A Society of Young Women: Opportunities of Place, Power, and Reform in Saudi Arabia 9780804791373

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A S O C I ET Y OF YOU NG WOM E N

A S O C I E T Y OF YOU NG WOM E N Opportunities of Place, Power, and Reform in Saudi Arabia

AMÉLIE LE RENARD

STA N FOR D U N I V ER SIT Y PR E SS STA N FOR D, CA LIFOR N I A

Stanford University Press Stanford, California ©2014 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. A version of this work was originally published in French in 2011 under the title Femmes et espaces publics en Arabie Saoudite [Women and Public Spaces in Saudi Arabia] ©2011, Dalloz, Paris. 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 Le Renard, Amélie, author. A society of young women : opportunities of place, power, and reform in Saudi Arabia / Amélie Le Renard. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-8047-8543-3 (cloth : alk. paper)-isbn 978-0-8047-8544-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Young women--Saudi Arabia--Social conditions. 2. Urban women--Saudi Arabia-Social conditions. 3. Public spaces--Social aspects--Saudi Arabia. I. Le Renard, Amélie. Femmes et espaces publics en Arabie Saoudite. Based on (work): II. Title. hq1730.l423 2014 305.242'209538--dc23 2014007324 isbn 978-0-8047-9137-3 (electronic) Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10/15 Minion Pro

CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction 1 Riyadh, a City of Closed Spaces

vii 1 27

2 Getting Around

51

3 Coming Together

85

4 Breaking the Rules

107

5 Consuming Femininities

131



Conclusion

159

Acknowledgments

171

Notes

173

References

191

Index

203



Photographs follow page 74

P R E FAC E

When I began my research in Riyadh in 2005, I knew little about the way in which postcolonial feminist scholars had deconstructed and problematized Western discourses on gender in the Middle East. I was already committed to the struggle against the occupation of Palestinian territories and felt concerned more broadly about issues of imperialism in the Middle East. I was deeply critical of the way the media dealt with the issue of women’s position in Saudi Arabia—that is, treating them as necessarily oppressed and sequestered as women. The tone commentators adopted most often fell between victimization and irony, between romantic calls to save Saudi women from their fellow men and sarcasms about the “customs and bans” of this society, implicitly mocked as ridiculous, backward, bizarre. Such mockery also sometimes both sexualized them and showed them as deviant: in fall 2012, I was surprised by how caricatures in two French publications with very different political lines depicted the new Saudi “women-only city” (in fact, a business and working area [in the Eastern Province city of Hofuf]) whose creation had just been announced. In the first caricature, the women are fully veiled (even though the logic of women-only spaces is precisely to provide a space where they do not need to be veiled); in the second one, the women are naked. In both caricatures, allusions to sexuality suggest that men are lacking in this regard and that women among themselves are bored. The comments insist on the supposedly absurd project of creating a “women-only city,” comparing it to a Bantustan, or all-black enclave in apartheid South Africa.1 Such press coverage signals the anxiety that the separation of men and women and homosociality provoke in France, where gender mixing is a central norm, a goal of public policy, and a sign of progress and modernity, according to public debates and official discourse. More generally, in the United States as in Europe, press articles often consider women’s participation in society—to borrow a term used by such articles as well as by the Saudi government—as automatically limited because of

viii   P R E F A C E

gender segregation, as if studying and working with other women meant nothing, and men were the only “real” society.2 This anxiety concerning homosociality is interlocked with anti-Muslim moral panic. In France (where I currently live and work), the Islamic veil has been at the center of debates in Parliament for the past decade. It was forbidden in public schools in 2004, and banning it from workplaces was discussed in 2013. The so-called integral veil was banned in public spaces in 2010. Women wearing the niqab (face cover with a slit for the eyes), as most Saudi women do in Riyadh,3 have been used as a symbol of “Islamic invasion” on the covers of French magazines, and have been designated paradoxically both as victims and as threatening. While the history of islamophobia in the United States differs and there are no laws there forbidding headscarves, the anti-Muslim moral panic, especially after 9/11, has resulted in a slightly different paradoxical confusion: Afghanistan’s burqa‘-clad women (“women of cover,” in the words of former President G. W. Bush) were offered as one symbolic justification for bombing it.4 Editorials published in American newspapers and magazines regularly condemn the Saudi ban on women driving as archaic. Such an assertion blatantly ignores that this ban was institutionalized relatively recently, and thus cannot be considered as the simple persistence of a tradition. In fact, it was institutionalized in 1990, in the specific context of the second Gulf war, at a time when large numbers of U.S. troops were present and visible on Saudi territory.5 Arguments against women driving actually centered on the struggle against U.S. imperialism, which has a long history in Saudi Arabia.6 In brief, there is a whole political and social history of why women don’t drive in Saudi cities, and it is not disconnected from the policies and media discourses of “Western” countries. If we ignore this dimension, it is impossible to understand why this debate is so vivid in Saudi Arabia. Journalists’ prolific but politically problematic interest in Saudi women contrasts with the silence in France of many renowned specialists on the Middle East, who when I began my research did not recognize gender as a legitimate subject and mainly dealt with men in their own research. I had to defend my gender approach adamantly. A few academics told me that though they considered the gender approach irrelevant in general, they thought it was appropriate when dealing with Saudi Arabia. Here, I must make it clear that I am definitely opposed to this notion. I do not regard Saudi society as some kind of exception, or seek to “other” it as backward because of its sexism, a discourse that has problematic resonance with the colonial one. On the contrary, my conten-

P R E F A C E    ix

tion is that it is high time to de-exceptionalize Saudi society and study it like any other society, marked by contradictions and tensions. I also strongly refute developmentalist perspectives that regard women’s “condition” as the path of progress from “tradition” to “modernity,” with some countries more advanced and others “backward.” In this discourse, when applied to Saudi Arabia, it is often implied that the king is progressive and society is conservative. A far more complex picture emerges from a study of the contradictory policies concerning Saudi women’s mobility and activities, the vivid debates around them, and the actual practices of the women themselves. One of my aims has been to understand the sociological, historical, and political conditions that have led to the spatial economy of gender that I have analyzed in Riyadh—that is, the organization of public spaces based on the segregation of men from women. Projects promoting Saudi women’s “progress” away from “tradition” that can be justified by various normative references (“religion,” “nation,” “modernity,” “women’s rights in Islam”) are objects of my analysis, rather than its guiding framework. As I was conducting this research, the reactions of different persons to the themes I dealt with revealed the extreme stereotypes circulating about Saudi society. I often had the feeling that people who would never express generalities about racial minorities, and who define themselves as nonracists, did not hesitate to formulate very general negative statements about Saudis. Against stereo­ types, ethnographic description opens perspectives on diverse and complex moments and interactions, personal situations and subjectivities. As with any other place, Riyadh’s inhabitants are situated in multiple ways, face dilemmas, and experience contradictions. Religion or culture do not in themselves define them, nor do they determine their behavior. Likewise, being a woman is never an isolated status: while the category of gender is necessary to analyze any society, Saudi women are also the subjects of an authoritarian and repressive monarchy. Their lives are deeply impacted, in ambivalent ways, by the rapid transformations of Saudi capitalism. For instance, while shopping malls have become highly popular spots for women’s sociability, some experience consumerism as a constraint that limits their mobility by excluding them, because they cannot, for example, purchase designer-brand clothing or do not want to wear makeup. They occupy specific positions, not only in the power relations of gender, class, and age, but also in rural/urban, sedentary/bedouin, and national/ nonnational hierarchies. Although Saudi Arabia is often described as “a closed society,” the population includes many nonnational men and women (onethird of the big cities’ inhabitants), and most Saudi households actually employ

x   P R E F A C E

and house nonnational maids. Non-Saudis are not a focus of this book, but it is impossible to understand the status and situations of Saudi women without taking into account this enormous group of nonnationals living in proximity to Saudis. Notwithstanding the minority status of Saudi women, as women, vis-à-vis Saudi men, they are relatively privileged, as subjects of the monarchy, compared with most non-Saudi female residents, who experience different expectations, constraints, and limits. Recent employment policies promote the replacement of nonnationals by Saudi citizens. In order to understand why Saudi society is often represented as “closed” in spite of the huge numbers of nonnational residents, we must look at the politics of multiple spatial segregations and rituals of noninteraction. My focus on shifting norms, hierarchies, groupings, and boundaries of inclusion and exclusion implies a questioning of categories, episodic identifications, performances, disciplines, power relations, and governmentalities. These perspectives have been much inspired by what has been called queer studies, rooted in Foucauldian thought on power and increasingly used by scholars studying the Middle East.7 More broadly, my approach is inspired by works in feminist postcolonial studies of Middle Eastern societies, notably as developed in U.S. universities, while it is also inscribed in fields such as francophone urban sociology and political sociology. In this regard, my use of references, including some originally in French, and way of constructing an argument might appear somewhat unfamiliar to American readers. Originally, I had envisaged an English translation of my 2011 book Femmes et ­espaces publics en Arabie Saoudite (Women and Public Spaces in Saudi Arabia), but I eventually decided to publish a different book in English, though based on almost the same ethnographic material. In working with Kate Rose on the translation, I came to realize how very different French and American methods of building and presenting arguments are, and I have tried to state my points more strongly in this book to conform to the American style. A Society of Young Women: Opportunities of Place, Power, and Reform in Saudi Arabia is much shorter than its French original, with ethnographic passages now made central to the narrative. Conducting ethnographical fieldwork in a context so different from my society of origin led me to a particularly strong personal engagement and a questioning of elements that had previously seemed obvious to me. My ethno­graphic experience of women-only spaces questioned many of my subconscious assumptions on how society should be organized. It led me to denat-

P R E F A C E    xi

uralize my ideas about femininity, masculinity, and gender norms profoundly. Putting on and taking off my tarha (scarf ) and abaya,8 while the young women I hung out with commented on my body, dress, and gestures, made this an embodied experience, so to speak. I began wearing clothes I had never worn before, not only an abaya but also high heels. The way I was categorized changed in time—during my last visits, since I cut my hair short, some women regarded me as a buya, or masculine woman (see further chapter 5), while men still interacted with me in the same way as before, as a “lady,” because I was veiled in front of them. However, although I socialized with various groups in Riyadh, I am not Saudi and I do not pretend to speak in the name of Saudi women or Saudi feminists. Neither do I seek to participate in the Western discourse on women’s oppression in Saudi Arabia, which I think does not help the cause, is imperial­ istic, and selects its victims accordingly. It rarely, for example, speaks of the regular flash protests by groups of Saudi women since 2011, especially against the detention without trial of thousands of people suspected of being linked to “terrorist networks.” It also ignores, in general, nonnational women living in Saudi Arabia, excluding them from its scope. I hope that my analysis of transforming Saudi femininities, which explores complex processes in terms of changing norms, hierarchies, and power relations, will help point out the flaws in the assumptions on which this Western discourse is based. I have visited Saudi Arabia every year since 2005, including after I finished the fieldwork on which this book is based, while also pursuing projects in gender studies in other contexts (including France). In part because I still find my position as a “Westerner” studying a “non-Western society” difficult, I decided to broaden the transnational perspective, conduct interviews with non-Saudi residents in Riyadh, and focus on the forms of international hegemony that affect the daily lives of its inhabitants. To better identify the specificities of Saudi women’s access to public spaces in comparison, I interviewed female Filipino and North American nurses working in Riyadh, and I got more and more interested in the articulations between forms of international hegemony and transforming gender norms. This led me to begin a new research project on masculinities in competition and discourses on femininities among highly qualified (European, American, Saudi, Pakistani . . . ) male and female professionals working in multinationals in the Gulf. An Arabic translation of Femmes et espaces publics en Arabie Saoudite was published in 2013. Although not sold in bookshops in Saudi Arabia, it was

xii   P R E F A C E

available at the Riyadh Book Fair, and during my last visit I had the opportunity to speak about it with a few academics who had read the book. They were interested, in general positive about it, and a bit surprised that I had been able to conduct ethnographic research in Riyadh. One comment was that I had said little in the text about my background and intentions. I hope this preface has clarified these.

A S O C I ET Y OF YOU NG WOM E N



INTRODUCTION These days . . . one rarely finds a woman in her home. She goes out almost every day to walk around the mall, whether to stroll, buy things or exchange what she has bought . . . and then she goes out to visit the neighbor, her friends, to attend parties, and so on, and through this, she leads her religion, her generation and her family to ruin. . . . It has gotten to the point where going out has become normal, and staying home exceptional. From a book published in Riyadh entitled “Lost Young Women: Stories of Young Women Who Deviated from the Proper Path”

E V E RY DAY , thirty-year-old Arij sets out for the Mamlaka, one of Riyadh’s most popular shopping malls. She is not there to shop—she works as a security guard on the mall’s women-only floor. Although weekdays are quiet, Arij appreciates the weekend atmosphere, when friends meet for coffee or stroll around the oval-shaped shopping arcade. Twenty-two-year-old Aliyya is often among them. A student at King Saud University living nearby in northern ­Riyadh, she often has her father drop her off at the mall to meet her classmates. Twenty-eight-year-old Abir visits the Mamlaka Mall only occasionally, and then only for professional assignments. She is a journalist, and though her father and stepmother severely restrict her nonprofessional activities, they consider that the prestige of this profession compensates for the degrading aspects of a young woman going out alone. While at the Mamlaka, she tries to combine business and pleasure, squeezing in visits with friends between her journalistic activities. Layla, a secondary school teacher, often hires a driver to take her to the Mamlaka on Thursday mornings—the weekend in Saudi Arabia—while her husband is still asleep, having stayed up late with his own friends. She and her husband have different rhythms, she explains, and she is used to leading her own life. Not all young women, however, enjoy the ­Mamlaka. Twenty-two-year old Amal, also a student at King Saud University, avoids this popular mall: “I find it a horrible place, all those little cliques of girls with their fancy makeup and hairdos. I’m okay with openness [infitah], but not in such a stupid form!” Amal prefers another shopping mall where,

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she says, the visitors are less inclined to what she describes as showing off. She goes there whenever her brother is available to drop her off. Because they are face-covered in “mixed” (mukhtalat)1 spaces, like the vast majority of Saudi women in Riyadh, Arij, Aliyya, Abir, Layla, and Amal are invisible in Western media accounts of Saudi women, which usually focus on women who more clearly resemble stereotypes of emancipation. Arij, Aliyya, Abir, Layla, and Amal do not consider themselves activists. Their daily activities do not confront the driving restrictions for women, nor the general policy of gender segregation that marks the Saudi capital. These five young women from various social, family, and regional backgrounds nonetheless adopt lifestyles characterized by access to a growing number of public, nondomestic spaces, among which some are forbidden to men. Their lifestyles, which include access to what I call an “archipelago of public spaces” (closed, securitized) involve unprecedented sociabilities with unknown women. Such practices shed new light on shifting power relations, social hierarchies, and gender norms in Saudi Arabia during a time of declared economic and social reform.

Space, Gender, and Reform: Shifting Models of Femininity Saudi women are usually portrayed as secluded. This is generally interpreted as a consequence of religion, traditions (tribal, bedouin . . . ), or the conservatism of Saudi society. There are two problems with these interpretations. First, they neglect the role of the state, urbanization, and capitalist globalization, which have shaped and are shaping the modalities of Saudi women’s access to public spaces. Second, the focus only on what Saudi women lack fails to consider the specific organization of spaces, lifestyles, and gender norms produced by the particular limits placed on mobility. Women’s mobility and access to public spaces are the subject of ongoing, lively debate in Saudi Arabia. In 1990, during the first Gulf War, forty-seven women got behind the wheel in Riyadh to demand the right to drive.2 The ensuing highly conflictual controversy furthered the rift between liberals and Islamists. The latter linked the forty-seven women’s initiative to the influence of the United States in Saudi Arabia.3 More recently, in spring 2011, several young Saudi women launched the Women2Drive campaign, calling on women to drive themselves to their daily destinations. The campaign was repressed by the police—as is every form of collective action in Saudi Arabia, where demonstrations and political parties are forbidden. Women’s mobility in Saudi Arabia is political, in the sense that it is at the center of controversies, tensions and repression. It is also political in a broader

I N T R O D U C T I O N    3

sense: beyond the debate on women’s driving, changing practices are widely observable in the city, as are the economic, social, and political transformations that influence—and are influenced by—these practices. They signify shifting power relations and ways of governing (governmentalities) in the sense that Foucault defines power as “a mode of action upon the actions of others.”4 The increasing access of some urban Saudi women to public spaces in Riyadh and their increasing visibility are embedded in the government’s normative project of reform that notably targets Saudi women.5 This project is spatialized: it relies on a specific spatial economy (or organization) that opens and closes spaces to different categories of people based on gender (along with class, nationality, ethnicity, and age). In the 2000s, notably after 9/11, the word “reform” (islah) was one of the leitmotivs of declarations made by the Saudi government and the current sovereign, King Abdullah,6 consecrated reformer.7 It concerned various changes: official reform discourse mentioned the struggle against terrorism, along with a call for tolerance, moderation, and dialogue between religions; the development of the private sector; the nationalization of jobs (that is, the replacement of foreign workers with Saudis through quotas); and the “enhancement of women’s role in society.” 8 This rhetoric of reform is not new in the history of the Saudi state. It was abundantly used by King Faysal, head of state from 1964 to 1975, who is presented by official Saudi history—and by official U.S. discourse9—as one of the great figures of reform, notably for having opened the first public schools for girls. Several elements of continuity can be identified between the current discourse of reform and modernization and the former staging of the king as an enlightened modernist attempting to persuade a backward society to accept changes. Representations of the relation between state and society in Saudi Arabia continue to be influenced by this image. Other elements are new, such as the inclusion of private-sector entrepreneurs as central reform figures. Here, the phrase “reform discourse” designates more than rhetoric: it is a set of institutional actions, official declarations, lectures, decrees, regulations, reports, and measures. In promoting women’s participation in society and ­women’s rights in Islam, reform discourse formulates a normative project shaping the possibilities, opportunities and spaces accessible to Saudi women. It defines a particular model of femininity based on expectations regarding behaviors and activities of “the Saudi woman.” In some ways, these expectations recall what may be called a liberal ideal of femininity that promotes professional

