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

By Amélie Le Renard

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Sep 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9781503629240

Book preview

Western Privilege

WORK, INTIMACY, AND POSTCOLONIAL HIERARCHIES IN DUBAI

Amélie Le Renard

Translated by Jane Kuntz

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Stanford, California

English translation of a revised edition © 2021 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

A previous version of this work was published in French in 2019 under the title Le privilège occidental: Travail, intimité et hiérarchies postcoloniales à Dubaï [Western Privilege: Work, Intimacy, and Postcolonial Hierarchies in Dubai] © 2019, Presses de la Fondation nationale des sciences politiques.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Le Renard, Amélie, author.

Title: Western privilege : work, intimacy and postcolonial hierarchies in Dubai / Amélie Le Renard.

Other titles: Privilège occidental. English | Worlding the Middle East.

Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2021. | Series: Worlding the Middle East | A previous version of this work was published in French in 2019 under the title Le privilège occidental : travail, intimité et hiérarchies postcoloniales à Dubaï. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021018470 (print) | LCCN 2021018471 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503613843 (cloth) | ISBN 9781503629233 (paperback) | ISBN 9781503629240 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Foreign workers—United Arab Emirates—Dubayy (Emirate)—Social conditions—21st century. | Whites—United Arab Emirates—Dubayy (Emirate)—Social conditions—21st century. | Whites—Race identity—United Arab Emirates—Dubayy (Emirate) | Dubayy (United Arab Emirates : Emirate)—Emigration and immigration—Social aspects. | Dubayy (United Arab Emirates : Emirate)—Emigration and immigration—Economic aspects. | Dubayy (United Arab Emirates : Emirate)—Race relations.

Classification: LCC HD8666 . L4713 2021 (print) | LCC HD8666 (ebook) | DDC 331.6/2121095357—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021018470

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021018471

Cover art and design: The Greens, © Clare Napper | highlife-dubai.com

Text design: Kevin Barrett Kane

Typeset at Stanford University Press in 11/14 Arno Pro

WORLDING THE MIDDLE EAST

Contents

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

1. The Construction of Skills

2. Structural Advantages in the Job Market

3. Performing Stereotypical Westernness

4. The Heteronormativity of Guest Families

5. Relations with Domestic Employees

6. Hedonistic Lifestyles

7. Western Privilege and White Privilege

CONCLUSION

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

First of all, may I thank all those who entrusted me with their personal stories or facilitated the work I did in Dubai. They confided episodes of their lives and engaged me in thought-provoking discussions. I hope to get the chance to interact together again around this book.

Deep gratitude also to Sylvie Tissot for overseeing the long process that eventually resulted in this book. I greatly benefitted from her constructive criticism and our inspiring conversations around the topics our work shares in common. Further thanks to Catherine Achin, Marylène Lieber, Catherine Marry, Patrick Simon, and Neha Vora for their participation at the public presentation for the habilitation and for their helpful comments on the early draft that greatly improved the final version. My ongoing exchanges with Ahmed Kanna and Neha Vora in view of our joint book project Beyond Exception (published in 2020) have provided much nourishment for the present work. This book owes much to our discussions and common elaborations! Thanks also to Laetitia Bucaille for her support of the initial book project and her enlightening feedback and to Paola Bacchetta for her invitation to Berkeley, which enabled me to delve more deeply into issues of gender, class, race, and sexuality.

Warm thanks to all those who read all or part of my draft at various stages of production and who encouraged me to persist in taking my research into somewhat uncustomary territory: Laure Bereni, Sébastien Chauvin, Claire Cosquer, Bintou Dembele, Karine Duplan, Abir Kréfa, Soline Laplanche-Servigne, Nasima Moujoud, Myriam Paris, Sophie Pochic, Cha Prieur, Sertaç Sehlikoglu, and Mira Younes.

