GENDERING US PUBLIC DIPLOMACY: THE ROLE OF WOMEN, ICTS, AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN BUILDING MUTUAL UNDERSTANDING BETWEEN THE US AND THE GCC AND JORDAN

This dissertation analyzes the role of gender in US public diplomacy to build more understanding of the impact that underlying attitudes about women’s empowerment have on US foreign policy in the Middle East and what this means for collaborative public diplomacy theory building. The goal of collaborative public diplomacy is to bring out your partner’s strengths to achieve something of mutual benefit. I collected data from secondary sources of US official discourse (2008-16), in-depth interviews with 93 people, including women participants in US public diplomacy programs, and participant observation from when I lived in the United Arab Emirates from 2014-17. The analysis is based on a framework combining Laclau and Mouffe’s poststructuralist discourse theory and feminist methodology to account for the role of context in defining gender roles, power relationships, and the emancipatory function of research. US public diplomacy official discourse situated women’s empowerment as a central strategy to counter violent extremism. The programs were thus about promoting a specific mindset and building a network of women who would fit into this discourse. The US goal was to collaborate with GCC and Jordan to create stability by promoting women’s empowerment through ICT entrepreneurship. With this came a set of definitions of what kinds of attributes and outcomes were linked to women’s empowerment and technology. However, women who had participated in US programs had diverse understandings of women’s empowerment, and the majority of the women I interviewed defined women’s empowerment as financial independence, the ability to make choices, and connection to networks of support. Collaboration as a theory falls apart in US public diplomacy in the MENA because the US discourse is built on US images of women rather than a process of co-creating a more complex vision of who women tech entrepreneurs are and what they can accomplish.