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work for women as a way to enhance their autonomy and sense of self. While I don’t consider a priori this normative project to be necessarily emancipatory for women, I am interested in the ways in which it is co-constructed through various practices and spatialized; how it participates in shaping new norms, subjectivities, and boundaries of belonging and exclusion in Riyadh. My contention is that this period of Saudi history combines particular discourses and practices that reconfigure power relations and have resulted in the emergence of young urban Saudi women as a central group in the reform project. My perspective is inspired by postcolonial and poststructural gender studies that view gender as produced and reproduced within situated historical configurations of power relations, as opposed to a universalization inherent to concepts such as patriarchy or women’s oppression.10 In particular, specialists in these fields have analyzed how modernizing projects have been both regulatory and emancipatory. They have produced new subjectivations (processes through which subjection to constraining norms produces new ways to be subjects). Gender is defined as a socially constructed difference and hierarchy between men and women, which implies specific gender norms, meaning characteristics and behaviors attributed to men and women respectively. These norms are constructed and specific to situated contexts, but also inhabited, negotiated, and resignified in multiple ways, beyond fixed categories of identity.11 Following such approaches, gender norms trace boundaries, not only between men and women, but also among those classified as women. Based on work with three generations of women in China, contrasting the Maoist period with contemporary neoliberalism, Lisa Rofel suggests that distinct models of femininity are produced according to historical periods and political configurations. She highlights the absence of homogeneity in the category of women in terms of desires, aspirations, representations, and lifestyles, and shows how the experience of a subaltern position differs according to the generation of women involved.12 The model of femininity promoted in the context of reform in Saudi Arabia targets Saudi women, as opposed to female foreign residents: a key aspect in a country where one-fourth of the population is nonnational, and one-third lives in big cities like Riyadh. Most specifically, it targets young, educated, urban Saudi women. The 2000s have been marked not only by colossal oil revenues but also by increased internationalization and financialization of Saudi capitalism.13 Saudi Arabia joined the World Trade Organization in 2005, following more than a decade of negotiations. In this context, certain sectors of the Saudi

I N T R O D U C T I O N    5

state have taken up vogues such as privatization of public services and trade liberalization. The adoption of such policies, far from limiting itself to a simple adaptation of the state to international injunctions,14 is inseparable from the will to change the image of the Saudi nation in the eyes of other countries and of Saudis themselves. Even though the measures are implemented in various ways, and sometimes not implemented at all, notably due to corruption,15 reform discourse promotes new narratives and imaginings of what it means to be Saudi.16 Young Saudis are increasingly shown as individuals who must take charge of their own lives to succeed, gain education and become highly qualified, build careers in the private sector, and thus participate in the country’s development. Young Saudi women are included in this discourse: they are encouraged to participate in the job market, including in the private sector. They are expected to participate in the nationalization of jobs, replacing non-Saudis by nationals. Because of this very strong national/nonnational divide, institutionalized by various state policies, I focus on the practices of Saudi women, as opposed to non-Saudis. That said, it is impossible to understand the constraints and limits imposed on Saudi women’s mobility while ignoring the spectrum of these other women, who fall into distinct categories through interactions with institutions and people. In some regards, reform discourse contradicts another model of femininity, which I call Islamic, since it is grounded in a rigorist interpretation of Islamic precepts, promoted for decades by certain state institutions responsible for the implementation of gender segregation. The young Saudi women on whom this book is based were brought up in a context where religious references were omnipresent in their socialization and daily routines. For the most part they do not reject these, although their lifestyles tend to stand in opposition to some official Islamic rules, founded on the interpretation of religious precepts by the Council of Senior ‘Ulama (religious scholars),17 a state board that issues fatwas (juridical opinions founded on the Qur’an and the Prophetic Tradition). Some of these are applied with or without being codified as rules and regulations, for instance by the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice (CPVPV), a sort of religious police,18 or even by the city police. The allmale staffs of these institutions are civil servants, Islam having been a source of legitimacy for the Saudi state since its foundation. When I speak of official Islamic rules or of an Islamic model of femininity, it is with reference to this religious mode of legitimation. I make no judgment as to whether the content does or does not truly correspond to Islam.

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This book explores young Saudi women’s practices within public spaces in relation to various—and sometimes contradictory—normative projects defining national femininity. These projects present specifications for what women should do; how they should act in order to be considered good, respectable Saudi women; what places they should occupy (literally and figuratively).

Public Spaces, Interactions, and Performances Dividing a population into assigned places, hence gender segregation, involves disciplinary practice and translates power relations. It means forbidding ­women’s access to certain spaces and homogenizing their way of dressing in mixed public spaces. It produces two social worlds, of which one is subordinate to the other. These two dimensions of constraint and hierarchy are why I speak of segregation rather than separation. At the same time, this spatial organization of gender results in the development, outside of domestic spaces, of separate and protected spaces wherein the presence of women is considered totally legitimate: this differs from a public/private divide. My chosen goal is to analyze, not only what gender segregation represses, but also what it produces in terms of spaces, sociabilities, regroupings, and identifications.19 I conducted my ethnographic fieldwork in an archipelago of spaces that can be classified in four categories: women’s campus, women’s and mixed workplaces, religious spaces, and shopping centers. These are neither administratively public (except for the campus) nor accessible to all: each of them is delimited by a particular type of boundaries. At the same time, they are not community spaces and even less private ones, since they put people in the presence of those they do not know. I refer to these as public spaces in order to call attention to the sociological and interactional dimensions of this concept. On this note, I must specify my use of the concept of public space, which has many different meanings, of which we can distinguish three main angles.20 As delineated by Jürgen Habermas,21 a public space is a space of debate, exchange, and confrontation of points of view; examples are cafés, newspapers, and the Internet. The second approach concerns legal status: a public space is a space that belongs to the state or to public organizations, a definition that includes streets, squares, parks and gardens, or even a public campus, but not a shopping mall. This dimension is often used in research critical of contemporary dynamics of privatization, concerning the hypersecuritization of urban spaces, the development of gated communities and the “ecology of fear.”22 However, the focus on legal status often neglects inequalities in access to spaces that are administratively

I N T R O D U C T I O N    7

public, in theory open to everyone. The gendered dimension in feelings of insecurity and in self-exclusion from spaces “open to everyone” is often ignored.23 This book identifies a specific link between gender, class, nationality, feeling of insecurity, and the preference for securitized spaces.24 I qualify the spaces I studied as public in reference to the third dimension of the concept: publicity can be conceived of as a quality in construction in spaces accessible to everyone, or at least in which people unknown to each other are able to meet. Here, meetings are socially organized by rituals of exposition or avoidance. This dimension is elaborated by Isaac Joseph, an urban sociologist focusing on public spaces, inspired by the work of interactionist Erving Goffman, who studied relations in public and behaviors adopted by people unknown to each other in situations of co-presence.25 Everyone attempts to control the impression given to others. I found it very stimulating to combine Goffman and Joseph’s approaches on interaction rituals in public spaces (that are either completely gender-blind, or not focused on gender) with queer feminist developments on performing femininity (and masculinity).26 Interaction rituals imply specific performances of masculinity and femininity. Most often, these correspond to dominant norms defining behavior acceptable for women and for men. Following this idea, I paid much attention to the ways in which young urban Saudi women qualified each other as “feminine,” “respectable,” “deviant,” “masculinized,” or “dirty” depending on self-presentations, ways of interacting, and reputations. I decided to analyze the strong connection between negotiations of gender norms and interactions in public spaces. Inspired by Goffman’s analysis, I considered the spaces frequented by young urban women to be like theatrical stages, on which each woman is simultaneously actress and spectator. My interest in gender performances began with reading the queer feminist theorist Judith Butler. As a sociologist, however, I adopted an interactionist rather than a linguistic approach. Goffman’s dramaturgical use of the concept of performance allows for analysis of judgments formulated on others in various situations of interaction, as well as consideration of people’s reflection on their own public behavior.27 It also allows for taking into account people’s different behaviors in various situations and the ways in which they experience these as contradictory or not. According to Goffman, the “self ” is held in tension between the desire for unity and coherence and the fragmentation due to different statuses, either mobilized when faced with others or attributed by them. The spaces in which young urban women gather are sites of transforming sociabilities and gender norms. They bring unknown women into one another’s

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presence. This contrasts with the relative confinement of the previous generation of urbanized women to the domestic spaces and sociabilities of the extended family. I am interested in how these sociabilities, whether ephemeral or more lasting, may contribute to shaping shared identifications. Additionally, I explore how these gatherings between young women in public spaces, and the way they judge the conduct of others in these spaces, contribute to renegotiating norms of femininity. Transformations in lifestyles and norms, particularly behaviors considered as permissible, appropriate, or acceptable in public, depend on interactions between these young women who are unknown to one another, as well as between them, their families, and various state entities. Practices considered normal are in perpetual redefinition. Frequenting public spaces with young urban women and observing how they categorize their peers allows for understanding “from below” the negotiation of new forms and norms of femininity. The practices I observed influence the range of behaviors regarded as acceptable in public as Saudi women, and involve the redefinition of national norms of femininity.28 These practices may correspond to models of femininity promoted by the government, the Council of Senior ‘Ulama, or other public entities. Alternatively, they may question these. Previously uncategorized transgressive or subversive behaviors require (re)definition, which may transform public behaviors regarded as acceptable for women, and thus gender norms. However, it may also be that such behaviors are labeled as deviant, which tends rather to reaffirm dominant norms,29 although it may also participate in displacing them, as we shall see. Young urban women adopt lifestyles that are above all styles: ways of negotiating a self-image in public. “Lifestyle” can be understood in two ways throughout this book. The first focuses on the imbrication of politico-­economic transformations and quotidian behaviors,30 such as professional activity and consumer, leisure, and cultural practices. The second focuses on the stylization of self, the way in which adopting a lifestyle implies a specific situated discourse and conception of self,31 embodied and performed in relation to others, and in front of them. This dimension soon appeared central to me while I participated in the spaces and gatherings accessible to women, observing public self-presentations and hearing comments and classifications about others’ self-presentations. In women-only spaces, where young women do not wear the niqab, everyone is in sight of everyone else. These are spaces of imitation, emulation, transgression, and conformation to groups of peers. Here, young Saudi women subject themselves to requirements in terms of appearance, behavior, and self-presentation:

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these imply particular practices of consumerism. Although young urban women emancipate themselves from certain constraints and project themselves in new imaginings through the lifestyles that they adopt, they nonetheless submit themselves to other constraints. Thus it is important not to idealize the process of autonomization regarding the most obvious and most visible forms of control: when women adopt new forms of consumerism, of dressing, and so on, they submit to new norms, even while having access to new possibilities.32 How do these young urban women’s public interactions relate to reform discourse? Some writers on public spaces use the concept of the disciplining and individualizing “gaze of power.” In the context of Turkey, Alev Çinar conceptualizes a “public gaze,” in this case secularist, that determines practices and self-presentations in urban spaces.33 Women wearing the veil subvert this order and question the categorization on which it is based. In Riyadh, it would be difficult to identify a singular “gaze” exercising an influence on the conduct of young urban women, given the complex imbrications/­intertwining of multiple and heterogeneous power relations. The lifestyles adopted by young urban women are influenced by the reform discourse, application of official Islamic rules, constraints imposed by families, or even private-sector initiatives. In Foucault’s definition, they constitute relations of power that intertwine, confront one another, and either converge or, conversely, oppose one another.34 Various elements open or close spaces and possibilities for action for young urban women, which contribute to fashioning their lifestyles. At the same time, focusing on interactions, with ethnographic methodology, is an effective means for studying power relations in action, in precise situations. The focus on daily activities and ordinary life of Saudi women allows for in-situation understanding of political and social transformations that are remaking Riyadh’s society.

Transforming Categories, Classifications, and Hierarchies Not all women in Riyadh have the same access to the city. This book questions how social divisions condition Saudi women’s access to urban public spaces. It also explores how uses of these spaces, and the interactions that take place therein, contribute to reinforcing or recomposing interlocked hierarchies of gender, class, race, nationality, age, and origin—such as they are defined in this particular society.35 Among Saudi women in Riyadh, the most mobile are those who study or hold a salaried position. The lifestyles they adopt trace boundaries and recompose social hierarchies. It is not pertinent to speak of Saudi women in

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general.36 Young urban women with mobile lifestyles are a historically produced category. The following analysis will shed light on the specificity of contexts and power relations, the processes of inclusion and exclusion, and the “work of regrouping” that shape it.37 At the time of my study, between 2005 and 2009, the interviewees were generally between twenty and thirty years old. Their mothers were often born in very modest circumstances, even in privation, before the impact of the rise in oil revenues was felt. They had generally experienced nomadic or village life and, for the most part, only arrived in the city at the time of their marriage. The daughters, on the other hand, grew up in the context of the “era of opulence” of the 1970s and 1980s. The majority were born in the city, and would for nothing in the world go live in their parents’ native villages, which they only visit occasionally for family celebrations. Secondly, their coming of age took place under very different conditions: the mothers received only a cursory education. They rarely worked for a salary, but those who were educated and wanted to found a job fairly easily, generally in the public sector as elementary school teachers. This was a well-paid job with a schedule compatible with the role of wife and mother. For the generation of their daughters, higher study has become the norm. Whereas many would like to become professionals, there are no longer any public sector jobs, and the rate of unemployment for women is even higher than for men: according to the Central Department of Statistics, the unemployment rate in 2013—apparently much underestimated—was around 34 percent for Saudi women and 6 percent for Saudi men, or 12 percent for “active” Saudis overall.38 The generation gap is also apparent in the experience of life’s stages: for the young women I met, youth existed as a passage in the cycle of life, yet it was practically nonexistent for their mothers’ generation.39 The latter often got married at fourteen or fifteen; they generally did not go to school, and the majority of them are illiterate. Many of them had seven or eight children.40 The interviewees, on the contrary, pursue higher studies and generally marry only after graduating.41 It is necessary to add here that many marriages do not last long and it is common to divorce after a few days, a few weeks or a few months, as some statistics published by the Ministry of Justice in 2011 showed: accordingly, 66 percent of divorces occur in the first year after ­marriage.42 The frequency of divorces and remarriages is not new,43 although today the rate of divorce is considered a public problem. Many Saudi women seek employment, before or after their marriage and/or divorce. For those who are married, the unrestricted, over-the-counter sale of contraceptives in all of the

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country’s pharmacies facilitates the pursuit of studies or the exercise of salaried employment.44 Young men and young women generally have very different social experiences. My informants and interviewees generally spoke of themselves as “young women” (fatayat), rather than as “young people” (shabab), which in Riyadh is most often used in speaking about young men. Their separated lives lead male and female Saudi youth to form two distinct categories. Because of gender segregation, they frequent different places, have different social networks, and pursue different activities. The social norms concerning professional activity and marriage differ according to gender. Thus, in general, young men must hold a paid professional job, while many young women have to negotiate their access to this with their families. Whereas young women are not pressured about getting married unless a credible suitor presents himself, young men must save money to get married. Moreover, young Saudi women are up against legal and familial constraints that are theirs alone. Gender and generation are not exclusive of other statuses mobilized during interactions. In the course of my fieldwork, I was interested in the ways in which the women I spent time with “did difference,” to use Candace West and Sarah Fenstermaker’s phrase,45 in discussions we had and interactions with various people; that is, how they asserted their own belonging, distanced themselves from those they identified as other, and assigned social status. I use the term “typification” in order to designate the statuses that are assigned to someone by others, in terms of gender, class, family belonging, regional origin, race, ethnicity, or nationality. Rather than imposing my own categories on the situations I analyzed, I often chose to borrow the words I heard in Riyadh and translate them literally. To understand the ways in which the interactions that take place in public spaces both reveal transformations of gender norms and social hierarchies and contribute to them, it is necessary to analyze which categories the interviewees mobilize according to the contexts in which they speak, which status they assign to others according to situations, and which divides they formulate to describe their society. The categories in circulation among the groups that I studied are numerous and fluid. They intersect and can be assigned to the same people in different situations. Here, I would like to introduce the principal categories mobilized during discussions and interviews. Most of the interviewees referred to different social classes (tabaqat ijtima‘iyya) in Saudi society—in general, they did not include nonnational residents in such classifications. They considered their own

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family as belonging to the middle class as opposed to the upper class—which would include the royal family, senior civil servants, and large entrepreneurial families­—on the one hand, and the “poor,” on the other.46 During informal discussions around the best seller Banat al-Riyad (Girls of Riyadh),47 for example, several young women said that the book was about the “velvet class” of Saudi society, a class to which they did not consider themselves as belonging. Such classifications are nonetheless highly unstable in a context where certain families have become wealthy quite rapidly following the oil boom in 1973, without regard to a high level of education or a prestigious family history. Additionally, Saudi Arabia, a state founded in its current boundaries in 1932, has not known any class mobilization, with the exception of demonstrations—suppressed and absent from official history—by the Saudi employees of Aramco (then a U.S. oil company, but now wholly owned by the Saudi government) in the early 1950s.48 The women I met also referred to the categories (shara’ih) of bedouin (badu) and sedentaries (hadar); to people of the south, of the east, and of the Hijaz (Saudi Arabia’s western province, where Mecca, Medina, and Jiddah are located); to blacks (sud), often descendants of slaves, and sometimes designated as such (‘abid), although this is considered insulting; and to village people (garawa; sedentarized bedouin in some cases), a term with pejorative connotations. They also spoke about “tribal” (qabili) as opposed to “without tribal ascendancy” (khadiri).49 They often used the word “background” (khalfiyya) in speaking of these social, geographical, and family origins. These categories are socially and historically constructed, of course, and their boundaries are never perfectly clear. Other categories employed by the interviewees included “open-minded” (mutafattihat), “free, or liberated” (mutaharrirat), “rigorists” (mutashaddidat), and “committed to Islam” (multazimat)—a term I prefer to “Islamist,” “Islamic,” “Salafist,” “Wahhabi,” and other adjectives that risk misinterpretation because of their diverse connotations. Generally speaking, “engagement” (iltizam) designates a Muslim’s accomplishment of all the Islamic duties—often maximally interpreted in Saudi Arabia as conforming to the fatwas of the Council of Senior ‘Ulama. The fact of being “committed to Islam” does not imply criticism of the government or militancy, although some multazimat see it as their duty to preach Islamic maximalism. Some are clearly politicized and opposed to the proWestern orientation of the government; others regard their commitment to Islam as a strictly personal religious choice and espouse the currently dominant Saudi discourse of tolerance and moderation.