My incentive to pursue research and to write owes much to some formal and informal collectives. Thanks firstly to our research team Interlocked Social Hierarchies: Gender, Class, Race at the Centre Maurice Halbwachs (CMH). The Global Gender project also provided a stimulating space for sharing; special thanks to Ioana Cirstocea and Delphine Lacombe for this collaboration. I greatly benefitted from lively exchanges with Elisabeth Marteu, Alexandre Jaunait, Myriam Paris, and Lila Belkacem around the intersectionality of gender, sexuality, nation, and race. Thanks finally to the Gender and Neo-orientalism group, the editorial board of Genre, Sexualité et Société, the Collaborative Institute on Migration, and the teacher/student community of the Master’s in Gender Studies at EHESS for so many stimulating and inspiring discussions.

Many thanks to all those who made my fieldwork possible via the Global Gender project, the TEPSIS Laboratory of Excellence, and the Centre Maurice Halbwachs, especially Patrick Michel for backing this project, as well as Solenne Bertrand, Arlette Mollet, and Isabelle Sylvestre for their collaboration in organizing the various trips that made my fieldwork possible. Thanks to Lucile Grüntz for time spent together on my first research trip to Dubai in 2012, and to A.M., L.A., R. A., and S. O. for great moments and precious conversations in Abu Dhabi. And thanks to Claire Beaugrand, Pascal Ménoret, and Roman Stadnicki for co-organizing the conference at New York University Abu Dhabi in 2012 that enabled me to begin my fieldwork.

The translation of the book into English has been a relatively fluid process, thanks to several people that made it possible. First, I would like to thank Kate Wahl for her enthusiasm for this project from its very beginning and for her responsiveness and highly valuable suggestions. Thanks a lot to reviewers who made very useful comments and suggested additional references, which helped me strengthen my argument in the English version of the book. Thanks to Pardis Mahdavi for being so enthusiastic. The translation would not have been possible without funding, and I thank the TEPSIS Laboratory of Excellence, again, for agreeing to finance translation. Jane Kuntz has been a wonderful translator, making the book possibly easier to read in English than in French; I am very grateful for her work. I also thank the Stanford University Press team for their work on my book in a very difficult period for all of us, and especially copyeditor Barbara Armentrout for explaining all of her edits, which made me learn a lot about English writing!

And finally, for countless inspiring conversations around the topics of this book, my deepest thanks to Bintou; and my deepest thanks also to my friends, especially Cha, Malo, Marie-Laure, Mira, Myriam, Nabou, and Yasmine, for being here in these challenging years.

This book is dedicated to N. L. D.

INTRODUCTION

EVERY YEAR IN DUBAI, the local French community holds a dîner en blanc, a white dinner, in a prestigious venue that is kept secret until the day before. The guests must come dressed in white and bring white food to share. Although the idea for this white dinner came from a similar event held in Paris, it takes on a special significance within the context of Dubai. Historically, the white clothing worn by settlers in certain colonies served as a status marker in that it distanced them from dirty work.¹ In the Emirates today, as in other Gulf States, it is the male nationals who dress in white. At the Dubai white dinner, most guests, though not all, are fair-skinned, and all belong to a hand-picked elite. On this occasion, the sophistication so often ascribed to them is on full display.

At the heart of major financial, commercial, and migratory networks, the city-emirate of Dubai, 90 percent of whose inhabitants are not of Emirati nationality, is a strategic site of inquiry into reconfigurations of social hierarchy at a global scale. Its labor laws are tailored to neoliberal ideology: the state has deregulated trade and created free zones, while at the same time maintaining control over the country’s resources, population, and sovereignty.² My book takes a close look at this hub city of postcolonial globalization, with a focus on the transformations of Western hegemony and whiteness through the experiences and trajectories of residents holding so-called Western passports, who typically occupy socially advantageous positions.

