Mobility And ‘Multiple Jeopardy’ in Love in The Kingdom of Oil

Abstract

The study of Arab Muslim women’s mobility provokes interest in the stereotypes of Islamic society being  patriarchal and spatially segregated along gender lines. This paper argues that pressures on Arab Muslim women’s socio-economic mobility prospects cannot only be traced to patriarchy and spatial segregation as their domination and subordination occurs on a multiplicity of scales.  The article therefore traces the intertwined relationship and power imbalances between  global, national and domestic spheres and the conglomerate impact of all these on the socio-economic mobility of Egyptian Muslim women as depicted  in Nawal El Saadawi’s Love in the Kingdom of Oil. To study this, I draw upon Deborah King’s ‘multiple jeopardy’, Fatima Mernissi’s ‘pyramidal model of hierarchy’ and Valentine Moghadam’s ‘structural determinants’  to explore the pressures on female socio-economic mobility. The article examines issues such as the overexploitation and increasing vulnerability of Muslim women both at work and home under the impact of global corporate forces, the impact of non-democratic policies on the common masses in the postcolonial nation state and the increasing resistance to female mobility in the different social milieus, the patriarchal forces within the institutional structures using Islam to control women and restricting them from socio-economic mobility, and the odds of breaking loose from this pyramid of hierarchy.