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Although the women I met did not qualify themselves as urban or modern, they frequently sought to distinguish themselves from the stigmatized figure of the “backward” garawiyya (village woman) who arrives from her village and stereotypically does not know how to behave in the city. To that extent, then, they implicitly defined themselves as modern, urban people and distanced themselves from other social groups.50

Fieldwork in Riyadh Riyadh is more strongly characterized by gender segregation than anywhere else in Saudi Arabia, and arguably in the world. In 1932, when the Saudi state was founded, Riyadh was a small city. But in a matter of decades, it grew exponentially. By the 1950s, the discovery and drilling of oil had transformed the city. The wall surrounding the old city was torn down, and the government ministries were progressively transferred from Jiddah to Riyadh. Villas to house the city’s growing population of civil servants were constructed in 1953. As oil revenues peaked in 1973 and numerous construction projects were completed, more and more Saudis from every region of the country were attracted to the city, hoping to gain their own share of oil revenues through employment in the public sector, advantageous housing loans, or even land grants.51 Foreign workers from Arab, Asian, and African countries settled in Riyadh temporarily or permanently. Americans and Europeans also arrived in Riyadh as qualified professionals or experts. In the 1990s, a second city center was constructed in the north of Riyadh, and the area increasingly came to resemble an American city, with its chessboard-like layout of streets, and far-flung neighborhoods inaccessible without a motor vehicle. Since 2000, futuristic towers have been popping up, along with bigger and tackier malls, coffee shops, and restaurants with American logos dotting six-, eight-, or ten-lane avenues. Driving has become more and more difficult at almost all hours. In less than a century, Saudi Arabia became one of the most urban countries of the region, with Riyadh, its largest city, counting 4.9 million inhabitants. In 2000, the rate of urbanization was 85 percent. (In 1970 it was only 48.7 percent.)52 Thirty-nine percent of Riyadh’s inhabitants are non­ nationals, and 35 percent of nationals are under fourteen years of age.53 In this research, I adopted an ethnographic method combining observation, various types of interviews, and the use of textual sources (mainly religious or official, expert reports, articles in the press, Internet sites, and unpublished academic studies). In this context where few studies have been conducted, my priority was to be rigorous and honest toward the persons I spoke with, through

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paying attention to the many facets of the elements I encountered and taking seriously their contradictory statements and analysis. My methodology was also shaped by specific limits, for instance not being able to obtain a residence permit. Altogether, I have spent more than a year in Riyadh since 2005. Following the feminist epistemology of situated knowledge,54 I consider it fundamental to give a few elements about my specific encounter with the persons I met and conducted this research with. The first space where I conducted ethnography was the female campus of King Saud University. During my stays, I spent mornings in the company of female students at the university, on the immense campus of Alaysha (named for the neighborhood in which it is situated, in the south of Riyadh), where humanities, languages, religion, education, and paramedical sciences are taught. Here, the origins of the students in terms of income level are very diverse, unlike at the costly private universities that have become more common these past few years (Prince Sultan University, Al-Yamama College, and Al-Faysal University). At Alaysha, I joined various groups of students. We stayed together for hours, seated in the shade of palm trees on campus or in the cafeteria, discussing what was happening on campus or in their lives. From these small groups, I could observe the campus and interactions between students. I was not studying with them, but those who knew me treated me as a friend who had come to see them at the university, since this also constitutes a place for meeting and sociability. Concerning workplaces, I spent every day for approximately a month and a half at a charitable organization, referred to here as Organization A,55 which employed a few dozen young Saudi women. With the director’s agreement, I conducted interviews with employees and observed this exclusively female workplace, spending time in different offices shared by several employees. I attended staff meetings and training sessions with the director. I also accompanied social workers in their house visits to the beneficiaries of the organization. I visited other workplaces as well and conducted numerous interviews with young women employed in hospitals as doctors, nurses, therapists, secretaries, receptionists, and other more or less qualified professions; in private schools; in several banks, whether in their female sections or in mixed headquarters; and with Saudi women working in other sectors or who had started their own businesses. Religious spaces constituted the least accessible site for my fieldwork. I had begun to make contacts in the female section of a religious organization and wished to inquire into a youth group that met weekly. The hierarchy of the or-

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ganization welcomed me favorably during my first visit, but later their mistrust proved insurmountable. This is linked to the control of religious organizations exercised by state institutions following attacks committed by Islamist activists on Saudi territory since 2003. It is not certain that this mistrust was linked to my status of (non-Muslim) foreigner: Saudis who sought to inquire on various subjects told me that they were automatically assumed to be spies by their interlocutors and followed very closely by state institutions, which made their work difficult, even impossible. Thus my fieldwork on religious spaces took place primarily outside of these, with the exception of public lectures that I attended at various organizations, foundations, and centers for memorization of the Qur’an. Interviews with young women engaged in these spaces, as well as participation in religious meetings in homes, allowed me to understand certain elements. Finally, I gradually became aware of the importance of shopping malls in young urban women’s daily lives. They talked about them often to compare them or to tell me what they did there, and I was regularly invited to the mall by Saudi friends on Wednesday nights, Thursdays, and Fridays, their weekend. These trips to the mall could have several compatible objectives: discussions between friends around a cappuccino, strolling, or shopping. Additionally, the mall was a constant destination during my stay: because of my own limited mobility in the city, I went there almost every day. I ate lunch regularly at the mall, since the café-restaurants nearest to my office were either forbidden to women or expensive. Interviewees often told me to meet them at the mall, and if they were late, I waited for them there. Sometimes we strolled together before or after the interview. I became well acquainted with Riyadh’s principal malls, their shops, and their clienteles at various times of the day and week. To understand the commercial policies that fashion these spaces, I interviewed managers and employees of the malls. Conducting fieldwork on a “city of closed spaces,” quite rarely explored by researchers in the social sciences,56 presented the risk of not being able to differentiate the banal from the exceptional among the situations on which I “happened.” Such concerns led me to explore as many sites of observation as possible. For the most part, the spaces described here are forbidden to men, and even when they are mixed, the relations of sociability develop primarily among women. Thus men are relatively absent from this book, just as they are from the segregated world of young urban Saudi women. Yet they are present through their considerable influence on this segregated world. This includes those who proclaim laws, fatwas, and regulations; brothers, fathers, husbands, colleagues,

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and friends; those who court via Internet or by telephone; those who harass or blackmail; the salesmen in malls, the cashiers in supermarkets, the security guards who prevent other men from entering female spaces, the police, and members of the CPVPV; those who judge cases of divorce or of rape; those who tape cassettes explaining to women how they can become better Muslims, or write the books that advise them to be happy with what they have. These men are mostly excluded from the world described here, but they participate in power relations in the sense that they influence possibilities of action for young urban women. Men were a “present-absent” reality, as Olivier Schwartz puts it,57 in family surroundings in my fieldwork: the interviewees talked a lot about them, their narratives shedding light on certain behaviors. Nonetheless, I was scarcely able to observe family relations directly, since domestic space in Riyadh is generally closed to people outside of the family. When I was received in the home of an interviewee, it was usually in the receiving room (majlis), destined for guests and the staging of the family in relation to the outside world. Even if I was welcomed into the living space of the family, it was generally in the absence of men, conforming to the principle of segregation. Thus, in general, I did not have access to interactions between all the members of the family.

Who Were the Interviewees? Not wishing to reify the category that I studied, but rather to understand the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion operating among young women living in Riyadh, I did not begin with strict characteristics for defining a sample. Rather, I was guided by the goal of gathering life stories—in terms of both life courses and daily activities—of young women representing a variety of income levels, family and social origins, and neighborhoods lived in and frequented, yet all of them with mobile lifestyles. The interviewees were students, or had a paying job or were looking for one, were married, single, or divorced. I met them in the spaces that I observed, through other interviewees, or at lectures or events for women. My research did not include women who rarely left their homes, whether because they could not negotiate doing so with their immediate family, had no means of transport, or stayed home caring for their children. Those I interviewed had very diverse income levels, and some of them faced considerable financial difficulties. In this regard, I noted the professions of the interviewee’s father and mother (though in most cases the latter had no salaried profession), the neighborhood they lived in, as well as the type of habitation, means of transportation, possibility or not of travel abroad, and schools at-

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tended (in the past few years, Riyadh has seen an increase in the number of private schools). Despite the many obstacles that they have to overcome, young Saudi women who are mobile in the city do not constitute a marginal category. According to the Ministry of Economy and Planning’s statistics from 2007—even if these are not very reliable—higher-level study has become common for Saudi women: in universities, they are more numerous than men. Women aged from twenty to twenty-nine are twice as likely as men to hold a university diploma, whereas the generation of their mothers is largely illiterate. As for salaried work, it is equally difficult to evaluate the proportion in the absence of reliable statistics; during my research, the women I met who studied or did not work generally expressed a desire to do so, irrespective of their marital status or their level of income. According to the available statistics, Saudi women constitute 14.4 percent of the national workforce (excluding foreigners) and 30 percent in the public sector.58 A large majority of professional women work in the public sector, though the employment of women in the private sector has quickly increased over the past few years.59 According to the Ministry of Labor’s statistics, 36 percent of Saudi women were unemployed in the end of 2012.60 The sharp rise in the official rate of unemployment for Saudi women (more than ten points between 2000 and 2012) is without doubt linked to numerous obstacles that curb their employment; but, as this statistic must be founded on the population of “­actives,” we may suppose that more and more Saudi women are willing to declare themselves and be recognized as such, which reveals both their increasing aspiration to hold paid employment and the recognition of the legitimacy of this aspiration. Unemployed women, like men, are eligible for “back-to-work” benefits created in 2011 under a program called Hafiz (­Incentive), though the conditions are highly restrictive. I conducted over one hundred interviews in Arabic; all quotations from these are my translations. The interviews took place either within the places of my inquiry, such as mall cafés, or in interviewees’ homes. In the latter case, the ­mothers of the interviewees were often present at the beginning of the interview, or came in to say hello and sat with us for the duration of the interview, both as mistress of the house, to welcome me, and to monitor who was coming to talk to their daughter and what type of questions were asked. Usually, I was able to make the most of this unpredicted event by gathering elements of family history and sometimes sketching intergenerational comparisons through questioning the mother of the interviewee about her own experience. The majority

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of tape-recorded, in-depth interviews took place at the end of my fieldwork. Until then, many interviews were not recorded, because for most Saudi women in Riyadh, it is very important to be invisible. (They take care, for example, that photographs of them are not in circulation, which could lead to blackmail.)61 This was potentially a source of tension in recording voices during interviews. Insisting on the anonymous character of my research allowed me to reassure my interlocutors. In the transcriptions, I tried to keep their own words in spite of the translation, which often led to awkward phrasings; words borrowed from English and used in Saudi dialect by interviewees are italicized. The intimate lives of the persons I met are not the focus here, but there are some incursions into hidden spaces, mainly when interviewees led me there. In general, I did not want to be in the position of asking my interviewees very intimate questions, and I also wanted to respect the boundary between what one can say and what one cannot say in this social context. These delimitations of visibility, invisibility, and what is in-between revealed much about the transformations of norms and power relations. I was interested in the ambivalence and ambiguousness of the terms employed, of the practices adopted in public. Intimate relations were shown only rarely and in ambiguous ways, as in the case of the buyat-cute couples described in chapter 5. Finally, although this book is about young urban Saudi women, I conducted a few interviews with persons who did not belong to this group, which helped me contextualize the changes that I observed. First of all, there were (women) intellectuals and “personalities”—journalists, writers, preachers, and businesswomen who expressed themselves publicly in media and books. Second, there were men who spoke about or took public initiatives on certain aspects of female modes of living or on the rights of women. Third, I consider the strong presence of immigrant men and women as an element that structures the urban society of Riyadh. During my last stays, I began to explore non-Saudi female residents’ practices in the city, which is important to understand Saudi women’s practices.62

A “Foreign Woman” Researcher: Transgressing Boundaries Reflection on my own position and the ways in which I was typified in fieldwork interactions contributed to better understanding of the social hierarchies and their modalities in the studied group. Soraya Altorki, a researcher of Saudi origin and one of the rare anthropologists to have done fieldwork in Saudi Arabia, has published her reflections on her status as an “Arab woman” in the field.

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She enumerates the advantages and disadvantages of her position: she doesn’t need a visa, has no accommodation problems, since she lives with her family in Jiddah (chosen as a place of fieldwork because that is where her family lives), already knows the households that she will study (she works on her social group of origin), but she must assume the role attributed to her, that of an unmarried daughter from a good family, which engenders a large number of constraints.63 Not being a Saudi woman engendered practical difficulties for me (visa, accommodation) compared with the experience of Soraya Altorki. In addition, it was not simply as a foreign woman but as a Western woman that most of the women I met typified me during our first meetings. This particular construction of my gender, closely imbricated with my origins, connoting a relationship of international domination for some interlocutors, needs a little contextualization. The city of Riyadh is marked by borders and hierarchization between different categories of nationalities, produced and reproduced during daily interactions. In public spaces, “Westerners” (overwhelmingly men, notably North Americans) who come to work for a few months or years in Arabia, are differentiated from Saudis by signs such as clothing. Employers generally require of Saudi men that they wear the national outfit (a long white garment called a thawb 64 and a red and white cloth on the head called a shmagh) and of non-Saudi men in qualified jobs that they wear a suit and tie. Westerners in ­Riyadh—who are generally highly qualified, white, from hegemonic countries, and live in gated communities reserved for them—benefit from a status distinct from that of the majority of (male and female) foreigners who come from poorer countries such as Pakistan, India, the Philippines, Indonesia, Syria, Egypt, Sudan, Eritrea, and so on, even if a considerable proportion of these occupy skilled positions and do not correspond to the stereotype of the poor immigrant worker.65 In this context of relative hierarchization between categories of foreigners, most of the interviewees welcomed me as a “Western woman.” Nonetheless, according to my interlocutors, I inspired curiosity or mistrust precisely because I only imperfectly corresponded to their image of a Westerner in Riyadh. First of all, coming alone to Riyadh with the goal of conducting fieldwork, I transgressed the gender roles that characterize Westerners living in Riyadh, who are mostly men, for whom it is easier to obtain a visa and to work. They sometimes bring their wives with them, but these have no right to exercise a professional activity and rarely leave the gated communities, restaurants, and shopping centers of the new center of Riyadh. Most of them do not cover their hair with a

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scarf (tarha). My self-presentation, characterized by my speaking Arabic and my relative knowledge of how to wear an abaya “properly” (having a fitting abaya and knowing how to put on a scarf in a way considered as nice) often made me “pass” as an Arab (non-Saudi, since I did not cover my face) rather than Western woman in most public spaces (though I did not intend to do so). Secondly, spending my days with Saudi women, I transgressed the boundaries between Westerners and Saudis, maintained notably by rigid checkpoints following many anti-Western attacks in the Saudi capital. My presence aroused suspicion among some heads of female branches of institutions about which I had hoped to inquire. Unacquainted with the work of Edward Said (1978) on Orientalism and postcolonial studies that have shown how colonial powers have used certain feminist ideas as vectors of domination on Muslim populations,66 they asked me who financed my research, and why “France” was interested in “Saudi women.” Why didn’t I study French women instead? What did I think of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan? Larger political concerns thus redefined my project. Being called on to justify myself in such “ethnographical tests,” to use Didier Fassin and Alban Bensa’s term,67 helped me to better understand the degree of politicization of any question touching on status and activities of Saudi women, in particular the ban on their driving, the rules of gender segregation, and access to jobs. In the public sphere, these questions systematically lead to debates about U.S. hegemony.68 Because of my status as a student and a foreigner having to express myself in Arabic, a language that is not my native tongue, I felt rather dominated in the interactions with heads of institutions, but what they held against me was being Western and thus dominant in the power relations that, while going beyond my research, made it possible. My stereotyping as a “Western woman” nonetheless aroused hostile reactions on the part of only a minority of interlocutors. Among young Saudi women, on the contrary, many expected that I would become a spokeswoman for the claims they would have liked to, but could not, formulate in public. They asked me to agree with their point of view and to talk in their name because of the freedom that my status allowed me in their eyes. In this view, the situation of my research represented for them a unique occasion: they could only rarely interact with “Westerners” and even more rarely because of the language barrier. During the conversations with various groups of young women, many asked me to talk about marriage, which a student on the campus of King Saud University told me was “a great injustice to all Saudi girls,” or even to consecrate

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“at least thirty pages” of my dissertation to it. After the end of my research, in February 2010, during a discussion in Riyadh with two persons whom I knew well and had seen regularly for four years, I told them that my research concerned writing about a society to which I was foreign and suggested that Saudi women themselves should write about their own society. They answered me that they could not and pleaded with me once more to speak in their name. Thus, some of the interviewees invited me to denounce constraints that they had to endure as Saudi women, whereas the mistrustful questions asked by other interlocutors showed that they judged my research emblematic in its chosen subject of the imperialist West and its discourse on the Muslim world through its image of “the Muslim woman.” Finally, others counted on me to “correct the negative image” of Saudi women in other countries. In either case, they addressed themselves to me as “a Western woman.” One informant suggested I send my research to Oprah Winfrey, whom she considered unfair to Saudi women in showing them as submissive. This typification as a “Westerner,” sharply felt during the first interactions, made my class background of secondary interest. First, this was difficult for the persons I met to discern. They generally relied on self-presentation and family belonging—through codes relatively specific to the urban female society of Riyadh. Second, I observed that they categorized nonnational residents first and foremost in terms of nationality, rather than class. Generally speaking, among the younger generation, the status of “Westerner” and researcher allowed me to be taken seriously by interlocutors of the highest income bracket, without making the more humble ones uneasy. The typifications varied according to the people and stage of research, and the process of socialization as well as observation.69 During the months of fieldwork, I was led to adopt certain daily practices of the women I was living with, for example, in terms of transgressions (see chapter 4). This contributed to diminishing the distance that the young women I knew established while interacting with me as a “Westerner.” I became a confidante for some of them. Finally, all these friendly relations with people—to whom I evidently had explained my research—added a lot to my fieldwork, firstly, because it is difficult to gather rich material on places of sociability without being integrated into groups of acquaintanceship.70 The informal conversations also allowed me to understand conflicts, rivalries, and family issues. Thanks to these relations, I could follow the activities of many informants for months or even years—end of studies, change of job, marriage, divorce, remarriage, and so on—and listen to their interpretations of these changes.