The expression Western passport might seem surprising. The West is not a country. And yet, having or not having a Western passport produces a clear split at the global level. It can take a variety of forms, which is why a scaled study of an urban society like Dubai is of such interest. People there use the term Western passport as a matter of course, for it refers to a difference in status. A Western passport allows access to considerable advantages. It facilitates passage across national borders and represents an important differentiator and ranking criterion within the globalized job market. Constructed by these advantages, the status of Westerner is also invested with meaning both by those who relate to it and by those who use the term to describe others. In Dubai, Westerners constitute a social group designated as such, whose members share the experience of being structurally privileged. Their advantageous position is often deemed legitimate not only by the group itself but also by some of those who are not included. The job market is heavily segmented among nationalities, often grouped into larger entities with fluid boundaries: people in Dubai routinely talk about Westerners, Arabs, and Asians. Western thus constitutes a local category constructed by structural advantages and representations, but it is also an unstable one, in part because a portion of Dubai’s upper-class inhabitants have two nationalities, one of which is Western.

In this book, I will be suggesting that we think about how Westerners are constructed as a dominant group in Dubai from a feminist postcolonial perspective that will attend to both professional practices and intimate settings. This approach allows me to highlight transformations and reproduction of hierarchies that interlock race, nationality, gender, and sexuality. Building on numerous works in the social sciences, I will be considering race as a social construct achieved through a process of categorization, ranking, and othering based on characteristics perceived as natural or inherited. This construct varies depending upon sociohistorical configurations, and it delineates categories and groups whose boundaries are unstable and blurred. The construct of Westerners in Dubai points to transformations of race, class, and nationality as social hierarchies that extend beyond the city. In the former British protectorate, now a city-corporation,³ Westernness and whiteness have become selling points for the brand of Dubai as a crossroads of globalization. This configuration produces particular forms of racialization, involving both advantages and stereotypes with regard to persons perceived as white and/or Western.

A SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE ON WESTERN HEGEMONY

The term Western continues to be used in some social science circles as a self-evident category. Countless studies speak of Western democracies or Western societies without questioning this partitioning of the world. Others demarcate the West as a very special zone about which one might easily generalize. However, the use of the term Western is by no means innocuous. The creation of the West as a thought category is linked to colonial history and to the determination of an Other, the East, or, more recently, the Third World.⁴ The persistent, routine use of the West as a category indicates the power of a colonial worldview that occludes the analysis of social hierarchies on a transnational or global scale. As Stuart Hall has pointed out, the West is a fungible term: it designates a category of country, an imaginary, a standard, a criterion for evaluating other societies, and therefore, an ideology. For this author, "if we use the discourse of ‘the West and the Rest,’ we will necessarily find ourselves speaking from a position that holds that the West is a superior civilization.⁵ In a historical essay published in 2003 dealing with the notion of the West, Sophie Bessis analyzes the way in which, over the past five centuries, the West has been fantasized as a distinct and superior civilization, whose lineage has been reconstructed as descending directly from Greek and Latin culture. This reading implies the foreclosure of non-Christian sources, eclipsing a whole history of circulation across the shores of the Mediterranean. This long history results in a shared Western tradition of viewing the Other with a sense of superiority [that] seems to transcend the particular national heritages and specific colonial cultures," according to the introduction to a journal issue devoted to postcolonial approaches to expatriation.⁶

Although the notion of the West has been questioned by authors interested in its historic construction and its discursive dimension,⁷ few sociological studies have contextualized its use.⁸ It was after sketching out my thoughts on this subject in Saudi Arabia⁹ that I traveled to Dubai for the first time in 2012. The word Western, in Riyadh as in Dubai, is used routinely and refers to a social group. Using the tools of sociology, my purpose here is to study the way this structurally privileged group has formed by analyzing which advantages and identifications have constructed the status of Westerner in a formerly colonized city and how this status intersects with positions of class, gender, race, and, in particular, whiteness.

