sexual orientation and are taking refuge in Amina’s house. In this documentary, we witness real moments of the daily lives of these young people who try to navigate in solidarity their own society with its violence, homophobia, and rejection. This chapter examines the negotiation of the family home and the public space, the navigation of patriarchal society, the sense of community, and the resulting solidarity and activism. The latter is shown essentially in the documentary with Amina and her friends are often overlooked or demonized. Like cultural and artistic productions, doing activism on the ground is a key aspect not only to understand the situation of sexual minorities but also (and above all) to combat the heteropatriarchal regime in place and to work toward new possibilities.

The aim of this chapter is to assess the dynamics of gender representation in Saudi Arabia in the aftermath of the sweeping reforms carried out under the watch of Mohammed bin Salman, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia. His rule marks a sharp turn in the modern history of the kingdom with a reversal from conservative readings and application of conservative social norms to an era of transformation and economic reforms that require female full participation. Consequently, women’s contributions are now expected and praised, unlike in the past when gender segregation prevented women from achieving their full potential and their empowerment was considered unnecessary in a rentier economic climate. To boost the female presence in the public sphere, women were appointed to governmental posts and allowed to participate in the limited political processes taking place in the kingdom. The aim of this chapter is to assess how the Saudi media communicate these new messages about women’s changing roles in society. Through a discourse analysis of selected Saudi newspapers, the author uncovers the frames that promote female participation in society. Ultimately, through the analysis of such constructs in the media, the chapter assesses the extent to which they mark a new dawn for Saudi women.

The chapter focuses on an unprecedented approach of protesting in Iraq which is mothering the protest. It argues that traditional gender performance, including mothering, has identified an original form of women’s activism post 2003. While the main line of argument expands on the available literature on the politics of motherhood, it also builds on the ‘performance turn’ in gender communication studies. The body of the female protester, the mother, will be focused on as the locus of the intersection of gender and political discourses. The chapter employs a multiplicity of feminist, political, and critical theories in analysis to read the Iraqi October protests as primarily a socially transformative revolution. The first section provides a contextual reading of the Iraqi October 2019 protests to show how gender and agency are expressed in this social movement and overlap with the communicative and political acts performed by female activists like Um Muhanned, an Iraqi bereaved mother who lost her only son during the protests. The second section illustrates how women redefined the protest’s narrative and language, nurturing a communicative climate where the public is engaged. Finally, the chapter provides a linguistic and cultural analysis of Um Muhanned’s activism in mothering the protest by drawing on her gender performance and communicative acts.

Iraq’s Tishreen (October) Movement emerged in 2019 as a culmination of years of grassroots mobilization. To offer a comprehensive understanding of power relations and gender dynamics in Iraq, this chapter takes a structuralist approach to examining the intersection between women’s and men’s struggles against institutionalized patriarchy. The first section borrows from bell hooks’ feminist theory to examine traditional and NGOized patriarchal structures in Iraq. The second section examines Theodore Kemper’s structural theory of emotions. The third section examines how protestors have expressed themselves in cyberspace and physical public spaces, and what their emotional expressions tell us about gender dynamics in the movement. This chapter helps us understand how collective expression and emotion around the October Revolution have motivated further mobilization for gender rights.

This chapter offers an unprecedented perspective on the Syrian blogosphere as a communication space used by secular and religious feminists. The analysis is built on real-life examples where the virtual public space is an alternative stage to promote new forms of female visibilities and cross-gender communication interchanges. This innovative analysis will serve as a background for investigations into social media activity in contemporary Syria. The stories narrated by two female bloggers (Maysaloon, and Dania, blogger of My Chaos) are used as primary sources toward understanding social dynamics. Through the creativity, intimacy, and human dimension expressed in these stories, the chapter offers the possibility to trace the motivations that brought these female activists to blog from within an authoritarian regime and a patriarchal society.

