Western Privilege: Work, Intimacy, and Postcolonial Hierarchies in Dubai (Worlding the Middle East) - Softcover

Le Renard, Amélie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1503629236 ISBN 13: 9781503629233

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2021

Synopsis

Nearly 90 percent of residents in Dubai are foreigners with no Emirati nationality. As in many global cities, those who hold Western passports share specific advantages: prestigious careers, high salaries, and comfortable homes and lifestyles. With this book, Amélie Le Renard explores how race, gender and class backgrounds shape experiences of privilege, and investigates the processes that lead to the formation of Westerners as a social group.

Westernness is more than a passport; it is also an identity that requires emotional and bodily labor. And as they work, hook up, parent, and hire domestic help, Westerners chase Dubai's promise of socioeconomic elevation for the few. Through an ethnography informed by postcolonial and feminist theory, Le Renard reveals the diverse experiences and trajectories of white and non-white, male and female Westerners to understand the shifting and contingent nature of Westernness―and also its deep connection to whiteness and heteronormativity. Western Privilege offers a singular look at the lived reality of structural racism in cities of the global South.

About this title

About the Author

Amélie (Saba) Le Renard is Permanent Researcher at the National Center for Scientific Research, Centre Maurice Halbwachs, Paris. They are the author of A Society of Young Women: Opportunities of Place, Power, and Reform in Saudi Arabia (Stanford, 2014).

Edition details

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1503629236
• ISBN 13: 9781503629233
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256