I will approach the subject from a postcolonial perspective, in the sense of an epistemological break (not of periodization), as defined by Sara Ahmed¹⁰: it is about rethinking how colonialism, at various periods, permeated

all aspects of social life, in the colonized and colonizing nations. It is hence about the complexity of the relationship between the past and present, between the histories of European colonization and contemporary forms of globalization. That complexity cannot be reduced by either a notion that the present has broken from the past (a narrative that assumes that decolonization meant the end of colonialism) or that the present is simply continuous with the past (a narrative that assumes colonialism is a trans-historical phenomenon that is not affected by local contexts or other forms of social change).

The Gulf countries have only recently been addressed from that angle: in that regard, this book falls within the scope of what might be termed a postcolonial turn in studies of the Arabian Peninsula. In the region, the issue of imperialism had for a long while been underestimated, even unaddressed.¹¹ Yet, some of the Gulf Cooperation Council countries were first of all British protectorates. The territories that today make up the United Arab Emirates (UAE), the federal state to which Dubai belongs, became independent only in 1971, making their colonial past a relatively recent one. Independence failed to bring about a change in leadership: the same ruling families remained in power, at the head of more or less repressive regimes, all allied with the former colonial power and, more broadly, with Europe and North America. For several decades, the Gulf has been a hub where goods, people, and capital circulate, and it represents a key for understanding the modalities of current economic globalization.¹² Rather than a phantasmagorical stage of hyper-capitalism, an embodiment of the worst possible future scenario,¹³ urban Dubai society, singular but in no way exceptional, is shaped by non-egalitarian flows very much in step with today’s globalized world. It represents a trade hub and production center where highly qualified personnel mingle with the far vaster numbers of those who serve them.¹⁴ Dubai is perpetually under construction, a boom city that the soaring oil revenues of the 1970s in the region dramatically transformed. Since then, the government has adopted a strategy of economic diversification. The city has been built and expanded by hundreds of thousands of workers, notably from Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan, a trend that continues to this day. The vast majority of the population is foreign, a result not only of migratory flows but also of the difficulty, or for some, the impossibility of obtaining Emirati nationality, including those who were born in Dubai and have lived there for their entire lives. In this context, the passport, beyond separating national from nonnational, plays a key role when it comes to social hierarchies and racialization. The social structure of Dubai cannot be understood unless one takes into account the hierarchy of passports and its link to coloniality, understood as the hierarchy among various zones in the world directly resulting from colonization.¹⁵ The construction of skills as something typically Western has everything to do with coloniality.

Interesting in and of itself, the case of Dubai also serves as an eye-opening microcosm of the staggering inequality of work conditions across the globe. As I was able to observe throughout my investigation, it is a prime location for people to take stock of their place in society and the world: since the vast majority have to leave their home countries to come work in Dubai, they are likely to denature the social order of this high-turnover city, while at the same time seeking to differentiate themselves from it—I shall come back to that point. I am interested here not only in the advantageous construction of Western status but also in the way those who benefit from it experience the change of social status subsequent to their move to Dubai as compared with their previous position. I see this status as multidimensional: the issue of class overlaps with nation and race in a world marked by coloniality, as well as with gender in a world where distinction and hierarchy among men and women are so pervasive. The adjective social refers here to the entanglement of all these dimensions and cannot be reduced to class alone.

SHARED STRUCTURAL ADVANTAGES

Western passport holders share certain structural advantages. Beyond the mere label, the term Western refers to a social hierarchy. Building on studies dealing with masculinity¹⁶ and with race and whiteness,¹⁷ my study looks at the way these structural advantages create the social group of Westerners. The term structural advantage allows me to analyze what affordances this passport provides to this group, promoting them, almost at the outset, to the middle and upper classes within this urban society, regardless of their initial class belonging.