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Shared and Unshared Constraints Generally speaking, the very fact of living in Riyadh allowed me to experience some of the constraints that weighed on the activities of the women I met. In the case of my fieldwork, this implied conforming to certain norms that condition women’s practices and daily lives in Riyadh—with important differences according to their nationality and class. Make no mistake: this does not signify that the researcher lives these constraints in the same way as the informants.71 Above all, my informants had been socialized with these constraints and were habituated to them. Thus the dependence of any movement on men weighed on me, whereas for the women I met, this was most often experienced as perfectly normal. Similarly, when I was at one of their homes and we were waiting for a man of their family or for the driver to return to the house in order to take us to a shopping mall, we could wait for hours without them growing impatient, even if they pretended to be anxious when they got him on the phone so that he would hurry. In terms of housing, my only option was the diplomatic quarter. It was difficult to rent an apartment elsewhere for such short periods, all the more so because the King Faysal Center, where I was an invited researcher, would have had to be my sponsor as a woman. In 2008, it became possible for a woman to rent a hotel room without a sponsor, but that would have been too expensive for me, given my very limited budget. Finally, I tried several times to persuade one of my friends’ families to rent me a room. However, they feared hosting a Western woman, which was unusual, while many households may lodge a f­emale domestic employee of Indonesian, Sri Lankan, or Filipino origin. My presence might have attracted the neighbors’ gaze or the attention of the CPVPV, who could enforce gender segregation between unrelated persons (with some ­limits) even in private houses. Only once did an elderly Saudi woman who needed the money almost accept, until her adult daughters advised her not to. Overall, there was no cheap housing possible for a “Westerner,” which was a serious difficulty during my stay. Interactions with the police constituted another case where the experiences of constraints differ flagrantly. The city is covered with checkpoints where police check the driver’s papers and ask questions about the passengers. I was submitted to these controls at least once a day, because I lived in the diplomatic quarter, surrounded by checkpoints through which it was relatively difficult to pass since 2003. Depending on the time, the appearance of the vehicle, the status (gender, class, nationality) of its passengers, and the outcome of the

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inter­action between the police and the driver, we might go straight through, negotiate and wait, or be sent back. To respect the segregation between men and women, the police (there are no female police) addressed themselves to “the man of the car,” except when he was a driver who claimed no knowledge of the people he was transporting. Not being able to explain oneself directly with the police was habitual and inconsequential to the women I knew well, as I sometimes observed where we were stopped together. One of them explained to me that it was for the men to figure it out and to resolve this kind of situation, something I often heard later. Beyond these differences in experience, the constraints that made my daily life tiring were actually far from those that limited the field of possibilities for the women with whom I was doing research. I gradually became aware of the depth of this gap. They lived in households that furnished certain services necessary for daily life, while considerably constricting their behavior, whereas I was relatively free, but had to face problems, notably of mobility, alone. My movements were limited by legal constraints enforced by the police: I was forbidden to drive and it is forbidden for an unrelated man and a woman to be alone in together in a car, unless the man is her mahram (her father, brother, husband, or uncle)72 or a licensed professional driver. The movement of interviewees in the city was above all limited by family constraints, linked to the necessity, to protect their reputation, not to be noticed. I did not experience these limitations myself, and I could not observe them directly, but they were present—sometimes omnipresent—in the conversations and interviews; family constraints blocked most of them well before they could clash with state institutions. This intersection of constraints attracted my attention regarding the articulation between these state institutions, developed progressively since the 1950s, and the nuclear family, considered the “central core of society,” to use the formulation of the Fundamental Status adopted in 1992.73 The legal apparatus necessitates the authorization of a “legal guardian,” who can be the father, husband, or brother, for numerous activities (university study, exercise of a professional activity, travel). For most of the women I met, this is combined with the extended family. The definition and role of the extended family have been profoundly transformed through the process of state formation and rapid urbanization, which accelerated in the 1970s. However, it has a significant influence on women’s degree of autonomy in daily life, notably through the importance attached to extended family’s judgments over the decisions taken by fathers for their daughters, for instance. This was evident among the women I frequented. The analysis of these

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differences between myself and the women I met in terms of constraints and experience of constraints was useful for understanding their ways of experiencing the situation, their attitudes of accommodation, and even their relations with direct family surroundings.

The Organization of the Book This book is divided into five chapters. Chapter 1 supplies some elements for understanding the socio-spatial organization of gender in Riyadh and refutes an ahistorical and culturalist interpretation of gender segregation. It examines the political and economic contexts in which the four types of spaces accessible to women were opened up. This allows for specifying and historicizing the models of femininity proposed, first, in the era of the oil boom and the Islamic Awakening (Sahwa), then in the context of reform discourse; these two discourses translate into different modalities of opening and closing of public spaces for women. In the 1980s, Riyadh was a paradigmatic case of gender segregation. This principle was endorsed by the Islamic Awakening, and its implementation was made possible by the increase in oil revenues. The model of Islamic femininity promulgated since then for Saudi women is anchored in this principle, contributing to national distinction toward foreign workers residing in the country, as well as the hegemonic U.S. ally. Starting in the 1990s and 2000s, new injunctions overlap with this model: for Saudi women, professional activity is valued, presented as a means for them to participate in society. Additionally, the liberalization of trade and the government discourse calling for private-­sector development favored the rising number of shopping malls in the city. This engendered the opening of new spaces for Saudi women. Boundaries linked to the securitization of these spaces are superimposed on the boundaries between men and women, which creates a specific economy of spaces in the city. Chapter 2 explores how young urban women gain access to these spaces through multiple negotiations, in particular with their immediate family. Since most women described the city as very dangerous, I was interested in the way they defined the dangers to which they exposed themselves. These were mostly linked to “youth”—that is, males circulating in peer groups rather than in “­families”—and also to the CPVPV. More generally, exposing oneself to the unpredictable, or even becoming visible through a behavior judged as unusual, can harm reputation: this definition was intrinsically linked to contemporary family configurations, and it engendered specific constraints, augmenting the cost of their mobility. Avoiding dangers is the responsibility of young women,

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which has a disciplinary effect on the behaviors that they adopt in public spaces: even when gender segregation is not materialized by walls, the boundaries between men and women are reproduced on the scale of interactions, characterized by avoidance and reserve. These precautions increase the cost, already considerable because of the ban on driving and the lack of public transportation, of mobility and of access to public spaces for Saudi women. Because of this high cost, moving in the city becomes constitutive of a lifestyle requiring paid employment or, to a lesser degree, the pursuit of higher studies, in order to accede to the only spaces that do not harm the “respectability” of women, spaces destined for consumption. This lifestyle itself is the result of negotiations with family members, who must be convinced that the behaviors adopted are permissible among others who count. This can mean, depending on the family, relatives or families having the same status and/or income level. These lifestyles and desires for mobility are part of the will to “realize oneself ” or even to “blossom” in a way that is autonomous from family. The self-help discourse, particularly used within religious spaces and appropriated by many young urban women, is central to the legitimization of these new activities, thought of in terms of personal development and self-realization. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 describe the interactions through which a “society of young urban women” constitutes itself within certain spaces and at particular moments. Founded on the analysis of status mobilized during the discussions among young Saudi women, chapter 3 questions how new forms of sociability between young students or professionals sharing the same spaces lead to links of solidarity between them, and with what barriers these links are met. The spaces shared by young Saudi women allow the development of homosocial relations and common identifications, going beyond usual divides in terms of family belonging and characteristics, including income levels. That said, the identification with a common group is fragile and episodic because of behaviors of distinction among young Saudi women, especially in terms of class and family belonging. The concern for reputation engenders a certain reserve in their friendly relations, a limit partially surmounted in virtual exchanges due to their anonymous character. Chapter 4 concerns transgressions of official Islamic rules; that is, rules inspired by the rigorist interpretation of religious precepts promoted by the Council of Senior ‘Ulama. While circumscribing the transgressive aspect of these acts, the analysis shows how the repetition and reproduction of these practices in public spaces consolidates complicities between young Saudi

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women. Within spaces of co-presence between young urban women, norms of public behavior are renegotiated, especially by the diffusion of practices transgressing official rules founded on a rigorist interpretation of Islamic precepts. These practices to some extent constitute resistances to the model of femininity promoted during the period of the Islamic Awakening. They characterize young urban women as a group and contribute to reinforcing the identification of young urban women with a category sharing the same constraints, the same indifferent or defiant attitude toward those responsible for applying the rules, and similar criticisms expressed during conversations between peers. Finally, chapter 5 shows how certain of these transgressive behaviors spread between the group of peers formed by young urban women, weaving new norms of self-presentation in public, which I call consumerist femininities, and which also become objects of diverse appropriations and subversions. New norms of self-presentation are also felt to be constraints for some women. On campus and in shopping malls, workplaces, and religious meetings, contours of a definition of femininity are renegotiated, involving lifestyles and self-­presentations that a young Saudi woman can and must adopt in public. They must conform to a model of consumer femininity founded on the displaying of consumer products purchased in shopping malls. This engenders the emergence of new modes of subjectivity, but also distinctions between those who can afford to show off, those who use ruses to pretend that they can in spite of limited means, and those who feel excluded from it all. These ways of stylizing self, inspired by Lebanese, American, and European models, signify the negotiations that take place around transforming norms that define legitimate femininity. Interpretations and tensions around the style of buyat, or “masculinized” girls, also reveal these negotiations around femininity norms. Just like large cosmetic brands, those responsible for applying official Islamic regulations participate in promoting consumer femininity to combat the “masculinization” of young women.

1

R I YA D H , A C I T Y O F C L O S E D S PA C E S Residents of Riyadh are eager to find any trace of desert beneath the city homes and streets that mask the past. At the first hint of spring, families venture beyond the stifling walls and into the vast stretches of sand. They rekindle a dream that is deep within them: the caravan is still there, waiting for them, at the edge of the city; it will always be there. Umayma al-Khamis, Bahriyyat

A R R I V I N G I N R I YA D H , I was struck by its silence. Even the constant hum of air conditioners and traffic was absorbed by it. The city seemed both noiseless and odorless. Then I began spending weekends at shopping malls: giant sound boxes containing a brouhaha of women’s discussions mixed with the laughter and shouts of children. Like many inhabitants of this “city of walls,”1 I felt closed in. It seemed that only construction workers got to spend time outside; like everyone else, I was either indoors or in a car, which I could not even drive. Given the city’s design, and especially how spread out it is, walking was not a viable option. In 2004, the municipality began to construct large sidewalks or “promenades” (mamsha). These were nicknamed “streets for pregnant women” (shari‘ al-hawamil ), as if they had been created to resolve the absurd situation in which some women found themselves: doctors recommend walking for exercise, but there is nowhere to walk.2 Frequent checkpoints and religious police who may pop up at any moment, as well as security checks (taftish) at the entrances to women-only spaces, notably to exclude forbidden items like cameras,3 reinforce the feeling that so much is forbidden, regimented, monitored. Measures designed to police morality, or to prevent attacks and misdeeds by “youth,” create a climate of ubiquitous surveillance. Although some of the women I met did refer to Riyadh as a prison, most of them had a very different impression from my own. The following anecdote illustrates this gap. I was planning to meet a journalist named Nada and go to dinner at the home of a friend of hers, and she offered to pick me up at a super-

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market that was on her way. This type of arrangement is common in Riyadh. I could not wait in the street or in a car, since I did not have one, and coming to my home was complicated because it was in a restricted zone, with the entrance guarded by soldiers who often refused entrance to people who did not look “Western” enough when embassies were closed. So that evening, I took a taxi to the supermarket and waited for Nada. I entered the supermarket immediately, a reflex unconsciously acquired in Riyadh, to protect myself from passing vehicles who might bother me in one way or another, even if just to beep their horns to emphasize the abnormal character of my presence outside as a woman alone. After several tries, I succeeded in getting in touch with Nada, who told me that she would be very late. With nothing else to do, I began roaming the super­ market. A few moments later, the call to prayer burst out, the doors of the super­ market closed for around half an hour, so that I and everyone else were locked in. While I was strolling through the aisles, a woman wearing a niqab and pushing a cart greeted me warmly, laying a hand on my arm. It was Ala, a young hospital employee I had met through her sister, who had become a friend. She was doing the shopping for her family. She asked me what I was doing there, and I told her in a slightly irritated tone what had happened: I was getting tired of being constantly closed in and dependent for my mobility. She answered that it was because, as a foreigner, I was not used to it. She herself found it more comfortable to be driven by her brothers than to drive herself, and she enjoyed walking around the supermarket and doing the shopping. It was a welcome change of scenery. This quite ordinary anecdote highlights different ways of experiencing the socio-spatial organization of this city, and particularly the fact that gender-based restrictions operate in such a way that a supermarket—or a shopping center—can seem like a space of relative freedom for women. How did this state of affairs come about? Riyadh has been shaped by the building of a modern state, along with developmentalism, oil revenues, the ­Islamic Awakening, and trade liberalization. In an era of reform aiming to attract international investors and transform Saudi Arabia’s image, the capital of the kingdom has gradually acquired towers and malls inspired by America and Dubai—what Saskia Sassen has called an “urban glamor zone.”4 The recent availability of new places for women to work and shop, modeled on the U.S.–Dubai-inspired “theme park,” where interactions are monitored by private security,5 accommodates and combines in diverse ways with strict gender segregation policies. The city is marked by two opposing discourses regarding gender norms and spatial layout. On the one hand, there is the discourse of

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national distinction, with gender-based segregation presented as a central element of Saudi identity. The implementation of this discourse dates from the period of the oil boom (tafra) and the Islamic Awakening. More recently, reform discourse has been promoting salaried work for women, development of the private sector, and the opening of markets for foreign exchange. This discourse has influenced the lifestyles of young urban women. It is often juxtaposed and intertwined with the national distinction discourse, and both can be pronounced by different state institutions at the same time, or by the same institution at different times. The Saudi state is not monolithic. Official policies toward Saudi women stem variously from the king, the Ministry of Labor, the Council of Senior ‘Ulama, and other entities, which may pronounce more or less conflicting discourses at the same time. Spaces accessible to women may be opened or closed according to the sometimes contradictory initiatives of the Ministry of Labor, members of the religious police, the municipality, entrepreneurial princes, and/or businessmen from the private sector.

Gender Segregation and Saudi National Distinction The word “traditional” is incorrectly applied to gender segregation as practiced in Saudi Arabia today. The current socio-spatial structure is the result of public policy grounded in a compromise between the government and state religious authorities.6 This policy is written into law: since the 1960s, mixed spaces are legally forbidden for employment and education.7 Gender segregation is one aspect of a broader discourse presenting Saudi society as Islamic—soliciting sentiments of national unity in the context of a state founded (in its current borders) in 1932 on a territory that was previously fragmented. This “Islamic society discourse” was promoted by the institution responsible for Saudi girls’ education from 1960 to 2002, a commission of ‘Ulama (religious scholars) that reported to the Council of Senior ‘Ulama and was independent of the Ministry of Education. The curriculum’s official goal was to make female students into good, pious, virtuous wives and mothers, protected from interactions with men.8 The official fatwas of the Council of Senior ‘Ulama, who are highranking civil servants, govern the daily lives—dress, authorized behavior, and so on—of Saudi women. It is recommended that they completely cover themselves.9 I call this a model of “Islamic femininity” because those who promote it do so mainly in the name of Islam. In nomadic and rural life, gender segregation did not concern all groups.10 Historical and ethnographic evidence gathered by Saudi researchers (primar-

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ily women) discredits the dominant reading of Saudi history in terms of linear progress and modernization, according to which all obstacles to women’s professional activity are the result of traditions inherited from the past. 11 Instead, the research reveals a contrast between the activities that women exercised before the Saudi state and the oil boom and the obstacles that they currently encounter throughout the peninsula. Women previously participated in a wide variety of occupations. Frequently, the subsistence of rural and nomadic families depended on women’s agricultural work. For this reason, in the Hijaz and Asir provinces, for example, women did not wear the abaya, but rather clothing better suited for outdoor work. Only women belonging to rich sedentary families could allow themselves to remain indoors;12 gender segregation was an indicator of high status, as is the case in many other contexts.13 Gender segregation for all and the wearing of black clothing indicate the “Saudization” of various regions, contemporary to a process of rapid urbanization. Establishment of the Saudi state, followed by the oil boom of the 1970s, attracted a large number of families to cities in hopes of benefiting from the numerous new public-sector jobs. Many of the families immigrating to Riyadh could be described as “uprooted.”14 The rural exodus and, for nomads, sedentarization, led to women’s increased confinement to the domestic space. Salwa Al-Khatib’s ethnographic study in 1980 of sedentarized bedouin in a settlement (hijra) revealed that in their previously nomadic existence, the women had enjoyed freedom of movement and had not been separated from the men of their extended families. They had participated in numerous tasks, some of which were shared with men, such as pasturing the herds, wearing the face cover called a burqa‘ in Saudi Arabia. After sedentarization, they were restricted to female sociability and their homes, while continuing to wear the burqa‘, and they felt that their role in the community had become secondary. “We have no other occupations but to fill our bellies, pray, and sleep,” one woman observed.15 Although no ethnographic study has been published on the impact of migration to urban areas on women’s lifestyles in Arabia, we can imagine a similar process. Sedentary inhabitants of Najd (the central region of Arabia, where Riyadh is located) practiced gender segregation, and in contrast to nomadic and rural women, women living in the city rarely worked outside the home, aside from the poorest among them. Women arriving in the city were forced to adapt as best they could to such practices.16 Additionally, they were forced to adapt to living surrounded by strangers, rather than among a large extended family. Women’s freedom of movement was affected by this change from nomadic life: according

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to Salwa Al-Khatib, nomadic bedouin women circulated freely among relatives, who would not compromise the honor of their family’s women.17 For families belonging to prestigious bedouin tribes, this “uprooting” also accentuated feelings of loss due to their fall in status within the political context of the Saudi state. Today, in light of their current circumstances, the nomadic life of former times is sometimes reinterpreted by the mothers of the women I spoke with as idyllic, or at least more egalitarian, since women benefited from greater freedom and autonomy within the extended family; when they evoked this period, they often forgot its harshness. Gender segregation became strictly enforced in the rapidly expanding city of Riyadh. Due to a housing shortage within the city,18 many Saudis, particularly bedouin, created makeshift settlements and slums on its periphery,19 without access to water and electricity. Finally, in 1971, the government created the Ministry of Public Works and Housing, followed by the Real Estate Development Fund in 1974, with the goal of encouraging the private sector to construct housing. Zero-interest loans allowed many Saudis to construct their own v­ illas, in districts further and further from the city center.20 These villas needed to be sufficiently spacious to respect gender segregation and to allow double circulation, with a double receiving room (majlis). Walls around the villas protect families’ intimacy. This was a sharp contrast from the much smaller mud houses of the old city center in which some women I met (the interviewees’ mothers) who had arrived in Riyadh in the 1960s and 1970s had spent their childhoods or early married lives. With the expansion of Riyadh, residential streets now merge into large boulevards instead of leading to the mosque as they used to. Formerly, the narrow streets of residential neighborhoods constituted semi-private spaces, allowing women a certain freedom of movement. These were eliminated as the city was remade to accommodate automobile traffic only: it was spread out, with few or no sidewalks. Neighbors rarely socialize. Spontaneous family visits have become rare because of the distance between homes.21 It may also be difficult to get to someone’s house, because only the large streets’ names are used, and houses sometimes have no numbers or the house numbers are unknown.22 Gender segregation has become more strictly enforced since the Islamic Awakening (Sahwa), a hybrid protest movement that assimilated various currents of both official Saudi Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood.23 It began in the 1960s and reached the height of its influence within the state and society (among men and women alike) in the 1980s. The Committee for the Promo-

