Saudi women driving

Images, stereotyping and digital media

Dados Bibliográficos

ID12700293
AutoresAreej Albawardi (0000-0002-7300-5203, Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University, Saudi Arabia, autor correspondente), Rodney H Jones (0000-0002-9426-727X, University of Reading)
Ano2021
Volume22
Fascículo1
Páginas96-127
Data de publicação2021-10-18
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoVisual Communication (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 1470-3572 • E-ISSN: 1741-3214
EditoraSAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1177/14703572211040851
OpenAlexW3206995349
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas5
Referências citadas35

This article examines the representations of Saudi women driving that circulated shortly after the lifting of the ban and considers the social, commercial and technological forces that helped to shape those representations . A corpus of images was collected from two international image banks – Getty and Shutterstock – as well as from a Google Image search. The images use Van Leeuwen’s (2008) visual representation framework in Discourse and Practice: New Tools for Critical Analysis, paying particular attention to the similarities and differences between the images available in the image banks and those that were made prominent in the Google search. In addition, semantic metadata accompanying these images were also analysed in order to understand the linguistic constraints that had been put on searches for these images and the ontologies of the issue that they promoted. Finally, a more detailed analysis was performed on images that had been appropriated into different contexts such as news stories and advertisements to investigate how these images were adapted to support different political, cultural and commercial agendas. Findings suggest that images of Saudi women that circulated online internationally shortly after the lifting of the ban were mostly generic and decontextualized, creating simplified and trivialized depictions of gender relations and social change in the Kingdom. The analysis shows how commercial concerns which influence both the creation of stock images and the way they are taken up by news organizations and advertisers can sometimes have the effect of erasing the complexity of political events and reinforcing the very stereotypes they seem to be challenging

Advertising · Business · Metadata · Order (exchange · Political science · Politics · Representation (politics · Social media · Sociology · World Wide Web · Computer Science · Law · Middle East and Rwanda Conflicts · Socioeconomic Development in MENA