Those who obtain this passport as a matter of course have something in common, what might be called existential luck,¹⁸ as compared to others. The structural advantages it affords come with positive stereotypes that tend to legitimize this hierarchy. These stereotypes might be about Westerners in general or some specific nationality. In fact, the Westerner category, a kind of pan-national label, is deployed in Dubai as nonexclusive, alongside other categories—notably that of nationality. Because certain stereotypes attribute qualities to a set of persons defined by their assumed common provenance, in this case national or pan-national, they can produce a form of racialization in favor of the relevant persons. To understand how this advantageous status has been constructed, it matters that we understand the material underpinnings on which these representations are based. In Dubai, as in other contexts, nationalities have been historically racialized. Under the British protectorate, the authorities of the city-states that made up the Trucial Coast gradually came to endorse a non-inclusive definition of citizenship, strongly associated with Arabness. Concurrently, a number of oil companies brought over experts, mostly British or American nationals, to take the highest positions. Still, this process was limited and came late to Dubai, where fewer than four hundred British nationals were counted in 1968, a figure that has increased continuously, starting in the 1970s with the construction of infrastructure intended to make Dubai a key trade nexus.¹⁹ The linkage between expertise, Westernness, and whiteness is revived and reinvented today through the hierarchies that structure the Dubai professional scene.

In majority white societies, white people tend to not perceive themselves as members of a specific racial group. Whiteness gets defined as the norm, an unnamed status, unmarked as such,²⁰ though such perception is limited to white people: nonwhite people do notice the whiteness of white people.²¹ The status of Westerner, numerically in the minority in Dubai, differs greatly from whiteness in majority-white societies: first of all, Western passport owners do not see this status as neutral but name it explicitly, identify with it, and often associate it with a particular cultural content. This status overlaps with whiteness without being its exact equivalent. How do people with such a diverse range of trajectories inhabit such a privileged status? This process, as we shall see, implies class mobility, changes in affective and domestic life, and forms of racial reframing. The Western subjectivities such as they get constructed in Dubai via this process seem to me to function as anchors and relay points for the exercise of . . . power.²²

The group of Westerners is bound together by their shared advantages while riven by hierarchies involving whiteness, class, gender, and sexuality. As my work in Dubai progressed, I found the intersection between Westernness and whiteness less obvious than I had imagined at the outset: these two statuses only partially overlap. In other words, Western is not necessarily synonymous with white in Westerners’ imaginations nor in that of the people they come into contact with. The boundaries of Westernness as a status are blurry, porous, and shifting. The field of study that deals with expatriation and privileged migration, with a focus on the migration of persons coming from so-called Western countries, has shed invaluable light on whiteness.²³ Some of the results presented here resonate with previous works on white residents in Dubai and in other global cities (and former British colonies), such as Singapore and Hong Kong.²⁴ While building on this foundation, the originality of my work consists in comparing the experiences, practices, and discourses of white and nonwhite Western passport holders residing in Dubai, where previous studies of privileged migrations have most often focused on whites.²⁵ By systematically contrasting the experiences of white and nonwhite Western passport holders, I was able to identify the specificity of whiteness as a privileged status among Western passport holders and to make visible the trajectories of nonwhite Western passport holders who benefit, to a lesser extent, from Western privilege while also facing forms of stigmatization and marginalization. Beyond this, the similarities and contrasts between the two groups reveal how Dubai’s neoliberal discourse on multiculturalism, combined with the use of whiteness in the city’s branding, impacts racial categories and produces conditional and limited inclusions. Such reflection echoes works on neoliberalism, multiculturalism, and selective inclusions in other contexts, especially the United States and some European countries.²⁶

Beyond white subjectivities in a migration setting, a topic dealt with by various studies on expatriation—which only scarcely analyze what white positions reveal about the context of the relocation—this book aims to shed light on how Westerners have participated in Dubai’s social order as residents who make up a portion of its middle and upper classes. Countering the notion that these people are just passing through, living temporarily in transnational spaces,²⁷ my study demonstrates that, despite their migrant status and their unfamiliarity with Dubai society, some of these persons quickly move into dominant positions through which they contribute to shaping local social hierarchies. In other words, they are stakeholders in Dubai’s social order: I deconstruct the discourse presenting Westerners in the Arabian Peninsula as outsiders, having no role in the perpetuation of inequality. This belief is central, I argue, to the construction of their privileged subjectivities.