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tion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice (CPVPV) was originally devoted to encouraging men to pray, but later also focused on systematic control over women’s appearance in public. With new norms of acceptable public behavior enforced by surveillance from the CPVPV’s “religious police,”24 all women were urged to wear the black garment that covers them from head to foot.25 Even those who would never have chosen this attire of their own accord had to submit to the fatwas of the Council of Senior ‘Ulama. Here, it is important to note that, unlike in the Islamic Republic of Iran, where the wearing of a veil is required, no law specifies how women should dress in Saudi Arabia. Certain fatwas are enforced by the CPVPV and by the municipal police, whereas others are not. In other words, the legal status of these fatwas is unclear. The fact that education is generalized within the framework of a developmentalist agenda contributes to spreading the model of Islamic femininity. Gender segregation is institutionalized by a separate school system for girls, in terms of both location and curriculum. From primary school to pedagogical universities for training teachers after high school, schools and campuses for girls are separate from those for men and surrounded by walls through which only women can pass. Inside, since they are among women, they wear neither veil nor abaya. But they are required to arrive in an abaya with their faces covered, which contributes to making everyone dress the same within the kingdom. Women have begun to cover their faces in regions such as the Eastern Province where this was not previously the custom.26 Through spatial segregation and the standardized performance of the difference between Saudi men and women under precise rules of self-presentation, gender overrules other differences such as faith, tribal belonging, or geographic origin. Gender segregation in public manifests the Islamic character of Saudi society. This mark of national identity is also a mark of national distinction, differentiating Saudis from nonnational residents. Throughout the 1970s, roughly half the working population consisted of non-Saudis, the majority being Arabs (Palestinians, Yemeni, Egyptians, and others). Since the end of the 1970s, the proportion of Asian immigrants has increased, particularly of Indians, Pakistanis, and Filipinos.27 The social hierarchy between Saudis and these non­ nationals (some of whom were born in Saudi Arabia) relies both on apparent material superiority, even if in reality not all Saudis became rich following the oil boom,28 and on the pretense of religious and moral superiority. This distinction is signified and reinforced through clothing. In Riyadh, the thawb, a sort of long, white djellaba for men, and the covering of the face for women standard-

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ize the appearance of Saudis and differentiate them from nonnationals, even if some of these also adopt Saudi dress. Wearing the thawb or covering one’s face serves to materialize and reinforce the Saudi/foreigner distinction. In this context, avoiding the company of men is considered specific to Saudi women, or even as their privilege. Only foreign women, mostly Indonesian, Sri Lankan, and Filipino, work as domestic employees, a sector stigmatized all the more since they live in their employers’ homes.29 Men employed as chauffeurs for Saudi women, which signifies that Saudi women also find themselves in situations where gender segregation is not respected, were, until recently, never ­Saudis.30 The company of an immigrant worker, with whom no marriage is possible, given the difference in status, appears to be considered a lesser evil; as a foreigner, he is not categorized in the same gender terms as Saudi males. Respecting gender segregation constitutes a mark of national distinction for Saudis, as compared to foreigners, similar to that described by Anh Nga Longva in the case of Kuwait.31 This is what I refer to as the discourse of Saudi national distinction.

Controversies and Conflicts of Memory Among the Saudi women I met, perspectives diverged regarding the general enforcement of gender segregation that took place in the 1970s and 1980s. It was considered a regression by those who had pinned their hopes on the changing practices of certain intellectual, economic, and political elites of the late 1960s. A few female intellectuals had begun to publish newspaper articles under their own names (many considered it shameful for a woman to make her name ­public) and became more and more visible in public debates, even if they were up against many obstacles.32 A Saudi intellectual evoked her return to Arabia after having studied abroad in the 1960s and 1970s, in an era when very few Saudi women pursued higher studies: Concerning [women’s] employment, when I returned to Arabia, there was strong encouragement from men in charge because they felt that women must study and work. That was in 1964. There were many opportunities for women. Young people were enthusiastic, parents were enthusiastic. . . . At the time, there was no religious rigorism [al-tashaddud al-dini]; people saw women’s progress as something natural. At the time, there were no obstacles in society, in spite of controversies. . . . In the 1960s, in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, there was no problem with our situation as women, perhaps because we were a minority, and the male society that surrounded us was very encouraging; we were free to make

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decisions, free to meet with men, including the minister. There was an openmindedness on the subject of women’s education, employment, contribution to society. The appearance of the rigorist current [mutashaddid] engendered women’s oppression. Before this, no one was telling women how we should dress.33

Evidently, memories of this period are influenced by subsequent events, concerning both the personal history of this intellectual—she could not continue working in a ministry, which did not prevent her from having a brilliant academic career—and the history of the country—she is as virulent a critic of religious rigorism as of the lessons given by the United States to Saudi Arabia in the aftermath of 9/11 and of American imperialism in general. On the other hand, Sahwists, meaning those who identify with the principles promoted by the Islamic Awakening, see the 1980s as a positive new beginning. They claim that the circulation of religious knowledge among women finally saved them from the ignorance of former times and enabled them to reclaim their rights in Islam as against the injustice of customs and traditions. Members of the young women’s group (nashi‘at) of the World Association of Muslim Youth (WAMY) defended this reading of the past, when I met them in Riyadh in April 2006, through affirmations such as “the Sahwa promotes respect between men and women” and “Our grandmothers did not have freedom in the choice of a husband. Today, the girl has the right to say yes or no, thanks to the Sahwa. Before, women’s rights were ignored. Our religion is better than that of our mothers: we know how to read and write. Before, there was a lot of ignorance [ jahl] in certain regions of the kingdom. There were customs and traditions in the place of religion.” Rereading the past in light of their religious commitment, Sahwists define their plan for an Islamic society as including a fight against customs associated with pre-Islamic ignorance ( jahiliyya) and stigmatized as unfair to women. This plan for an Islamic society is also brandished against the threat of “Westernization.” Since the 1980s, in the context of U.S. hegemony, women intellectuals of Sahwist sensibility have compared their situation to that of “Western” (U.S.) women, and consider that the latter tell others how to live, while running themselves ragged between paid work and family responsibilities. In other words, for Sahwists, feminism’s only gain is a double workday, and thus an increased exploitation of women; the application of Islamic precepts protects Saudi women from such injustice: they are not required to hold paying jobs, since by virtue of the Islamic precept of qawwama, the men of their family are responsible for protecting them and providing for their needs.34 In the 1980s, the journalist and writer Juhayir al-Musa‘id praised the principle

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of ­qawwama as a right from which Saudi women benefit.35 In fact, whenever it participates in international conferences on women or gender, the Saudi government reaffirms the necessity of adhering to Islamic precepts that gave women their full rights fourteen centuries ago.36 Conflicts of memory regarding gender segregation are at the core of contemporary debates on the mobility and visibility of women in public spaces. The car-driving controversy of 1990 entrenched the opposing viewpoints of liberals and Islamists, with systematic reference to American hegemony. On November 6, 1990, just after the Gulf War, forty-seven women got behind the wheel to protest against Saudi women not driving in the city, even while the country was full of American soldiers, male and female, who were driving there. Many of the activists had studied in the United States and held American driver’s licenses. Whereas they had been expecting positive reactions—they had obtained permission from the governor of Riyadh for this rather atypical demonstration37—they were arrested, spent the night in jail, and were suspended from their jobs, even though they were kept on the payroll. In addition, although the ban on women driving in the city had only been a norm and not a law, it was made official by a fatwa issued by Abdul ‘Aziz ibn Baz, grand mufti of the kingdom at that time. It was justified by the restriction of means clause according to which anything that could lead to actions not in accordance with religion must be stopped. A fatwa issued by Muhammad ibn ‘Uthaymin, another member of the Council of Senior ‘Ulama at that time, denounced the “intense pressure [the enemies of Islam] were placing on a Saudi society devoted to preserving its religion and morality.”38 The driving regulation sought to reaffirm the Islamic legitimacy of the state through the restriction on women’s rights, symbolizing the virtue and inviolability of the nation, not long after the government had required the assistance of U.S. soldiers.39 However, regardless of one’s interpretation of the government’s reaction, the “driving action” sparked public debate on women’s mobility, in which various positions and contradictions could be defined. In spite of lively debates surrounding this question during the 1980s,40 the driving activists (during my interviews with three of them) expressed surprise at the aggressive reactions they had encountered. The initiative of these women, the majority being from wealthy families and having lived several years abroad, was publicly denounced by many religious figures and intellectuals as one more threat of Westernization. The most representative example is an excerpt from the famous poem by Abd al-Rahman al-Ashmawi, PhD in Arabic and professor at the Imam ­Muhammad

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ibn Saud Islamic University, which condemns the women who participated in this action: . . . I did not think I would live to see the day when a girl of the peninsula would make a mockery out of our principles She hurries to remove her veil as if she were in an umma 41 of which the sovereign is retreating . . . She ignores the fact that the umma is ruled by religion, that it’s God who protects and supports . . . Perhaps you were led astray by secularism [‘ilmaniyya] or a perverted wolf made you do it 42 . . . Thus, at the height of war, you wish to abandon your veil and make your wish known . . . Where is the protective father, where is the husband of the household, or is it the women who have power and give orders . . .43

To drive means to abandon the veil, mock Islamic precepts, take the side of secularists; even more than the activists themselves, considered as women led astray, the men who “allowed” them to do this, or even manipulated them, are accused of not fulfilling their duties as men. Faced with this type of reaction, most liberals defended the activists. The question of Saudi Arabia’s dependence on the United States has subsequently been evoked whenever the controversy concerning women’s driving has come across new initiatives and developments: it is almost always linked to this topic.44 Women’s driving, as an issue, has become a “public problem,” that is, the focus of “controversies and confrontations between different groups.”45 The debates are structured by the confrontation between two sides that promote two different models of femininity. Today, this controversy continues to influence discussions in the public sphere regarding women’s status and activities, which include, but are not limited to, driving.46

An Archipelago of Women-Only Spaces Owing to increased gender segregation, spaces reserved for women within the city have actually been multiplying. The separation between spaces reserved for men and for women in no way corresponds to the bourgeois European division between the male public sphere destined for production and the female private sphere destined for reproduction.47 This is particularly important for understanding Riyadh’s socio-spatial organization. Since the 1970s, an archipelago of spaces reserved for women has created a parallel city, with its campuses,

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sections for businesses, administrations, and charitable organizations, and religious spaces. Places reserved for women are becoming more numerous and more diverse, reinforcing gender segregation. Historically, the first gender-segregated sector developed was education. During the same period, a large number of both boys’ schools and girls’ schools were constructed.48 Supervised until 2002 by a commission of religious scholars, girls’ education does not officially aim to give them employable skills; only professions that “conform to their nature” are discussed, notably teaching elementary, junior high, and high school for girls, thus having a schedule compatible with family life.49 However, in practice, the curriculum for girls is nearly identical to that for boys, but with an additional subject, “Home Economics,” where they learn to cook, do housework, decorate, and manage a household budget. Between 1960 and 1970, the kingdom’s main universities authorized female students to pursue their studies by correspondence.50 The first female students, prohibited from physically attending universities, only went to the university to take their exams.51 Starting in the late 1970s, campuses reserved for girls were created in the major cities. In 1976, King Saud University opened buildings for women next to those for men. At that time, segregation was mostly respected, but (according to the interviews conducted by the Saudi sociologist Fowziyah Abu-Khalid) there was a certain flexibility; for example, there were weekly co-ed academic meetings. These took place in a building on the female campus with a separate entrance; women were veiled, but their faces were uncovered.52 In 1986–1987, after the men’s campus was moved to Diriyah, on the west side of Riyadh, such meetings were no longer possible. The former men’s campus, Alaysha, thus became women-only and was devoted to humanities, religion, and paramedical studies. The physical distance between the men’s and women’s campuses paralleled changes in policy, such as the ban on co-ed meetings, which, according to Fowziyah Abu-Khalid, led to an increased marginalization of women in decision-making. At the same time, the strict application of segregation also meant greater autonomy for the women’s campus, as well as the feminization of leadership positions within it. The Alaysha campus, as I observed it beginning from 2005, was closed and surrounded by walls.53 Female monitors at each of the entrances regulated comings and goings; sometimes they opened students’ bags to make sure they contained nothing forbidden, such as a cellphone with a camera, or film. Students could enter at any time, but leaving was regulated: it was forbidden to leave the campus before noon (classes began at seven). This was to prevent students from

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going elsewhere when their families thought they were at the university. Within the campus, next to the entrances, waiting rooms with tinted windows allowed students to see their cars enter the parking lot without being seen from outside. Strictly separated from the outside world, the female campus was a city within a city, with its own cafeterias, parks, shops, and, since 2008, some sports equipment. Many young women study IT or sciences that in other contexts are studied by a majority of men. Computer-based professions are particularly accessible to women because they can generally be exercised from home or within a space that respects gender segregation. Some courses were only recently made available to female students: only since 2007 have they been able to study law (qanun) at King Saud University—although Islamic law and jurisprudence have been accessible to female students since the founding of women’s campuses. Although they cannot become judges, they can become lawyers (allowed in Saudi courts since 2012) and practice other law-related professions within businesses. In 2012, the courses remaining inaccessible for female students included certain foreign languages, architecture, and political science, even though these are not officially forbidden. Conversely, certain courses are open to women only, such as home economics and child care. The education of girls on a large scale provides employment to a significant proportion of women in the public sector as teachers.54 Education remains the largest sector of employment for Saudi women. The development of a parallel educational system is costly, but oil revenues have made it possible. Elsewhere, it is often for financial reasons that education has become co-ed.55 In October 2000, the Kuwaiti parliament voted in favor of gender segregation in Kuwait’s previous co-ed university, but the decision was annulled by the government a few months later (in January 2001) because of the very high cost of establishing a parallel university for women and the difficulty in finding qualified male and female professors for every subject.56 The first official women’s charitable institutions (as opposed to unofficial networks of solidarity) were created, like the first educational institutions, in the 1960s. In Riyadh, the Al-Nahda organization was founded in 1962 by Princess Sara al-Faysal, daughter of King Faysal; thereafter, the largest organizations and charitable foundations opened women’s sections to take care of poor women, handicapped children, orphans, and so on. Princesses are particularly active in the world of charity, closely regulated by the Ministry for Social Welfare, which founded a women’s branch in the 1960s.57 In the 1980s, the private sector began to consider Saudi women as a potential market: banks attempted

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to attract women’s capital by creating women’s branches with female employees. The first women-only branch was opened in Riyadh in 1980. In 1982, thirteen female branches were operating in Riyadh and in Jiddah.58 Since women had long been excluded from public places of worship, the opening of women-only religious spaces in the 1990s was an important change.59 Although Qur’an memorization circles have long existed for girls as well as for boys,60 women do not generally pray at the mosque, except during Ramadan. Starting in the 1980s, certain female intellectuals, who had generally studied abroad, became known and respected for their religious knowledge, notably Fatma Naseef, Suhayla Zayn al-‘Abidin Hammad, and Nura al-Sa‘ad.61 These three women, all from wealthy Hijaz families, publicly affirmed that the problems encountered by Saudi women were owing to incomplete application of Islamic precepts such as “women’s rights in Islam.” In the Eastern Province, there have been many Shi‘ite women activists since the Intifada of 1979;62 some of them later pursued their studies in Iran. These intellectuals position themselves as speakers for religion, in opposition to “liberal” intellectuals who have other goals than the Islamization of society.63 In the 1990s, this movement grew, spread, and stretched beyond the intellectual sphere: young women with diplomas from Islamic universities (BA, MA, or PhD, the structure being copied from U.S. universities) became more and more numerous and sought to voice their religious knowledge. During their studies, it is recommended that they be active in spreading their religious knowledge through preaching (da‘wa); some of them have developed their own women’s religious centers. Qualified in religious doctrine or Islamic law, they are considered legitimate preachers within female religious spaces. There are several types of religious spaces reserved for women. The Qur’an memorization centers (dar tahfiz al-qur’an), which have replaced the less formal Qur’an memorization circles, are often housed in girls’ schools. Many religious institutions have opened female sections: the WAMY (World Association for Muslim Youth) in 1990; then the Foundation of Mecca (Mu’assasat Makka) and the Foundation for Construction and Development (Mu’assasat al-i‘mar wa-l-tanmiyya). These sections are led by women who haver no inter­ action with male leaders, which makes their daily activities relatively autonomous. Concretely speaking, this means that when conferences are organized by these sections, the speakers are female and prayers are led by women, even if they are never called imams and the female “prayer rooms” (musalla) are not considered mosques (masjid). These female sections propose a large range of activities, from Qur’an memorization courses to lectures on personal development

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and even workshops in English, makeup, and sewing. Recently, many female preachers have become famous within “women’s society” and have founded their own Islamic centers, for example, the Asyeh Center founded by Asma alRuwayshid, and Laha Online, founded by Rugayya al-Maharib. Some of the women who frequented these spaces and were engaged in such activities considered themselves “committed to Islam” and attempted to apply a maximalist interpretation of Islamic precepts to every detail of their daily life: for example, they believed in the necessity of not listening to music and of wearing an abaya that covers one completely from head to toe, and implemented these principles. This was not the case for all of them: some explained that they made compromises in their daily lives regarding what they considered to be the precepts of Islam, not being able to resist, for example, watching clips on television. Among the younger generation of women in Riyadh, those committed to Islam were, at the time of my research, a minority.64 In parallel, religious discourse by women for women has become more mediatized, with the appearance of new Islamic women’s magazines such as Majallat al-usra (Family Magazine), in which journalists write in favor of increased enforcement of Islamic precepts in Saudi society. After 2000, female religious magazines and web sites became more common and are often for young women ( fatayat); the magazine Hayat, for example, is geared to fifteen-totwenty-five-year-olds.65 While remaining fairly consensual and unquestioning, the discourse developed by women for women differs thematically from the religious discourse of official institutions. Its goal is to respond to specific needs of women. They often discuss women’s rights and encourage women to commit to religious and charitable activities, which, incidentally, imply having a life outside of the home and family. For example, the preacher Asma al-Ruwayshid affirms that women “must participate in the development of charitable and social works through volunteer activities; to the acceleration of social progress and the development of female spaces; to the resolution of specific problems from which women suffer.”66 Religious foundations organize many conferences on personal development for women; several provide psychological counseling, education, and services regarding religion and family life.