This chapter sheds light on displaced Syrian women who have endured the worst consequences of the war and conflict in Syria and the refugee camps. The focus revolves around displaced Syrian women who have found in activism a new tool for visibility and empowerment. Displaced Syrian women have arguably found new opportunities to challenge traditional norms, voice their concerns, and launch their campaigns on digital media—which can be defined as a new discursive power. However, although digital media is characterised as the ability to amplify and maintain certain discourses about women’s rights, Syrian women still face several challenges, particularly when it comes to contesting gender hierarchies. The chapter juxtaposes the opportunities afforded to Syrian women with the challenges they face in the digital space, drawing on different forms of evidence including female media activists’ reflection on their situation, and their interpretations of the challenges they face.

The Gezi Protests, with no centralized leadership, created many different interest groups uttering their demands. Women’s groups were among the most visible. This chapter demonstrates that women’s activism, started with the Gezi Protests, marks an important era in the Turkish feminist movement and created a broad alliance between feminist groups. Years after the protest, the ‘Gezi Spirit’ is still transferred to the outside world and the concept of utopia became more and more visible in women’s activism. The End Violence Platform’s demands of revoking proposed changes in the Turkish Penal Code (Türk Ceza Kanunu, or TCK) reflect the organization and mobilization strategies inspired by Gezi Protests. This chapter answers the following questions: How do the Gezi Protests help us theorize transformations in the women’s movement in Turkey? What has been the mechanism of political mobilization used by women and women’s organizations in the campaigns for change in women’s rights following the Gezi Protests? By studying feminist activism using social media platforms, the chapter concludes that the mobilization of women and women’s organizations in the wake of the Gezi protests has marked the beginning of the fourth wave of the feminist movement in Turkey.

In June 2020, the @assaultpolice Instagram account was founded in Egypt to provide a forum for the growing number of sexual harassment accusations leveled against university student, Ahmed Bassam Zaky, and call for an investigation into a 2014 gang-rape incident at the Fairmont Hotel. Egyptian and international media hailed this as advancing #MeToo in Egypt. In June 2020, American University in Cairo (AUC) student, Nadeen Ashraf, created the @assaultpolice Instagram account to provide a forum for the growing number of sexual harassment accusations leveled against university student Ahmed Bassam Zaky and to call for an investigation into a 2014 Fairmont Hotel gang-rape incident. Media hailed @assaultpolice’s work as advancing #MeToo in Egypt. Yet, the work of @assaultpolice’s online activists was made possible by earlier activism. As with #MeToo activism, earlier activists used social media and crowdmapping to provide alternative spaces of testimony. Unlike the current #MeToo activism, they were able to exploit digital media to mobilize volunteers in on-the-ground campaigns and push out new conceptual frames of gendered norms and sexual violence. Since 2014, the state has sought to coopt the movement, leading to its subsequent demobilization. This chapter examines the history of digital activism to combat sexual harassment in Egypt and argues that #MeToo activism is comparatively limited in scope and constrained by the state’s forced demobilization of the movement, although social media remains the last space and tool for activists to address the sexual harassment problem.

This chapter offers an analysis of how Iranian women creatively and diplomatically used women’s magazines to engage with Iran’s theocratic regime on increasing women’s access to political decision-making roles. Through case studies of Zanan (Women) and its successor magazine, Zanan-e Emrooz (Today’s Women), it discusses these magazines’ roles in carving out a space for debate and discussion of women and politics within the Iranian public sphere since the 1979 revolution. The chapter demonstrates how these magazines, working within the confines of the theocratic state, challenged the gender discriminatory attitudes and behaviors of Iran’s political and religious elites across the ideological spectrum. It also discusses the contexts in which, despite women’s diplomatic articulation of their demands in a way that resonates with key ruling elites, on occasion they nonetheless faced backlash from hard-liners, leading to magazine closures and other forms of censorship. The chapter sheds light on the role and agency of women who utilized print media as a medium to raise awareness and publicize women’s concerns in formal politics while working from within a highly patriarchal and undemocratic context, similar to other global contexts that are influenced by gender conservative thought.

