Western Privilege: Work, Intimacy, and Postcolonial Hierarchies in Dubai

by Amélie Le Renard, Jane Kuntz (Translator)

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 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.

Genres: Travel

256 pages, Paperback

Published September 21, 2021

About the author

Amelie Le Renard , is French sociologist and researcher at (CNRS )The French National Centre for Scientific Research . She joined the PRO team of the Maurice Halbwachs Center in 2011. She followed a double course in social sciences (doctoral thesis in political science at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Paris, 2009) and in Arabic. She was a visiting doctoral student at Columbia University (New York), temporary teaching and research associate at the University of Versailles St-Quentin-en-Yvelines and post-doctoral fellow at the Freie Universität (Berlin), and most recently, in 2016, visiting scholar at UC Berkeley.

Her doctoral research, based on an ethnographic survey, crossed sociology of gender and urban studies in order to shed light on the political and social issues of women's access to public spaces in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia. (Title of the thesis "Urban lifestyles, reinvention of femininity. A political sociology of access to public spaces for young Saudi women in Riyadh") She has participated in several collective projects questioning the promotion of "national" gender norms and of sexuality. Her current investigations focus on the transformations of gender, class, race and nationality hierarchies in multinational professional worlds in the Gulf (Riyadh and Dubai in particular). Her latest research analyzes Westerners as a structurally advantaged social group in Dubai. She devoted her authorization to supervise research, obtained in 2018 and entitled Become a Westerner in Dubai. The formation of social groups through the prism of a postcolonial feminist sociology .

She is a member of the pedagogical council of the gender, politics, sexualities master's degree and co-director of the journal Genre, Sexualité, Société (GSS).

She received the CNRS Bronze Medal in 2015, as well as an honorable mention from the Association for Middle East Women's Studies , the same year, for her book A Society of Young Women: Opportunities of Place, Power, and Reform in Saudi Arabia (Stanford University Press, 2014).

Reviews

[Tomiye · Rating 3 out of 5]

would've liked more perspectives

[Salman · Rating 1 out of 5]

The book felt underwhelming, with too much space focused on raw interviews and not enough analysis. What really stood out was how the author misses the mark on Dubai’s immigration story: it’s framed like a lose-lose! but there's barely any attempt to explain why. That’s frustrating, because there’s a strong case for it being a win-win: excellent opportunity for everyone, not just westerners and growth for the city as a whole.Ignoring that side makes the argument feel one-sided!