A Society of Young Women: Opportunities of Place, Power, and Reform in Saudi Arabia by Amélie Le Renard

Abstract

There is perhaps no group of people so ubiquitous and yet so silenced in Western academic scholarship about gender in the Middle East as Saudi women. They symbolize for the Western imagination the most oppressed women in the world, as well as a country that, though a political and economic ally of North America and Europe, is supposedly their antithesis. In particular, the intense gender segregation that Saudi Arabia imposes, the ban on women driving, and the expectation that women cover their faces and bodies in public have become tropes for the country’s “backwardness.” Saudi women themselves, and their opinions and experiences, are rarely heard in Western academic circles, and when they are, they are heavily mediated to prop up preexisting understandings of their oppression. In contrast, Amélie Le Renard’s groundbreaking ethnography provides a richly layered look into the diversity of young Saudi women’s lives in Riyadh. The book overturns ideas about Saudi society as closed or backward by highlighting how the production of homosocial spaces and the limitations placed on Saudi women’s mobility are entirely modern conventions tied to rapid urbanization, oil wealth, and the presence of a large foreign resident population. Le Renard found in her fieldwork in the “archipelago of public spaces” (2) where young women spend their daily lives in Riyadh—malls, workplaces, university campuses, and religious organizations—that homosociality, rather than constraining them, enables certain forms of empowerment and identification for Saudi women that they could not have in heterosocial settings. In these spaces women from different family, class, and social backgrounds—who normally would not have a chance to meet each other—interact and negotiate the parameters of femininity and what it means to be a “Saudi woman.”Le Renard rewrote her book (rather than simply translated it) primarily for an American audience from a book she published in French in 2011. In the introduction she discusses the “reform period” in Saudi Arabia since 2000, when national women were specifically targeted by the state as central to projects of economic development and modernization and especially to the project of Saudization, which aimed to replace foreign workers with nationals. Reform discourse solidified a category—the “Saudi woman”—that became the object of development and modernization policies, which included greater opportunities for higher education and employment. Because of strict ideas about “protecting” women from unrelated men, women’s development required the production of a parallel public sphere. This time period also coincided with an influx of Western goods into Saudi Arabia, the rise of shopping malls, and greater use of the Internet. In these spaces young women encountered competing expectations of femininity, including reform/state, Islamist, and consumer, that they combined with the norms of their own families to produce a sense of being “Saudi” while also creating hierarchies of national belonging. In many ways the gender limitations placed on Saudi women also defined them against non-Saudi women, producing a “national distinction” (29) that was visualized on their abaya- and niqab-clad bodies as a symbol of their privileged and protected status in the country.The ethnographic chapters, based on over one hundred interviews in Arabic and hours spent in women’s spaces, explore in great detail women’s daily negotiations of femininity and how these produced both solidarity and difference. Le Renard explores, for example, the various family and other negotiations that women have to manage on a daily basis to be mobile in the city. They cannot drive, and their national distinction makes it improper for them to take taxis (unlike migrant women), so they are often beholden either to male family members or to careers that provide income to maintain a car and a driver as well as a reason to leave home. Women use many tactics to argue that mobility will not damage their reputations or those of their families, including referring to their rights in Islam and to self-help discourse: “The crux of the negotiation is to convince the family that a certain behavior is the most accepted, the least stigmatized in the eyes of those who count” (63). In addition, while moving between homosocial spaces women have to contend with the religious police and their harassment, which increases women’s desire for anonymity to protect their reputations. Le Renard argues that these negotiations, especially neoliberal self-help discourses, may look like liberal feminism but in fact are not so. Most women explicitly reject the idea of feminism as Western and imperialist.Throughout the book the author unpacks ethnographic encounters from women’s public spaces (which she argues are public even though they may technically be private or semiprivate) to highlight how this “society of young women” (mujtamaʾ al fatayat) (86) forms at times a collective identity but one that is not deliberate or fixed. She explores how collective identity emerges through women’s daily “transgressions” against gender norms, particularly those enforced by the religious police. For example, women often break dress codes and produce their own “styles” in homosocial and mixed spaces. Women’s quiet collective forms of transgression are not necessarily “protest,” but they do produce change by redefining norms. The more common the transgression, the more normalized it is, and the less the religious police can do about it.Gender segregation means there is less veiling for Saudi women than in Muslim contexts where public space is more mixed and women are expected to be more modest. This makes beauty and dress more important in Saudi Arabia than it might be in other countries of the Arabian Peninsula. However, some women feel excluded from consumer femininity and criticize its shallowness even as they try to emulate it. Le Renard also discusses buyat identities (women who behave “masculine”), which challenge normative femininity but are also consumerist. However, she convincingly shows that their gendered performances (often with feminine cute girlfriends) are not emulative of heterosexual norms, nor are they necessarily about sexual desire. Heterosexual performances are in fact practically impossible to observe in contemporary Riyadh.A Society of Young Women overturns most feminist ideas about heterosociality as normative by tracing how gender segregation individualizes Saudi women and their activities outside the home. The author does an excellent job, however, of not romanticizing Saudi women’s daily lives. She highlights the privileges afforded to Saudi women by their “national distinction” but also details the competing expectations they have to negotiate and the deep anxieties produced by consumer femininity. Parallel homosocial spaces also produce a direct relationship between Saudi women and the state “through the generalization of personal identity cards, the creation of women’s sections in state institutions and ministries, and promotions of female employment” (162). This removes to some degree the influence and protection of the family, making women more easily knowable and thus controllable. Le Renard has done an impressive job of avoiding easy tropes about Saudi women and speaking truth to the complexities and contradictions in their lives, thus humanizing and diversifying Gulf national women more than any other text I have read to date. If I could find any point of criticism, it would be that I would like to know more about the role of non-Saudi women in the daily production of Saudi femininity, as interactions between Saudi women and foreign national women (and men) are ubiquitous in the home and in the homosocial public spaces that this society of young women occupies.