This chapter discusses Oman’s media attitude toward female candidates during election campaigns and the ways social, cultural, and political structures influence media coverage. Aiming to set neutral policy, the rules set by Oman’s ministries of Interior and Information prohibit media from showing any biases toward candidates. Journalists describe this policy as fair and equal toward all candidates and justify this instruction from the authorities as an effort to leveling the playing field. However, female candidates see media’s impartiality as support for the dominant culture, promoting male leadership and protecting patriarchal hierarchy above all else. Moreover, female candidates suggest that even under current restrictions, media can engage in more meaningful discussion of women’s political participation and gender issues. By broadening the period to discuss women’s issues beyond the elections period, media can change national narratives and discourses surrounding women’s fight for greater representation and leadership in a very traditional society. Women’s campaigns are inhibited not only by traditional public perceptions or access to resources, but also, as they explain, by tribalism and corruption. The use of money in exchange for votes is a major factor limiting women’s success in electoral bids—and influencing the freeness of Oman’s elections overall.

Current trends in popular and celebrity politics interrogate the intersection of politics, gender, and media. New evidence reveals changes in both the media representation of women politicians and the role of women’s magazines in promoting feminist ideas. In light of this and the emerging trend in Israel of women politicians appearing on magazine covers, the present study examines how Israeli women politicians have been represented in popular Israeli women’s magazines over the past 15 years. The study is based on an interpretive analysis of the text and images on the 17 front covers of three popular Israeli women’s magazines and the accompanying profile articles that represent a variety of Israeli women parliamentary politicians. The findings indicate a complicated terrain of negotiation. On the one hand, the magazines exhibit a gender-blind, and even occasionally feminist, coverage of women politicians in terms of rhetoric. But on the other hand, the visual images reveal a feminine and sometimes sexual objectification of women politicians. The chapter explains this contradiction with reference to the thesis of gendered mediation, the agency of women politicians, Israel’s gendered sociopolitical context, and the role of political discourse in popular women’s magazines.

The Libyan society with its different components, including women, has gone through different stages of political development since the creation of the modern Libyan state. The Libyan political culture had changed over time following the shifts in the political and social environment. As a result, the presence of women in public sphere, especially in politics and media, has witnessed dramatic changes over time. This chapter examines women’s public engagement in four different time frames and discusses change in their degree of political participation and in the levels of communication channels available for women in Libya.

This is an exploratory study that aims to understand Facebook’s political impact on Egyptian women by examining their use of Facebook to make political decisions. For this purpose, the authors examined Facebook’s role in mobilising women voters in the 2020 elections. To ensure the validity of the results, the researchers deployed several data collection methods including the collection, analysis, and integration of quantitative and qualitative research. The findings indicate that Egyptian women rely on Facebook as a primary source of information and are influenced by mainstream public opinion. This fact was heavily utilised by women candidates running in the 2020 parliamentary elections due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the effectiveness of Facebook’s role is somewhat restricted due to two factors: shortcomings in Facebook’s ability to reach all sectors of the community, especially in rural areas, and a lack of credibility and inability to verify the authenticity of information/news published on Facebook. The recommendations put forward by this chapter highlighted that women should not rely only on Facebook to reach out to supporters and mobilise voters, but rather ensure the usage of other means of communication.

This chapter examines digital intimacy and violence in urban Libya during the past decade (2011–2021). It explores practices of in-app chatting, texting, phone calls, and social media video creation, all of which have become even more vital in a period characterized by war-impelled displacement and long periods indoors due to both conflict and COVID-19. These platforms and habits of daily life illustrate how the modes, conditions, and politics of forming intimate relationships in and outside of Libya have changed concurrently with the past decade’s war and its attendant processes of increased militarization and widespread traumatization. While young people have looked in particular to the social norm of marriage as a way of imagining security, the continuation of life, and a future beyond the ongoing conflict, whether in or outside of Libya, they have also negotiated the encroachment of the war into the intimate spheres of their lives, including the avenues by which they seek a potential partner, the grounds on which they obtain broader familial agreement, and the gendered traumas that shape their relationships.

The case of Israa Ghrayeb, a 21-year-old Palestinian woman who was killed by her family in 2019, has generated widespread social media attention and interactivity across the Arabic-speaking cybersphere. It is considered a catalyst for launching a new wave of Palestinian women’s movements against gender-based violence that carefully navigates the transnational social media spaces while situating themselves as part of the unique Palestinian geopolitical context. This chapter draws on two prominent examples in the Palestinian society: the virtual dynamics of Israa Ghrayeb’s case and the #Tal3at movement that was established after her killing. It explores through these cases the role of transnational social media tools in creating alternative spaces for action and platforms for informal justice while mirroring offline structural inequalities and posing the threat of transnational decontextualization.