Women’s Participation: A New Reform Discourse Since 2000, in the context of reform discourse promoting participation of Saudi women and their greater role in society, the archipelago of spaces accessible to women has expanded. This discourse includes institutional, social, and eco-

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nomic aspects.67 In the 1990s, following the Gulf War and responding to several petitions demanding political changes in the kingdom, a Fundamental Statute (similar in its form to a constitution but with no legal value) was promulgated and a Consultative Council (Majlis al-shura) with appointed members was created. During this time, development of the private sector and nationalization of jobs, or “Saudization”—that is, the replacement of foreign employees by Saudi employees—were promoted as means of reforming the economy, based on rent and considered insufficiently productive. Plans for development (published every five years) began recommending an increase in Saudi women’s professional activity in order to boost national employment rates.68 However, these plans are much more theoretical than practical—more like a rhetorical exercise in macroeconomics than a set of applicable measures. Nonetheless, these recommendations were partially implemented during a time when, paradoxically, financial pressures had decreased and economic reforms may have been considered less essential.69 This was in the aftermath of 9/11 and the terrorist attacks within Saudi Arabia (beginning in 2003). In this context, “Saudi women’s role in social development” became one of the main themes of governmental reform discourse, alongside the “struggle against terrorism” and the promotion of a “religion of moderation.” The amalgamation of these different themes and the blurring of the political and economic significations of “opening” and “liberalization” present analogies with the U.S.-led project for a Greater Middle East.70 Among a series of debates organized by the government, a “national dialogue” on women was held in June 2004 in Medina. There were four sessions, including one on women’s rights and duties.71 Women intellectuals were invited to speak on women’s rights or women’s role in society with regards to institutions ranging from the Consultative Council to the National Association for Human Rights, created with the government’s support in 2004. In the 2000s, several books were published to highlight Saudi women’s role in various sectors since the founding of the kingdom—devoting much attention to the role of princesses.72 In 2005, while Saudi women were refused the right to vote for municipal (consultative) councils, the election of two businesswomen to the administrative council of the Jiddah Chamber of Commerce was highly publicized in Saudi Arabia and abroad.73 In 2009, Norah al-Faiz was appointed vice minister for girls’ education, the highest formal political position ever obtained by a Saudi woman. In 2011, the government announced the nomination of female members of the Consultative Council, as well as the possibility that women would be able to vote

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and run for office in municipal elections by 2015 (an extremely limited right: political parties and coalitions are forbidden, half of municipal councils are nominated, and they have only consultative prerogatives). This promotion of Saudi women is at the core of a new national discourse, founded not on the strict application of Islamic precepts, but on Islam as a “religion of moderation.” In parallel, several events in favor of women’s professional activity were supported by the government and placed under the patronage of princesses. In 2006, the Media Center for Saudi Women, managed by the journalist Nahid Bashatah, received support from the Ministry of Information to organize conferences such as the “first forum of professional women in the media,”74 and on “the contribution of women’s work to society’s development.” 75 The latter was placed under the patronage of Princess Adila, King Abdullah’s daughter. Saudi newspapers and television channels created rubrics and programs devoted to famous and successful women.76 Starting in 2003–2004, initiatives were launched to facilitate women’s employment in the private sector. The country’s first chamber of commerce for women, the Khadijah Bint Khuwaylid Women’s Center (named after the Prophet’s first wife, an entrepreneur), was created in Jiddah in 1998. In Riyadh, a women’s chamber of commerce was created in March 2004. In 2005, a decree authorized women to obtain business licenses, enabling them to start businesses without a man’s endorsement. That same year, new programs were created: some sought to offer advantageous loans to men and women to start their own small businesses, while others aimed to put private enterprises in contact with women seeking employment.77 A decree of the Council of Ministries recommended adapting college courses for female students to the needs of the job market and developing short-term contracts and part-time jobs to make the job market more flexible.78 Another decree recommended that the Council of Chambers of Commerce create a female section responsible for finding ways to collaborate with the private sector in order to train Saudi women and facilitate their entry into the job market, encouraged ministries to open female sections, and advocated the creation of specific zones for women’s employment within cities.79 In 2008, a session was devoted to women’s employment at the seventh national dialogue on employment.80 This provided an opportunity to reaffirm the necessity of creating female sections in courts, ministries, and various institutions, adapting female students’ courses to the job market, and reducing unemployment among both young men and young women through privatesector employment. Today, this focus remains the general trend.

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Through these recommendations and measures, another model of femininity is promoted, which may be called professional: Saudi women must participate in “national development” through professional employment and become productive, “active” members of society. Such recommendations imply that women who do not exercise a profession are “passive” or at least “in­active” members of society under norms used to establish international statistics. This plan is not limited to the economic sphere—it implies the transformation of gendered imaginations regarding what it means to be a Saudi man or woman. Advancement of the model of professional femininity is accompanied by the stigmatizing of other lifestyles, labeled as backward. Reform discourse ­parallels, and does not oppose, the discourse of national distinction. The necessity of preserving the “specificities” of Saudi society is constantly evoked. Every change concerning Saudi women is implemented “with respect for the precepts of Shari‘a.” The text concerning how to facilitate women’s access to paid employment specifies that this is only to be authorized if the job is adapted to their “female nature” and their domestic obligations, takes place in a space separated from men, and employees respect a dress code of modesty such as defined by Shari‘a.81

Workplaces: Entrepreneurs of “Saudi Women’s Empowerment” In Riyadh during the early 2000s, new workplaces became accessible to women; however, this slow process was rife with contradictions between various government institutions. Although labor law reform in 2006 removed the explicit prohibition on mixed spaces, these are not an option in most sectors, with the exception of hospitals. A woman who wishes to start her own business receives an authorization from the municipality, specifying that men are not allowed to enter the premises. Businesses with male leaders and employees wishing to hire Saudi women must create separate female sections. However, in some businesses, workplaces are only nominally segregated. The headquarters of many banks include mixed spaces, although a sectorial institution reaffirmed and partly enforced their prohibition in 2007—in contradiction to the new labor law.82 Any suspicion of gender mixing may lead to a visit from the CPVPV. A twenty-five-year-old bank worker named Asil was employed until 2004 by a business unauthorized to hire women. She explained to me how the three female employees worked in a “secret office” with a separate entrance, so that their presence went unnoticed by the other employees working in the tower, who might have denounced them to the CPVPV. Many (notably female) entre-

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preneurs oriented toward female consumers have been forced to shut down following complaints from the CPVPV. Often, this was owing to rumors that they were “places of debauchery.”83 The influence of such rumors hints at a murky legal situation: certain establishments are tolerated for a time, then repressed some months later, and few persons know where the decision came from; or they might be tolerated by one institution and repressed by another. Members of the royal family are less vulnerable to such fluctuations,84 and a few of them became entrepreneurs of “Saudi women’s empowerment.” This takes place in a broader context of privatization. For the past few years, certain activities that were formerly in the public sector shifted to the private sector, particularly education, health care, and employment. However, this is more of a branching out than a weakening of the state, since it closely monitors privatesector activities. 85 The private sector is used to compensate for the state’s inability to provide access to jobs, health care, and education. As is the case in many contexts, the public/private boundary is blurred; there are, however, certain particularities. First, the Saudi royal family—both a state institution and members of society—is large, with many princes at the head of private businesses. Second, the royal family usually takes advantage of public/private ambiguity.86 This involves “gifts” from the royal family to the people, whether in the form of charity for the poor only or for the entire population, with the goal of attracting support and enhancing the royal family’s status. Third, the entrepreneurial sector and the royal family are intimately linked. The support of a prince facilitates many procedures, and in some sectors may be absolutely necessary to get anything done. Highlighting the need for connections to do business, Monica Malik refers to this as “crony capitalism.”87 Some royal family members have played an important role in the opening of new spaces for women within the city. The Faysaliyya and the Mamlaka, two luxurious towers in north-central Riyadh, allow entrepreneurs to develop their businesses under princely protection.88 Two female owners of shops and cafés for women explained the difficulties the municipality and CPVPV put in their way during the 1990s. The latter does not like “women getting together,” one of these businesswomen, Munira al-Shunayfi, explained. After numerous administrative hurdles and repeated inspections by the CPVPV, she succeeded in opening cafés in the Mamlaka Mall.89 Among the entrepreneurial princes who decided to employ Saudi women in their businesses, some made a commercial strategy out of it, notably, Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal, who promoted a specific model of professional femininity. Sponsor of Georgetown University’s Prince

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Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU) , primary owner of the Rotana TV channel, which features Arabic clips, and a large shareholder in Euro Disney, among other things, the prince likes to emphasize the presence of young Saudi women hired by him for the project of “rebuilding bridges between cultures.”90 Interviewed on a foreign television station, he declared: “I will spend whatever God has given me to promote the cause of ladies here in Saudi Arabia. Money is not an issue at all.”91 The ­Mamlaka Mall (or Kingdom Mall, in English), owned by the Al-Waleed bin Talal’s holding company, houses a floor exclusively reserved for women which corresponds, as the mall’s director (a woman) Nada al-Utaygi affirms, to the “vision of Prince Waleed: reasonable change.” This rhetoric (“change while respecting customs, Islam, specificities of Saudi society . . . ”) converges with the government’s reform discourse. The prince also claims participation in the “reform” of the kingdom, as is shown by his ghost-written official biography: “Encouraging reform has become his priority. In addition to his crusade in favor of women, the prince continues his struggle against poverty in the country.”92 The boundaries between marketing and political speech are unclear. There are obvious symbolic implications for investments such as the Mamlaka—whose name signifies “the kingdom.” Even if Al-Waleed bin Talal is a businessman who has no official relation to the government, his princely status links him to the royal family, which he himself recognizes in the documentary Saudi Solutions: “The small kingdom that I have will do everything to help the big kingdom. Because at the end of the day, all that the small kingdom got is from the big kingdom.”93 Although he is not part of the circle of the most influential princes exercising important state functions, Al-Waleed bin Talal exists politically through his investments and his public discourse: he is one of the most mediatized members of the royal family in Saudi Arabia and abroad. He is influential through his investments and commercial initiatives. In Saudi ­Solutions, the (female) director of his palace’s management team, composed exclusively of women filmed without veils or abayas, dressed and made over like stars of clips played on the Rotana channel, affirmed: “He gives us a unique opportunity, which we will never find elsewhere, he gives us a good job, good positions. . . . we are all satisfied, and he is empowering all the ladies in Saudi Arabia.” Al-Waleed bin Talal wants to present himself as a key player in the empowerment of Saudi women—a term used by international organizations, which has a pejorative connotation for many Saudi women, since it evokes the international discourse of women’s rights, interpreted as imperialist interference.

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However, the private sector must not be seen as unified, on the contrary: the policy of employing Saudi women has met with considerable resistance. Although the question of gender mixing was at the heart of virulent debates surrounding the replacement of foreign salesmen by Saudi women in ­lingerie shops, finally applied in 2012, the strongest opposition was originally from shopkeepers complaining of the high cost of this policy: they would not only be required to employ Saudi women in place of immigrant workers, but also change the configuration of their shops and install tinted windows. In addition, businesswomen are not necessarily in favor of Saudi women’s employment: during a forum for businesswomen, a large number of whom were owners of beauty salons, several of them criticized the quotas of nationalization of jobs, even while complaining of the perceived unreliability of foreign women employees.94 In spite of these obstacles, new professional spaces have become accessible to Saudi women and have conditioned the development of mobile, professional, and consumerist female lifestyles.

Shopping Malls: Freedom and Security? Riyadh during the 2000s was marked by the growing number of shopping malls and their tremendous success, but it did not pioneer them in the Middle East. In the Gulf, malls were first developed in Dubai. One of the first huge shopping malls in Saudi Arabia was Rashid Mall (1989) in Al-Khobar in the kingdom’s Eastern Province, where there are numerous North American Aramco employees. Malls were also opened in Jiddah before Riyadh. We can identify three steps leading to the opening of malls in Riyadh. Firstly, supermarkets were opened throughout Saudi Arabia during the 1970s, but were too expensive for the majority of Saudis; they were for well-off expatriates.95 Not until the 1980s did Saudis begin to appropriate these consumer spaces. In 1986, television commercials were authorized, and in the context of economic recession, wealthy Saudis travelled less and tried to do their shopping inside the country. From 1990 onward, a few malls opened, notably Sahara Mall and Iqariyya, in north-central Riyadh. The second step, starting in 2000, was the opening of two additional malls, again in the affluent part of the city, at the foot of the Mamlaka and the ­Faysaliyya towers, which transformed the cityscape. These two malls continue to be immensely popular. Perceived as prestigious and fashionable, they offer both luxury brands, Dior, Gucci, Lanvin, and so on, and more affordable brands (Zara, Mango), whose prices nonetheless are high relative to the standard of

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living of many Saudis. These malls are structured to give an image of luxury. At the Faysaliyya, a valet opens the doors of customers’ cars and they walk on a red carpet for the few meters that separate the car from the mall’s entrance. Lawns and flower beds frame the entrances of the mall; Pakistani chauffeurs squat in the shade, waiting for their passengers to finish their shopping. The mall’s female marketing director explained that the goal is to attract “Class A+” customers, that is “VIPs who purchase luxury items,” as well as “Class B,” but not “Class C.”96 The third step, starting in 2003, was the opening of malls in every neighbor­ hood of Riyadh, including less wealthy residential neighborhoods, well beyond the north-central area. Some of these malls are huge and seek to attract a broader clientele. Everything is sold, including international branded clothing, abayas, tailored evening gowns, shoes, perfumes, accessories, electronic products, gifts, and children’s toys. Many malls include a U.S.-style food court and Starbucks-inspired cafés. The opening of a new mall is a big event: entrepreneurs compete for new ideas to attract customers. For example, a mall opened in 2008, the R ­ iyadh Gallery, is structured around a reconstructed European landscape: woods where deer graze and ducks splash in a pond, next to which customers can sip cappuccinos or a lattes, while munching on donuts and cinnamon rolls. Just as with women’s campuses, shopping malls are closed, limited-access spaces, with specific regulations. Although mostly desegregated, malls are nonetheless forbidden to lone men on weekends, with the exception of salesmen.97 Security guards stand at the entrances and undesirable customers are sent away. In order to curb any possible illicit interactions, the shops have no dressing rooms, and women’s toilets are in general as far as possible from men’s toilets in order to respect gender segregation (though it is less strict in the latest malls). Some malls, sections of malls, or shops are for women only, forbidden to men: the staff (saleswomen, waitresses, security guards) consist of women of various nationalities, including Saudis. Women reach the “ladies’ kingdom” (mamlakat al-mar’a) on the second floor at the Mamlaka, for example, by way of escalators and stairs forbidden to men, monitored by security guards. This segregated space does not make customers feel isolated or marginalized, but rather admitted to a sort of VIP area, as women. Its layout corresponds to a very classy vision of wealthy women, as customers, strolling alone or with friends, with leisure activities independent of family life. The mall’s female manager, Nada al-Utaygi, explains that the goal is to create a “space of freedom and privacy for Saudi women, where there is also security.”98 Freedom and

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security are regarded as intertwined: freedom is only possible within highly securitized enclaves that eliminate any danger. The comments of a twentyeight-year-old Saudi woman employee working in this mall illustrate this concept of “freedom”: You are not free to walk alone in the street. Young men would bother you or the Committee [the religious police] would come ask you questions. . . . It’s like being in prison. There is no freedom here, everything is forbidden. . . . There is no freedom, in any sector, you cannot even express your opinion. . . . I think [the Ladies’ Kingdom] opened so that women could have a little freedom, could go shopping without being bothered. A space where they can breathe freely. It’s also to create an additional workplace for women. For the past five years, there has been a tendency to greater openness. Here, it really worked. . . . In five or six years, it will be more open, there will be more jobs, more freedom for women.

Most of the women I met preferred to get together in malls rather than in the “family sections” of cafés and restaurants, which have a history of being forbidden to women not accompanied by a mahram (see n. 103). Co-workers can meet at the mall for lunch or in the evening. Female students from other cities who spend the week between dormitories and campus sometimes get out in the afternoon to go for lunch or to stroll around the Faysaliyya, inventing elaborate scenarios to explain their absence to monitors. Some college students meet at the Mamlaka’s women-only floor on weekends. Today, there are seven cafés and restaurants there—in addition to those in the desegregated parts of the mall—which was not the case when the mall was first opened. Two are “terraced” cafés, meaning seating is on the mall’s promenade, allowing customers to see and be seen. Access to the other cafés is through the promenade, but cafés are separated from it by partitions, and they attempt to develop their own particular atmospheres through music and décor. Since the religious police are all male, they cannot enter these women-only spaces, which thus do not close during prayer times. Many researchers have analyzed the opening of malls in various cities and their increasing popularity as participating in the “privatization” of cities. They denounce this process as a loss in terms of democratic access to the city, since the spaces devoted to strolling and leisure activities are now segregated along economic lines, the poor being unable to pay the costs of access.99 If we define spaces frequented by people who do not know one another as public spaces, however, they were already rare for everyone in Riyadh, and especially for

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women, by the 1990s, aside from roads reserved for cars. In practice, the restriction of access to malls (gender-segregated or not), and their surveillance, allow women to frequent them; this logic is not specific to Saudi Arabia.100 In reality, in many contexts, the mall is an accessible space for people excluded from other spaces because they belong to minorities, for instance.101 However, getting back to Riyadh, the mall’s accessibility is, for many women, limited by other types of exclusion, as we shall see.

