CyberOrient
Journal of the Virtual Middle East
and Islamic World

Vol. 19, Iss. 1, 2025

TikTok Affordances by Foreign Domestic Workers in Kuwait: Between Connective Leisure, Ethical Empowerment, and Migrant Regulation

30 Oct 2025

TikTok Affordances by Foreign Domestic Workers in Kuwait: Between Connective Leisure, Ethical Empowerment, and Migrant Regulation
Marion Breteau Article Three million women are employed as domestic workers in the Arab Gulf States. Originating from Africa and South Asia, they find themselves in highly precarious working conditions. TikTok, the most popular application in the Gulf, now counts users from this job category. By displaying their conditions and addressing issues of cultural adaptation, foreign domestic workers foster a new form of identity through TikTok. By exploring…

Article

De-escalating Hate: Muslim Organizations’ Counter-Speech to Buddhist Islamophobia in Sri Lanka (2012–2014)

30 Oct 2025

De-escalating Hate: Muslim Organizations’ Counter-Speech to Buddhist Islamophobia in Sri Lanka (2012–2014)
Andreas Johansson Article In contemporary Sri Lanka, nationalistic Sinhala organizations like Bodu Bala Sena (BBS) have made a great impact on the debate over what role Buddhism should play in the country. BBS claims that Islam is a non-Sri Lankan element in the Buddhist majority society, campaigning on such issues on social media between 2012 and 2014. This led Sri Lankan Muslim organizations to use social media to…

Article

Dancing off Patriarchy and Orientalism in Moroccan Pop Singer Manal’s Song Niya: A Tribute to Moroccan Chikhates

30 Oct 2025

Dancing off Patriarchy and Orientalism in Moroccan Pop Singer Manal’s Song Niya: A Tribute to Moroccan Chikhates
Maha Tazi Comment My previous work examined how pop artists in the Arab region are using self-orientalism in their visual artworks to articulate a decolonial critique that aims to subvert the orientalist discourse through an inversion and a reappropriation of the colonial gaze (Tazi, forthcoming). In other words, to borrow from a famous saying by Black feminist Audre Lorde (1984), these artists are “the master’s tools to dismantle…

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