The chapter explores the social impact of Algeria’s 2015 law criminalizing domestic violence in the country. It focuses on the contradictory media perceptions of domestic violence that emerged in response to the enactment of the law, which appeared on mainstream national news networks. These responses, however, are largely removed from the actual experiences of domestic violence survivors. The remainder of the chapter explores the discrepancies between these media narratives and the actual experiences of domestic violence survivors in the Algerian legal system. Ultimately this chapter aims to elevate the voices of survivors, create a more informed understanding of how domestic violence is being handled in Algerian courts, and analyze these experiences against the rhetoric on domestic violence in mainstream media.

Gender-based violence and sexual harassment have plagued Egypt for decades (Sadek, The Law Library of Congress, 2016). Yet, Egyptian women’s active participation in the Arab uprisings of 2011 has encouraged many women, who once accepted such humiliating and painful experiences with shame and self-blame, to increasingly find their voice and stand up to their perpetrators (Eltantawy, Women and media in the middle east: from Veiling to Blogging. Taylor & Francis, 2017; Ibrahim, J Soc Media Soc 8(2):167–186, 2019). Today, a growing number of female activists continue to combat violence and sexual harassment via social media activism as well as other forms of activism. This chapter applies a discourse analysis of the Instagram account of the Egyptian feminist activist group, Assault Police to identify dominant themes with all posts that relate to the two case studies of Ahmed Bassam Zaki and the Fairmont Hotel rape case. The chapter relies on theories of collective action and empowerment to analyze the impact and effectiveness of @assaultpolice’s cyberactivism.

This study examines the obstacles and challenges faced by female journalists in Kuwait. It explores a set of interrelated factors that discourage women from working in the media, such as gender inequality, sexual harassment, threats, social resistance, and cultural barriers. The study uses a mixed methods approach, comprising a survey of 24 Kuwaiti female journalists and qualitative in-depth interviews with 8 female journalists. Findings suggest that the cultural resistance that women have faced for years around the world does not affect female journalists in Kuwait so much; however, they still face sexism, exclusion, and stereotyping in the newsroom. Moreover, more than one-third of female journalists have faced sexual harassment at work, while 75% faced abuse of power and 54.2% reported being publicly humiliated or receiving threats of humiliation. Although all female journalists denied being physically abused, 45.8% reported facing verbal threats and 37.5% faced verbal violence.

Yemen’s media has been polarized since the power struggle that erupted at the beginning of the 2011 uprisings. The so-called Arab Spring turned into open warfare in 2015 when the Saudi-led coalition of nine countries launched a military campaign against what they labelled the extension of Iranian influence in the region. This media polarization has seriously influenced how society engages with and develops attitudes towards social and cultural issues, such as gender inequality. The country, described by Amnesty International as “one of the worst places to be a woman” (Amnesty, Yemen: One of the Worst Places in the World to be a Woman. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2019/12/yemen-one-of-the-worst-places-in-the-world-to-be-a-woman/ , 2019) due to deeply entrenched gender inequality rooted in a patriarchal society with rigid gender roles, is also suffering from this repressive media climate. Its impact is not only on the professionalism of Yemeni men and women journalists, but also on the incidence of violence against women. This chapter investigates women’s representation in current Yemeni local media platforms and the portrayal of gender issues. These platforms include, but are not limited to, press, radio, television, and social media. Major findings indicate that despite significant achievements, Yemeni women’s representation in the media workplace remains drastically different from that of their male counterparts; women are underrepresented which falsely implies men are the cultural standard and women are minors. In addition, men and women are portrayed in stereotypical ways that reflect and maintain socially endorsed views of gender, while depictions of relationships between men and women emphasize traditional roles and normalize violence against women.