Conclusion From the point of view of its female inhabitants, the city of Riyadh juxtaposes different types of closed spaces. The discourse of national distinction and the developmentalism of the 1970s and 1980s have resulted in an increase in closed, segregated, secure spaces, legally public, such as female campuses. Since the 1990s, and especially the 2000s, reform discourse has led to certain women’s access to private-sector employment and the opening of spaces requiring money, such as malls. These spaces correspond to the “theme-park model”102 of a seemingly friendly environment in which everything is structured for maximum surveillance of visitors/consumers. Theme-park-style rules of isolation and security combine with gender segregation and moral policing. Spaces accessible to women, whether legally public or private, are almost always separated from the outside by high walls, security forces, and random searches. However, young urban women also produce them as public enclaves in the sense that they develop various activities and forms of sociability in them. Ethnographic research on young city-dwellers leads to greater understanding of how these spaces are constructed by those who use them. The spatial economy of gender in the city reveals transformations in the relation between state and family.103 Through gender segregation and free (but not obligatory) public education for girls, state institutions stand in for the family to “govern” women’s lives, which contributes to consolidating the Saudi state and extending its scope. Officially, the state is the protector of the family: Article 9 of the Fundamental Statute adopted in 1992, confirms a principle hammered into the population on every available occasion: “The family is the core of Saudi society.” State changes concerning women always include the requirement of their male guardian’s permission—this is the case for education, which is voluntary, as well as paid employment. These policies have questionable effects and deeply influence power relations within the family. In leaving such decisions to the head of the nuclear family, the state recognizes this definition of the family

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as legitimate and thus implicitly weakens the extended family, which has no legal value. Additionally, gender segregation in an urban context tears families apart spatially: any social life outside of the home separates men and women. This was not formerly the case in Saudi society: for rural people and nomads, for example, gender mixing within the same extended family was once much more widespread.104 Urbanization has led to households structured around the nuclear family, yet given that most public spaces are gender-­segregated, married couples share few activities beyond the home. Women are increasingly recognized by state institutions separately from their male relatives; their access to the state is increasingly direct.

2

GETTING AROUND ‘Ayb [You can’t do that] was the expression she hated most. She would have liked to delete it from the dictionary: it was repeated constantly, about anything she did. . . . Yet most of the bans and customs they enforced had no basis. In spite of that, everyone bowed to them, even against their own will. Fa’iza Ibrahim, Banat min al-Riyad (Girls from Riyadh) I have been wanting to call you for a long time and to meet with you, but every time I tried to do so, I had problems with the driver. You know drivers, some show up, others don’t. This one is leaving the country, that one wants more money . . . Nuf, a twenty-nine-year-old job seeker

I N R I YA DH , taxis were my main means of transportation, and I usually took them alone. This earned me many warnings from women I met who regarded the city as an obviously unsafe place: “The papers don’t give the full story, but there are many crimes here, kidnapping, rape . . . ” Several of them explained that even if they were allowed to drive, they would not do so because of these dangers, in spite of the fact that their dependence on others significantly and constantly complicated their lives. Meetings were often cancelled at the last minute owing to lack of transportation. Most did not have the option of taking a taxi. Although in theory nothing prevented them from calling a cab (a “limousine” in Saudi dialect), these were considered too dangerous. Also, taxis “lacked prestige,” as Suhayr, a young teaching assistant, said when cancelling our meeting because the family’s chauffeur had just quit. She belonged to a wealthy and influential family, and her father would never allow her to take a taxi alone, she explained. Very few of the young Saudi women I met took taxis alone. One of them was twenty-four-year-old Shuq, who was working as a journalist when we met. Compared to most of the women I interviewed, she was particularly autonomous regarding transportation. Her rather poor neighborhood was in the southernmost part of the city. She shared an apartment (a floor of a house) with her mother, brothers, and sisters, as many low-income Saudi families do. Since her parents’ separation, relations with the father had become extremely conflictual, with him trying to prevent his daughters from studying and working. In spite of this, Shuq pursued a professional career. The years that followed,

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Shuq held a well-paid private sector job, while at the same time pursuing an MA. Thanks to her salary and those of her brothers and sisters, the family was able to move to a slightly more comfortable house. Shuq negotiated with a private chauffeur to bring her to and from work. For any other transportation, she continued to take taxis, although she preferred private chauffeurs and was very cautious during these excursions. For most of my other informants, even when their families did not have the means to provide them with a chauffeur-driven car, getting around by taxi alone was inconceivable: both too dangerous and too lower-class. The experiences of Suhayr and Shuq suggest how women’s mobility is considered a family affair and an indication of class status in Riyadh’s contemporary urban society. Which Saudi women have access to the city’s public spaces? What are the obstacles to their mobility and how do they get around them? How do they “get around”? An analysis of the obstacles encountered by young Saudi women reveals how some of them succeed in negotiating with their families to gain access to daily mobility, which implies being able to cover the high cost of it. Indeed, for many young Saudi women, earning one’s own income is a prerequisite for getting out of the house every day. Professional activity opens the door to other spaces within the city. Being mobile becomes a lifestyle. The young women who adopt such lifestyles often describe them in terms of personal fulfilment, a concept that will be analyzed at the end of the chapter.

Transportation Hurdles In many contexts, gender as a social hierarchy means unequal access to public spaces, which is heightened in Riyadh by discriminatory state policies. Women, Saudi or foreign, do not have the right to drive, a considerable limitation in a city that is made for cars: a vast checkerboard of unwalkable streets, with no public transportation except a few bus lines in pitiful state, mostly used by poor immigrant male workers.1 The lack of adequate transportation is not the only hurdle to Saudi women’s mobility. Most also highlighted the necessity of avoiding what they considered the two main dangers for women in the city: young males and the religious police (CPVPV). I became particularly interested in this feeling of insecurity voiced during interviews and informal conversations. This feeling of insecurity cannot be analyzed in light of police statistics (which are, incidentally, unpublished). Women sometimes did evoke rape and kidnapping. However, the everyday acts to which they felt most exposed, and had often already experienced (as described during interviews),

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would probably not be included in police statistics. Nonetheless, these dangers (as they call them) determine how they do, or do not, gain access to public spaces. During a lengthy interview, twenty-two-year-old Fuz, an IT student from a wealthy family, described with great emotion an experience of harassment—term used by informants, newspapers, and, more recently, by judges2— which she considered had done her much harm. She was followed in a car by a group of “youth” (shabab), a term that designates homosocial groups of men circulating in public spaces. Fearing that they would discover where she lived and harass her every day, she asked the chauffeur to try to get them to go away, in vain: they continued to follow her until she agreed to take their phone number. She was then able to go home, but the story didn’t end there. Her parents found out about the incident through the intermediary of what she described as “the youth network”: young men who spend their time driving around observing the comings and goings of young Saudi women in order to start rumors about them. “I told you about the youth networks,” she said; “they are all in touch with each other, they tell everything to those who drive around all the time, so they can recognize girls’ cars, etc. And they talk to them, ask questions, about me for example, the car is like this, this color, this license plate number.” Word of the incident eventually reached her brother, and he informed their parents, who blamed her—in their eyes, it was Fuz who was responsible for avoiding such incidents. If she failed to do so, her parents might impose new restrictions on her mobility, such as forbidding her to go out alone with a driver after a certain time. Fuz’s experience suggests that although public urban spaces are far from the family home, they do not provide the anonymity that would allow for more freedom.3 Young males are not the only danger. Young women also seek to avoid encounters with the CPVPV. Some I spoke with placed youth and the religious police on the same level as risks to which they were exposed in the city. This is somewhat ironic, since a main function of the CPVPV is supposedly to protect women from harassment by men.4 Members of the all-male CPVPV keep watch in cars, inside malls, on promenades (mamsha), and at entrances to womenonly spaces to prevent youths in cars from secretly watching women come and go. “Cover your face”; “Cover your eyes”; “Wear the abaya of Muslim women” (that is, the head abaya), CPVPV members order women in public spaces. The majority of interactions between young Saudi women and the CPVPV are limited to these commands. Many of the women I met paid little attention to them; however, some feared the religious police enough to avoid some

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mixed public spaces altogether. “They have microphones, they do not speak to you discreetly, they speak to you over a microphone. In front of everyone. So sometimes it’s just not worth it,” Maryam, a twenty-two-year-old bank employee, told me. Women I spoke with often emphasized the fact that the scolding takes place “in front of everyone.” The publicness of the reprimand is punishing. Members of the CPVPV can also stop people in certain situations, for example, a man and woman whom they suspect are neither married nor close relatives. Both people may be arrested and held in custody, or even incarcerated. Although less frequently, groups of women in a car or a restaurant may also be targeted by religious police. A twenty-year-old student named Suzan told me: I went with a group of my classmates to eat out for lunch. We took the big car so that there would be room for all these girls, and after a while a car of youths started following us and making signs at us, so the Committee [the CPVPV] came after them, and we said, “Ah, for once the Committee is doing something useful for us.” But then they switched, started following us, stopped the car, made the driver get out, and two of them got in front. I told them, “You can take us to the [CPVPV] Center but you must first call my father.” This scared him, since usually girls are afraid that they will call their fathers. He ended up just taking our names and making us promise not to do it again. This incident really bothered me. . . . Doesn’t the Committee have anything better to do? . . . Yet fear of the Committee constantly prevents you from doing normal daily things. We have enough to fear from the youths, we don’t need the Committee scaring us too.

In Suzan’s experience, youth and the “Committee” engendered similar precautions and avoidance strategies. Women I spoke with feared arrest by the CPVPV—which would need to be kept secret if it happened. “People think that if the Committee [hay’a] have arrested someone, there must have been a reason,” twenty-two-year-old Amal said. As in other contexts, the persons I met saw themselves as a part of a vulnerable population as women. The offenses described, such as harassment by youths, function as warnings, reminding them of the potential aggressions to which they are exposed, and participate in constructing their feelings of vulnerability in urban public spaces.5 However, insecurity in the case of Riyadh’s Saudi women involves an additional dimension: young women fear publicization of any contact considered abnormal, which would harm their reputations (sum‘a).6 My informants often used the

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term sum‘a, as well as kalam al-nas, which can be translated as “what people will say.” They very rarely used the word “honor” (sharaf ), which is applied to the family, whereas the word “reputation” is applied to a person, group of people, place, school, people of a certain tribe, and so on. The young women I interviewed protected their reputations mainly because they feared that if any act of theirs were seen as compromising it, their families would restrict their mobility. The behaviors that may lead to danger or harm one’s reputation are not strictly defined: they vary according to each person—or rather according to her family’s requirements and the way she deals with them. As we shall see, family requirements reveal desires and strategies of conformity and differentiation, and are thus significant of the central role young women’s lifestyles play in class transformations. When relatives speak about adopting respectable behavior and protecting the family’s reputation, it implies asserting boundaries between “us” and “them.”

Mobility and Distinction In order to negotiate activities outside of the home, many of the young women I met had to convince their relatives that they would keep out of harm’s way. Some explained that they were very careful not to be noticed, for fear of their parents’ imposing additional restrictions on them. With this in mind, they took precautions such as recreating gender segregation even within mixed spaces wherein it was not enforced by walls. Shaykha, a twenty-two-year-old student, said she avoided “places for [male] youths.” Hind, the twenty-six-yearold director of a female career training center, even spoke of spaces “filled with [male] youths who behave badly.” Above all, it was considered preferable to travel with a private chauffeur in a car with tinted windows. Taxis, with their transparent windows, were viewed as a dangerous means of transportation, leaving lone female passengers highly exposed to the two previously mentioned dangers: male youths and the CPVPV. For many women, not exposing themselves to dangers is not only a precaution, but above all, in the eyes of their relatives, a way of earning prestige. Nura, a twenty-two-year-old student from a wealthy neighborhood explained to me that owing to their fear of rumor, her father and uncle criticized her for taking walks: “Everyone looks at me and thinks, that girl came quite far on foot, maybe she actually came in a taxi, maybe she has no family—people talk like that.” In most areas of Riyadh, and even more significantly in the wealthy and middle-class areas, norms of respectability for Saudi women require that they get around only in cars driven

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by private chauffeurs or by family members, never by walking. This goes together with a specific performance of femininity—reinforcing both class and nationality (Saudi/non-Saudi) status distinctions—that calls for flawless, elegant clothing, often including stiletto heels, showing inter alia that their wearer does not walk to catch taxis or buses in the dusty streets.7 For young Saudi women, having a means of transportation considered as prestigious publicly signifies a mobile lifestyle without exposure to the unpredictability of public spaces. It also differentiates them from most non-Saudi women. Many foreign women take taxis, which suggests that they do not attach the same importance to such precautions. Although non-Saudi women come from diverse backgrounds in terms of nationality, professional activity, income level, and conditions of immigration or stay in Saudi Arabia, most of them do not face the same constraints regarding access to public spaces experienced by Saudi women. I got to know some of them and observed their practices (and put myself under the category of a foreign woman in Riyadh). On the one hand, foreign women are on average poorer than Saudi women: class and nationality are often intertwined, since Saudis’ salaries are on average considerably higher than foreigners’ salaries.8 This could make their mobility more difficult. On the other hand, their families—when they are present—generally seem to have a less restrictive vision of the range of behaviors that a woman may adopt in public without damaging her respectability. This gives them greater opportunities to get out and about, without worrying very much about the type of dangers that young Saudi women seek to avoid. In spite of this similarity, there are also significant differences according to the categories of nonnational residents. Domestic employees—the majority of whom are Filipino, Sri Lankan, and Indonesian9—immigrate alone and live in their employers’ homes. This entails isolation and confinement, all the more so since they have few days off. These are not the main problems for most Palestinians, Syrians, Egyptians, and Eritreans,10 who often immigrate to and live collectively in Saudi Arabia and can count on family or community support. In between these two very different ways experiencing the city, many nurses, mostly Filipino or Indian, live together in housing off-limits to men. Their feeling of insecurity differs from that of Saudi women, as is seen in this discussion (in English) on life in Riyadh with two twenty-five-year-old Filipino nurses, Mary and Teresa, who identify kidnapping as a particular danger to them as Filipino women: Mary: And it is unsafe for women. Amélie: Unsafe for women?

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Mary: We hear a lot of stories about women that are abducted. I show surprise. Teresa: It is different for Filipinos because we hear a lot of stories about women that are abducted. If you are white you are more respected. . . . We don’t go out alone. Going out alone is scary. . . . Mary: They don’t release the news but we hear stories. Filipinos getting abducted by taxi drivers. Amélie: What do you mean, abducted? Mary: Raped and thrown [out]. So we do not go alone. We always ask someone to accompany us.

Ways of experiencing the city differ, depending on gender, class, and nationality. Many urban Saudi families emphasize the Saudi/non-Saudi distinction. Several young women I interviewed explained that in the eyes of their relatives, a respectable young Saudi woman “should not behave like a foreign woman.” Fuz, who stopped covering her face in mixed public spaces with her father’s permission, related her grandmother’s arguments, which forced her to return to her previous habit: “My grandmother started asking me, why are you doing that? People could mistake you for a Syrian woman, for a non-Saudi girl, who goes out without covering her face.” Like state discourse on “Islamic Saudi society,” the grandmother’s remark implicitly links national belonging to maximalist application of Islamic precepts. In spite of the increasing visibility of Saudi women, their public practices contribute to “doing the difference”11 between Saudi and non-Saudi women.12 This is a bit different, though, in less wealthy households: poor neighborhoods, generally described as the most dangerous,13 are the only places where women can be seen walking around, whether they are foreign or Saudi. That said, constraints on women’s mobility and the obligation to use a means of transportation considered as prestigious are not automatically lower because of poverty. There are two main possibilities: either the family requires women to forgo leaving the house unless a male relative can accompany them (since they cannot afford a chauffeur), or they leave the house anyway, as is the case with Shuq (mentioned earlier in the chapter). Family members’ attitude depends mostly on the group with which they seek to be identified. In this way, some women explained that their relatives expect them to behave like “girls from good families” even if their household is poor. Sometimes the prestige attached to a family’s name does not correspond to their level of income, since older social hierarchies were disrupted by the founding of the state and the oil boom, causing groups such as the bedouin to lose status.

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Constraints on mobility are revealing of contemporary family configurations. My interlocutors, like Fuz, often presented the restrictions as originating in the extended family. Many spoke of “what people would say” (kalam al-nas), but when I asked them to reveal who they meant by these “people” (al-nas), they most often mentioned members of their extended families. Significantly, no women I spoke with presented the restrictions on their public behavior as directly imposed by their parents (with the exception of a few who were in open conflict with them). This perspective on the restrictions helped, perhaps, to make them more bearable, given that these women had strong daily ties with their parents, with whom most of them lived, but less so with their aunts and uncles. Through these constraints, the extended family, an institution currently without legal status, is reinvented and transformed in the contemporary context.

Revenue and Mobility Saudi women who can get around in a car with a personal chauffeur are a minority: more than half of Saudi households in Riyadh have only one car, generally driven by the men of the family, providing transportation for an average of seven people.14 A chauffeur generally earns a relatively low monthly salary of around 1,500 riyals (U.S.$400), which many households nonetheless cannot afford. Employers must also provide food and accommodation (separate from the rest of the family, to respect the rules of segregation). Very wealthy Saudi women with access to a personal chauffeur are also those who spend several weeks each year in Europe or in the United States; they are the most visible Saudis abroad, but represent only a minority. The women I met are not part of this social group. Most have never left Saudi Arabia, or perhaps only once or twice in their lives, for example to visit neighboring countries on family vacations. Since access to the city is expensive, having their own salaries facilitates mobility when faced with restrictions imposed by relatives. There is a significant link in Saudi Arabia between paid work and mobility, even more so than in other contexts.15 Paid work itself implies the tremendous advantage of allowing women to leave home every day for something their families consider legitimate and respectable, without having to renegotiate every time; work means avoiding confinement to the home. Twenty-sevenyear-old Budur had worked as a secretary before returning to her parents’ house after a divorce. Her parents were uneducated and relatively poor— “backward” and “ignorant,” Budur said. “Frankly, people in my family are

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very conservative,” she explained. “They are very attached to customs. For a girl, this means no coming and going, having friends, going out. Work is the only way to get out.” Like Budur, many women I met told they got out in order to go to work and went to work in order to get out. Earning a salary provides women from ­middle-class or poor families not only with transportation, but also with colleagues and a social life at cafés and restaurants in shopping malls, which are relatively expensive for the average standard of living. These are the main public leisure spaces accessible to Saudi women, since their security makes them predictable, unexposed to dangers. Since men unaccompanied by their families are forbidden in malls on weekends, visitors are mainly groups of women, with some married couples and children. Except for conventional exchanges with salesmen, there are very few encounters between men and women of different families at malls beyond the convention of mutual indifference between strangers that Erving Goffman calls “unfocused interaction.”16 Malls, given their layout (large open areas), are spaces of extreme visibility and mutual control, which regulates conduct: it is difficult to act discreetly and even harder to be sure that nobody is looking. Going to malls is thus regarded as respectable, not dangerous. But one needs to have some money. All these factors are interdependent and weave mobile professional and consumerist lifestyles: young Saudi women need to work in order to go out, have access to places of leisure, and negotiate autonomy when faced with family constraints. Higher study also is a springboard to accessing public spaces, though to a lesser extent than full-time paid work, since students earn less than employees. Public universities provide free bus service to the campus and Saudi students receive “compensation” (the term officially used) of around U.S.$160 to $200 per month, which they can spend on occasional outings to shops and restaurants. These mobile lifestyles are specific to the younger generation. Whether they study or work, young urban Saudi women are more mobile than their ­mothers: in most cases, domestic obligations keep the latter at home. Mothers and daughters live in different times and places: young women consider their time as divided between work and leisure, activities that also correspond to different spaces within the city, whereas in general, time as experienced by their mothers is not compartmentalized in the same way. In some neighborhoods, mothers have developed local ties of sociability that do not require cars. For poor women, these sometimes include the informal sale of clothing, beauty products, or home-cooked foods. Generally, their daughters participate very

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little, or not at all, in these local ties of sociability. The meetings take place during times when the daughters are busy with their studies or professional activities. Several young women moreover indicated that the conventional rituals of neighborly visits bored them. Hissa, a twenty-eight-year-old graduate student, told me, for example: I don’t like visiting because I don’t know how to act, I don’t know what to say or what to answer, for example, when they say hala wa marhaba [a salutation], you need to follow a script, and if I don’t know how to answer, the women get angry. Some of them are very attached to customs. But I grew up in the city, I never went [visiting neighbors] with my mother, and then I was a student, and I never got around to learning their ways.

