The Dubai Women’s Museum is a “contemporary culture center” that archives how the daily lives of Emirati women have shaped culture and society today. In my visit to the museum as part of a Colloquium class called “Gender,” we explored questions of how the past is commemorated in sites of heritage like museums, and to what extent this relationship reflects issues of public memory, identity, and representation in media when it comes to the Emirati female experience.

The museum represents female identity as a political force. Our tour guide was the museum’s founder and scholar, Professor Rafia Obaid Ghubash. Claiming that, “just being a woman means something political,” she explained how one of her aims in curating this museum was to demonstrate the way that Emirati women politicize womanhood to their advantage. The Women’s Museum actively seeks to deconstruct media stereotypes of Emirati women being passive, silent actors in history, and instead represents them as powerful forces in shaping today’s society. The museum spotlights the individual stories of many such powerful women, including Ousha Bint Khalifa and Sheikha Hind Bint Maktoum. A special section of the Museum is dedicated to the poetic journey of Ousha Bint Khalifa – “The Girl of the Arabs”. The exhibit connected the poet’s legacy to the successive achievements of Emirati women in the arts, thus constructing an individual Emirati woman’s identity within a communal lens.

Wherever possible, these women’s stories are told through their own voices through letters, poems, and video recordings, curated by museum founders Professor Ghubash and Dr. Hessa Lootah, both of whom have dedicated their lives to commemorating Emirati women’s authentical lived experiences. One powerful artifact in the museum, featuring a newspaper headline from the Women’s Museum qualifies Dr. Ghubash’s efforts to combat the mainly Western perception that Emirati culture gives women no agency. Dr. Ghubash explained that while it is true that there were extremist interpretations of Islam that oppressed women, this newspaper headline shows Sheikha Hind Bint Maktoum’s efforts to support humanitarian projects. This is an example of a woman using her power and resources to honor the charity values of Islam. By including this headline, the Women’s Museum preserves in public memory an example of Emirati women making positive change, commemorating this empowered identity for future generations.

The Women’s Museum also addresses and deconstructs a paradigm of public versus private that has been largely applied to gender studies. The paradigm portrays a distinction between the ‘masculine’ public sphere of work and politics and the ‘feminine’ private sphere of the home and informal work. The Women’s Museum shows how the realities of many women transgressed this paradigm. It explores the fluidity between this assumed dichotomy through its exhibits but also most prominently in its choice of location. The museum formerly occupying a site known as “Bait Al Banat” or “The Girls House” evokes this dichotomy of a private realm, where women and families once resided, and its transformation now into a public place for research and commemoration. This is in line with the museum’s aim of empowering Emirati women by showing examples of how women throughout the region’s long past have moved from within the (private ‘feminine’) home to (public ‘masculine’) work and political environments.

The visit to the Dubai Women’s Museum gave me the chance to immerse myself in the everyday stories of brave Emirati women, which are not often given the spotlight in mainstream media. Reflecting on the relationship of the past with commemoration, the museum exhibits are a catalogue of how throughout the years and across regions, Emirati women have indeed been present in global conversations. By commemorating these lived experiences, both museums remind future generations of girls and women of the efforts of all those before them and inspire them to continue making positive contributions to the realms of politics, education, and work.