Studying how Westerners have coalesced into a dominant group prompts us to rethink certain reconfigurations of class and race in a world marked by coloniality and neoliberalism, thereby refreshing the way we look at social hierarchies generally approached from different angles. Until very recently, studies carried out on the Gulf nations, by focusing mostly on subaltern groups, have tended to render invisible the position of Westerners in these societies.²⁸ By analyzing how the social group of these privileged individuals comes into being, my book sheds new light on the urban societies of the Gulf and also examines the transnational transformations of social hierarchies.

LABOR DIVISION, INTIMACY, AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF WESTERNNESS

Both their positions within the job market and their personal lifestyle patterns have tended to construct Westerners as a distinct group. The advantages they enjoy in the job market constitute a central component in the construction of their social position. But the legal dependence of some persons with regard to others, as wives most notably, has proven to be an equally structuring aspect; it shapes a vision of intimacy vested as a source of distinction. In this book, I analyze how the group gets constructed in professional spaces as well as in domestic and leisure settings and through a particular overlapping of gender, class, race, nationality, and sexuality. Job market and private life are merged by an empirical approach that links the material and subjective dimensions to better highlight the overlapping social hierarchies.

This approach draws inspiration from various feminist works. The choice to link labor and intimacy has long been at the core of intersectional approaches that have sought to interconnect gender, class, and race, as well as transnational feminism, which prompts us to think of social hierarchies outside the confines of national borders.²⁹ Work, whether paid or unpaid, has historically been a locus for constructing social hierarchies of gender, class, and race for workers at the lowest rung of the social ladder as well as for those at the top. Whiteness in particular has been constructed through division of labor, shaped by slavery and various phases of colonization, and gets recast today via the hierarchies that structure the way work is organized.³⁰ Yet, it is rarely addressed by studies devoted to professional transnational mobility.

Work organizations construct the status of Westerner through such components as salaries, contracts, careers, management styles, and job segmentation. Intersectional approaches in the sociology of organizations deployed by Joan Acker³¹ and Evangelina Holvino³² have analyzed the way work organizations contribute to constructing hierarchies of gender, class, and race by placing demands on salaried personnel, easier for some to meet than for others, or through hiring and promotion mechanisms, or salary differentials, to name just a few examples. Holvino³³ suggests spotlighting the role of organizations in the production of hierarchies among nationalities and sexualities. Building on this work, my book analyzes the way work organizations construct the status of Westerner by asking the following questions: What are the structural advantages afforded to Western passport holders and how are these advantages modulated according to their position in gender, class, and racial hierarchies? What does this status involve in terms of embodiment and self-presentation? How does this distinctive construct of Westernness shape hierarchies beyond the professional sphere? When it comes to people in high-ranking jobs, such issues have not been widely developed by the sociology of work and organizations. For instance, discussions about qualifications and skill levels have rarely linked the ranking of diplomas to the place where they were obtained or to the presumption of skill sets among people of a certain national origin, real or assumed, apart from the countless studies of the ethnicization of labor, which deal mainly with categories of low-paid jobs.

By approaching the professional world of Dubai from this perspective, I was faced with dividing lines of inclusion and exclusion that did not always match up, or at least not automatically, with the border between whiteness and nonwhiteness. In this regard, my thought process was sparked by analyses of the ways in which race and class hierarchies have been rearranged by neoliberalism. According to Aihwa Ong,³⁴ based on various cases in East Asia, neoliberalism favors graduates of American universities, educated, multilingual and self-reflexive, or what she terms flexible citizens.³⁵ Jodi Melamed claims that neoliberal multiculturalism in the United States transformed the process of racialization throughout the 2000s: neoliberalism, she believes, has given