Dunya Mikhail’s poetry grafts landscapes of pain and resistance to bear witness to the horrors and traumas of Iraq’s succession of wars while highlighting the poet’s resistance to this violation. These writings represent a deeply insightful medium to evoke the most horrific realities of war, displacement, and loss. The need to overcome loss and pain through poetry inspires Mikhail to construct an important woman-centered archive of marginalized histories and stories within these negating circumstances. The sidelined perspectives of women are inscribed in the poeticized “feminine sign,” a uniquely feminized alphabet that punctuates Mikhail’s recent collection of poetry titled In Her Feminine Sign in the original English version (2019). This chapter demonstrates how the feminine cipher reveals Iraq’s wounded geographies of death, absence, violence, and desolation. These experiences are preserved within the feminine sign’s womb-like folds as a symbol of the many losses suffered by women in particular when they are confronted by war and violence.

Feminist media studies routinely ignore how popular music shapes femininities and feminisms. Moreover, while scholarship on gender and communication addresses intersections between feminist politics and social media in the global north, the global south remains undertheorised. This chapter fills these gaps. It examines the contradictory ways in which subcultural music communicates gender in contemporary Palestine. The author asks how young adults’ cultural practices simultaneously rupture and reproduce gendered power structures at different geopolitical scales. The author makes two arguments: First, young women and men play with patriarchal codes through lyrics and performances. Such transmissions disrupt heteropatriarchal expectations about identity and desire. Second, however, popular music does not constitute utopian sites of wholesale gender ‘emancipation’. While transgressing some gender norms, performances—and musicians’ framings of their performances—often assert novel controls. Young women particularly mobilise postfeminist frames to assert their personal ‘success’. These narratives foreground migratory (neo)liberal scripts of gendered freedom, sutured to individual agency, choice, and autonomy. The chapter concludes that as these young adults challenge local gender codes, they simultaneously conform to transnational, postfeminist notions of gendered ‘progress’. Thus, neither fully resistant nor entirely compromised, musicians’ practices highlight the ambiguous ways that music communicates gender in Palestine.

This chapter provides a much-needed account of female voices in Moroccan hip hop. Since the genesis of this urban culture from the 1990s until 2020, female rappers or femcees have learned to navigate and negotiate politics, traditional social mores, and increasing internet penetration to create and build their own artistic careers. This chapter analyses lyrics, music videos, performance, language, femcees presence on and use of social media together with interviews to present a holistic portrayal of the Moroccan female rap scene. Against international media unnuanced reports on North African and Middle Eastern female rappers, this chapter draws attention to the ways in which these women have been involved in the country’s music scene discussing their life experiences and their music. Ultimately, the chapter provides a herstory of the Moroccan rap scene examining changing local and global expectations of what means to be a Moroccan female rapper.

This chapter focuses on Tunisian artists Aicha Filali and Sana Tamzini and the Moroccan artist Khadija Tnana as central figures in contemporary and conceptual art in the Maghreb. Their work before and after the uprisings that started in Tunisia in December 2010 has attracted the attention of galleries and critics in their own countries and abroad. This chapter shows how their choices for a new artistic grammar have allowed them to historicize repression, patriarchal violence, and masculine fantasies. No longer striving for beauty, their installations and happenings encourage resistance to cruelty and a confrontation with ugliness, pushing their societies to think and say the unspeakable and to strive for new attitudes and creative orientations. The aesthetic morality conveyed in these artists’ works constructs a new ethics in response to the contemporary context, as had the women artists in the Arab world who developed new languages to express their aims in their particular contexts during the 1940s and 1970s.

Pranks, jests and comic performances inducing laughter are everyday social media affordances on platforms like Instagram, the image and video sharing platform. Simultaneously, humour has a long tradition of subverting and ridiculing social norms by actors on the margins of power. But insights into Middle Eastern women’s funny performances on Instagram represent a gap in media and communications research. This study takes the case of three comic Middle Eastern women social media influencers to consider how their humorous Instagram performances might develop agencies for empowerment while articulating the boredom and constraints of women’s inequalities within the domestic sphere and beyond. A novel feminist postdigital framework explores the collapsed context of social media and illustrates modes of veiled humour navigating the Middle East and North African patriarchal bargain. Enquiry reveals refractive and indirect humour, with meanings below the radar. Overall, the study illustrates the political significance of Middle Eastern women’s laughter and emerging comedy for articulating ‘hazl’ (farce), ‘tahakkum’ (taunt) and ‘sukhri’iya’ (poking fun, including forms of sarcasm and irony) as comic resistance to women’s oppression through subversive and destabilising laughter.

Since the start of the 25 January Revolution in January 2011, protestors have used walls of public and private buildings in urban and rural areas to engage in debates with each other and the state around revolutionary demands, document revolutionary happenings, and share their political and cultural views. While this ephemera documented revolutionary happenings, commemorated martyrs, and celebrated heroes, it also challenged hegemonic ideologies of Egyptian womanhood and articulated future imaginaries of what constitutes an Egyptian woman. Through close readings of select graffiti created by women and women-lead groups and their contextualization within nationalist constructions of Egyptian women’s identity, the author demonstrates that these ephemera challenge hegemonic characterizations of acceptable Egyptian womanhood and open up space for imagined alternative future definitions of what it means to be an Egyptian woman.

This chapter examines how information and communications technologies (ICTs) have enabled a significant increase in female entrepreneurship in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). It also examines how ICTs alone have not been able to overcome major financial, cultural, and sociological barriers to female entrepreneurship in the region and suggests how those challenges could be addressed. Female entrepreneurship in the MENA region currently features a paradox. According to The Economist, one in three start-ups in the Arab world is founded or led by a woman—a higher rate than Silicon Valley. Additionally, women entrepreneurs in the Arab world are notably leveraging the internet to overcome cultural barriers and start new businesses—the share of female digital entrepreneurs in the region is 35 percent compared to 10 percent globally. Nevertheless, men still own 40 percent more businesses than women in the MENA, the largest gap in the world, according to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM). This chapter examines the importance of ICT inclusion in creating an enabling environment that governments, businesses, and other stakeholders should aim to create to not only inspire female entrepreneurs but also empower and support them to create successful enterprises. It will notably focus on Lebanon and the UAE, where this paradox is prominent.

This chapter is about women entrepreneurs in Kuwait and Jordan and their perspectives on what Information and Communication Technology (ICT) entrepreneurship represents and makes possible. The governments of Jordan and Kuwait both support building an entrepreneurship ecosystem through funding and incubators, to empower women and encourage youth to rely less on the government sector jobs. This study employs a feminist methodology and draws on 29 in-depth interviews with women entrepreneurs and other stakeholders, participant observation of ArabNet in Kuwait in 2016, and visits to incubators in 2016. It focuses on how ICT entrepreneurship is used to indicate innovation, problem-solving, and change. It demonstrates that while both ICTs and entrepreneurship are concepts that are often assumed to have male characteristics, they can in fact be gendered in a spectrum that features female traits. For female entrepreneurs, some view ICT entrepreneurship as a gender-neutral space to expand opportunities for women, from launching “pink businesses” to more disruptive models. However, for others, ICT entrepreneurship reinforces gender norms. Overall, entrepreneurs feel that they are willing to take risks and are open to others and that they take initiative to fix a problem or need in society, ranging from social issues to consumer needs.

This chapter focuses on the Bahraini native Esra’a Al Shafei to discuss social entrepreneurship as it intersects with gender and digital technologies in authoritarian contexts. Al Shafei was no more than 19 when she ventured into the world of social entrepreneurship. As the founder and executive director of the non-profit Majal.org, Al Shafei has launched since 2006 innovative online platforms ( MidEastYouth , CrowdVoice , Migrant-Rights.org , MidEastTunes , and Ahwaa.org ) to amplify the voices of the oppressed and marginalized in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and beyond. By focusing on Al Shafei, the chapter makes two important claims. First, her work introduces us to the under-researched world of young disruptive social entrepreneurs in MENA who rise above contextual constraints and exclusionary socio-political structures to engineer social change one platform at a time. Analysis of her work calls for rethinking activism beyond its classic definition to account for the emergence of new entrepreneurial possibilities and disruptive social innovation in the age of digital technologies. Second, an analysis of the platforms and activities under Majal.com, as well as personal interviews with Al Shafei (2008–2020) provide answers to why and how the young social entrepreneur seeks to interrupt state hegemony over knowledge production and truth. Al Shafei complicates our understanding of acts of witnessing, documenting, and archiving human rights violations in oppressive contexts.