Hissa had no desire to play the role of “daughter of the household” and preferred not to be home, or to stay in her room, if her mother or sisters were receiving visitors. Her relationship with her family was tense, especially concerning her professional choices: her sisters had first tried to discourage her, then left her alone once she had reached a prestigious position. During Ramadan, I noticed that the mothers, in the families that invited me, often expressed nostalgia for village or small city evening gatherings where the women of the neighborhood would get together in one another’s homes; they regretted that their daughters preferred to be in Riyadh for Ramadan and to spend their evenings strolling around shopping malls. Many young women explained that they did not share their mothers’ nostalgia for their parents’ native regions or villages. One mother explained why she preferred her village, where women could “walk, stroll around freely, go see friends without needing a man to take them,” emphasizing that in the village, there were “no youths” (ma fi shabab), and that no one would cause any problems for women. Her statement suggests how the category of youth is constructed in this context: it implies city-dwellers. There are also twenty-five-year-old men in villages, of course, but because they do not behave like city youths, they are not considered part of that category. Women of the younger generation conversely feel they have more freedom in the city than in a village. Women can move around more freely in the village, because everyone knows everyone else, whereas in the city mobility is limited, notably by the dangers previously described, but the city is more attractive in the eyes of the younger generation, since women can succeed in negotiating access to shopping centers, universities, and workplaces there.

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Family Negotiations Although material autonomy was essential for the women I met in negotiating with her family to gain access to public spaces, exercising a professional activity also required that their legal guardian did not forbid it. Legally, the legal guardian can at any time prevent his wife, daughter, or sister from working simply by informing the employer of his decision. In family negotiations regarding work, various types of arguments and normative references are mobilized. I got both sides of the story from the women and never had direct access to these negotiations; they were a “present-absent” reality for me.17 Although the women’s narratives should not be confused with ethnographic notes obtained from direct observation, they clarify many elements that I actually did observe. The analysis of both sides’ arguments sheds light on power relations and on the possible ways of negotiating within families. Women’s rights in Islam were one ground for their negotiating mobility with their families and arguing against rules and refusals imposed by their parents. This required distinguishing between religion and customs—definitions of which vary from one person to another. Some of the women I met referred to studying, working, and various other activities as their rights, and serving others, or having a positive impact on others, as their duty (passing on knowledge through teaching if they had received an education, for example). They also spoke of womens’ right in Islam to refuse to marry a suitor who didn’t suit them. Young women’s appropriation of this register is facilitated by their level of education, which is generally higher than that of their parents. Many of them did not refer to Islamic principles alone in negotiating with their parents, however, but instead combined them with the notion of reputation. In a context where it is important not to be noticed, or to behave in any way that might be considered as abnormal, certain young women succeeded in convincing their relatives that the norm today is to conform to such and such an Islamic precept. During lengthy negotiations, they would back up their arguments by quoting the Qur’an and other religious sources. The goal was to show that refusing to allow them to go somewhere or do something would indicate that their family subscribed to traditions and thus could be seen as backward. Budur said of the argument she used to persuade her parents to let her pursue a professional activity: “My parents . . . are conservative but not religious. . . . They are always saying ‘You can’t do that’ (it’s ‘ayb). I tell my father ‘Don’t tell me what I can’t do, tell me what Islam allows [halal ] and what Islam forbids [haram].’”

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Budur emphasized the difference between what is forbidden by religion, haram, and what is forbidden by society, ‘ayb, which according to her was implemented because of the backwardness of society and in this case of her parents. She stigmatized what she identified as outdated customs and emphasized the necessity of conformity to Islam as proof of modernity.18 Saudi “traditions and customs” are less a historical reality than the product of a past imagined in light of contemporary urban life. Although Budur’s difficult relationship with her parents was rather exceptional, several other women I met used the “Islam against customs and traditions” argument to negotiate with their families. No public figures in Saudi Arabia who advocate for women openly define themselves as Islamic feminists. Asserting women’s rights in Islam is currently the approach, not only of liberal intellectuals, but of female Islamic preachers (who contend that Islam has already given women “all their rights”) and of the government.19 For Saudi liberals, this tactic distinguishes their position from that of international organizations for women’s rights, considered imperialistic. It is interesting to note how young urban women make this discourse their own and take it to a whole new level: for their own benefit, they convince relatives of the legitimate character of a certain behavior or activity. Adapting this discourse to their needs not only allows them to pursue new activities but also contributes to a certain way of thinking about the history of Saudi Arabia and its current society. Any obstacles they confront are label relics of the past (of “backward traditions”), as opposed to Islam, a “religion of moderation” compatible with professional aspirations. This version of history is stressed even more by the “committed to Islam,” for whom the rights Saudi women now enjoy are the result of the Islamic Awakening, whereas previous generations lived in ignorance of Islamic precepts. “Rights in Islam” is not the only argument, or normative reference, used to convince hesitant parents. One of the young women I met with regularly, ­Suhayr (already mentioned in this chapter), was planning to study abroad. Her father, a highly educated senior civil servant, had the means to finance her studies but refused to do so, believing that it would be prejudicial to the family and to ­Suhayr’s marriage prospects if she lived abroad as an unmarried woman. Suhayr explained that if a girl goes abroad to study alone, “people think something is up.” They might wonder, for example, whether her parents had sent her abroad to cover up a scandal, such as a pregnancy out of wedlock. In addition, a young woman living alone abroad would attract all sorts of suspicions regarding her

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lifestyle and relationships. Suhayr’s strategy, having finished her undergraduate studies with brilliant results, was to apply to study for a master’s degree, be hired by the university as a teaching assistant, then earn a scholarship from the university to go abroad. Her father would then be forced to accept the situation because of the prestigious position of his daughter at the university: his refusal, according to Suhayr, would be inexcusable and might even be stigmatized as backward by other well-to-do families around them. Quite often, the main justification evoked by parents to prevent their daughters from working pertained to moral distinction, according to which a woman belonging to a good family should not have to work, go out, and expose herself to danger, for example, by frequenting men. On the other hand, some families encourage their daughters to succeed professionally: it is considered prestigious to have a daughter in a high position. It then becomes a question of which professions are prestigious enough to outweigh the need for moral distinction through protecting the family’s women.20 In Suhayr’s case, becoming a teaching assistant was sufficiently prestigious to allow her to study abroad. She would necessarily be accompanied by her brother: a legal clause for the attribution of a scholarship, though not strictly implemented.21 Suhayr and her father were able to reach an agreement acceptable to both of them. The two normative references evoked—moral distinction and professional success—can only be considered as pertinent insofar as they are linked to family reputation: negotiation does not consist of debating which of these two normative references is preferable according to Suhayr’s or her father’s convictions, but rather to figuring out which would most contribute to the family’s prestige among the upper echelons of Riyadh society at that particular time. Practices considered as respectable change, and the goal is to be seen as neither too liberal nor too backward. More generally, whether women mobilized the “Islam versus traditions” argument, or that of professional success overriding the usual measures of respectability, parents made decisions without referring to convictions about what is good or bad, but rather to what they believed to be the most suitable behaviors in the eyes of those who count (who are defined in various ways). 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. In a way, young urban women reverse the reputation argument—based on the necessity of conformity, of not being noticed—to their advantage. They succeed in using it as a resource, even if questions of reputation are usually one of the primary obstacles they are up against. In other words, they negotiate within the family

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order rather than subverting it. During these negotiations, the emergence and delimitation of categories of urbanity, or even modernity, since the goal is to stigmatize anything backward (both terms being relative ways to situate oneself in relation with others, and with no fixed content), are developed. Negotiations mainly concern the boundaries of behaviors acceptable for young Saudi women. Boundaries may be shifted in one direction or another; young urban women play a prominent role in the process by persuading their families that for a family like theirs, which does not want to be seen as backward, refusing to adopt a certain behavior is more stigmatized than adopting it.

Organizing One’s Life: Personal Development Professional activity is not only part of a strategy used by young Saudi women to gain mobility. The desire to work is significant of a broader project to organize their existence in autonomous ways, around activities and places independent of their families. Most of the young women I met strongly expressed their desire for a lifestyle very different from that of the previous generation, notably through professional employment. They were seeking jobs that would help them avoid “routine,” unlike the teaching professions, often portrayed very negatively. English and IT, requirements in working for a corporation, were highly sought after among female university students. Many students with diplomas in other fields studied one or both of these subjects at private institutes in hopes of finding a suitable job (the rate of unemployment for Saudi women being quite high). Some spent their salaries on training courses with a specific professional goal in mind. Many described themselves as strategically elaborating career plans, although several cards are missing from their hands. Most of them described their salaries as supplementary income for the family, or as personal pocket money. They claimed that professional activity is a choice, and part of being a well-rounded individual. Such statements were not only made by wealthier women or to those in skilled professions; they were voiced equally by secretaries, receptionists, and security guards, even if some of them clearly needed the money. Many among the women I met justified their desire to study or work in terms of personal accomplishment, affirmation of self, or even self-discovery.22 Manal, a twenty-two-year-old who had been working in her organization’s public relations department for two and a half years, explained: When I started, I had no personality. I didn’t know what I wanted. That’s why I chose to work. I wanted to really figure out what I like. I work to find out who I am, to affirm my personality. In the beginning, at work, I didn’t talk to anyone.

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I was afraid to get to know people outside of my family environment. Here, I know a lot of people. Before working, I . . . didn’t know how to organize my time, my goals.

This does not reveal Manal’s initial motivation: throughout a lengthy interview, she presented a coherent and highly structured narrative, dividing her life into “before” and “after” professional employment. As quoted, she sought in working to know herself better. She went on to explain, however, that working outside the home was a privilege she had finally gained after bitter negotiations with her parents. These went on for a year, during which she was (to use her own words) virtually locked in, punishment for having had a romantic relationship that her parents discovered. Indeed, her boyfriend had come to ask for her hand in marriage, pretending not to know her, but someone informed the parents that there was already a relationship between them. In her parents’ opinion (as for many people in Riyadh), future spouses should not know each other. To endure the punishment inflicted by her parents, Manal avoided them by sleeping all day and spending her nights on the Internet. It seems that her main motivation for working—and the main reason that her parents accepted it—was to put an end to this insufferable situation. It is interesting that, after the fact, she presented this decision to work as the result of a desire for selfknowledge, for learning to organize herself, set goals, and be efficient. Combining the goals of good mental health and personal (social, professional) success, as is characteristic of a self-help narrative, many of the interviewees presented their lives in the simplified psychological terms of depression, maturity, and fulfilment.23 This way of viewing their lives constitutes a prism through which to relate to themselves.24 Self-help discourse is particularly prevalent in religious institutions. Considered as apolitical, it is a topic of lectures and workshops. The Ibn Baz Project, a religious foundation, organizes free self-help lectures for women several times each month in Riyadh, given by specialists in religious issues and/or in psychology, but who are not considered as preachers.25 These lectures, which bring together hundreds of women of all ages and social backgrounds in a large amphitheater, are so successful that some women squeeze in on the floor, while others sit in the aisles. At the end of the session, which usually lasts four hours, each attendee receives a certificate. These lectures are geared toward self-knowledge (“Do you want to know more about yourself, know yourself better?”), 26 as well as development of personal skills (for instance, how to cultivate self-confidence by imitating the methods of “those who have succeeded”). Other aspects include relations and communi-

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cation with others, especially within the family (“The Art of Family Dialogue,” “Conjugal Happiness”), but also in the workplace. In female Qur’anic centers, Islamic self-help is especially offered to “Today’s Young Women,”27 with themes like “How to Be a Positive Woman” (Mecca Foundation, Riyadh, 2007) and “How to Live without Sadness” (Qur’an memorization center Dar al-sumu, Riyadh, 2007). “Young women only” meetings are organized, with the most famous female preachers, who explain based on their own experience how one gets to be a famous preacher and an accomplished woman. This discourse is the result of a hybridization between California-style self-help and references to the Qur’an and the Prophet himself: a prime example of someone successful who knew how to develop his full potential, talents, and skills. During the lecture on “How to Be a Positive Woman,” the preacher referred to the fact that she, like the Prophet, has a strong, confident personality and does not listen to others’ criticism; she also emphasized the necessity of memorizing the Qur’an and following all Islamic precepts. Similarly, the best seller by Sheikh Aaidh alQarni, As‘ad imra’a fi-l-‘alam (The Happiest Woman in the World),28 alternates references to the Prophet’s words and writings of American psychologists. Even if the lecturers repeat that a woman’s role in her family is the priority, and even if some of their advice aims at preserving harmonious family relations, they also promote a certain individualism characteristic of self-help. This is in contrast to their “women’s rights in Islam” discourse, which tends to condemn it and emphasize their role in family. Female preachers usually accuse individualism, said to be Western, of leading to the disintegration of the family, and many denounce the “Western feminist conspiracy”29 seeking to export concepts like women’s empowerment (tamkin al-mar’a) in order to weaken Muslim societies by attacking the institution of the family. In spite of a certain ambivalence, these two types of discourse are not necessarily incompatible insofar as they are used in different contexts, for different audiences. One aims to help women in daily life, in their religious, social, and professional engagements, whereas the other seeks to oppose liberal intellectuals whom female preachers and other women consider as partisans of Westernization. Self-help goes beyond women’s religious spaces and, more generally, religion. Translations of American self-help best sellers sell very well and the readers, as far as I could observe, do not necessarily feel the need to distinguish between what is or is not Islamic. Lectures organized by the Ibn Baz Project to help young people marry attract many psychology students who think that the certificate handed out at the end of the lecture will be useful for landing a

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future job in a hospital, clinic, or charitable organization. The boundaries between self-help, Islamic personal development, psychology and professional training are blurred. Private training institutes for women, which are becoming increasingly numerous, often offer workshops on archetypical themes of this discourse, such as “How to Develop Your Capacities for Communication and Dialogue,” “Setting Goals,” and “Time Management.”30 This genre fits into a context where psychologizing is quite common: Islamic activists were described by the late Crown Prince Nayef bin Abdul-Aziz al-Saud, the Saudi interior minister, for example, as “deviants” who would benefit from “psychological help.”31 Young Saudi women’s appetite for Islamic personal development actually complements and justifies their professional ambitions, since they are led to see themselves as individuals seeking success and self-affirmation, with the idea that “each of us is a unique and independent individual.”32 Self-help may allow them to justify and prioritize activities that they consider necessary for their well-being, whether involving professional and vocational goals or social and leisure activities. Many women affirmed that they needed to work for their well-being, and some mentioned their desire to become an exceptional person through their professional careers, through writing or starting a micro-project. This discourse has ambivalent effects: on the one hand, it promotes the pursuit of personal objectives, fostering and justifying the possibilities of women having a life beyond the home, through statements like “the positive woman does not act like those around her.”33 On the other hand, it makes people personally responsible for what happens to them, and ties any problem to vague, psychologizing explanations rather than to the denunciation of socially unjust situations. For example, the speaker elaborating on “the art of family dialogue” affirmed throughout a lecture organized by the Ibn Baz Project: “Women do not fight; if they fought, they would get what they wanted.” This discourse encourages women to affirm themselves more when faced with obstacles that they encounter individually; yet it undermines larger claims and collective actions aiming to improve the enforcement of women’s rights, or even to change the texts that determine them, since every woman must fight for herself. The writings of Aaidh al-Qarni on this subject take it quite far, since they affirm that everyone must be happy with what they have, happiness—the central value—being a simple question of will.34 However, in the context in which the young urban women I met lived, the infatuation with self-help did not at all translate into resignation. Rather, it legitimated and reinforced their willingness to adopt lifestyles centered around

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personal evolution through more freedom in choices of activities, mobility, and ways of consuming. At the same time, they subjected themselves to certain methods geared toward mastering their existence and rationalizing their emotions (“How to Have Self-Confidence”), methods taught via consumer products (books, workshops). The appropriation of self-help discourse corresponds to some of the most consensual liberal feminist ideas (even though the women I met did not themselves identify with this current) in two ways. First, their valuing professional activity as a means for individual well-being may have similar effects to this current of thought, for which paid employment is a fundamental aspect of women’s emancipation. However, the two arguments are quite different: the women I met did not speak of women’s emancipation, a concept that implies that there is unfair inequality between men and women, but rather insisted on individual well-being, a term borrowed from simplified psychology indifferent to relations of power. Second, self-help encourages the exteriorizing of feelings and private problems, which are to be analyzed with the help of others through personalized advice via telephone and the Internet. Private problems are made public. However, in contrast to the approach of many feminist movements (the personal becomes political) the discussion of private problems does not aim at denouncing injustice, but rather at therapy and personal success.35 Although self-help may allow the younger generation of Saudi women to justify new activities, this discourse indirectly contributes to molding devoted and well-behaved employees useful for Saudi Arabia’s private-sector expansion: whatever the conditions may be, work becomes a source of personal evolution and a mode of emancipation from family authority. However, in many cases, there is a gap between discourse and practices. Though many women employ self-help jargon when speaking of their work, this does not mean they do not, at least for some of them, have real financial needs. Some directly contribute to the household budget with their parents or husbands; others save up to buy independent housing with their spouses and leave their in-laws’ homes. Salaries do not only represent supplementary income,36 although few women admit it; most prefer to present their families as financially secure.

Three Types of Marriage and the Will to Choose The description of professional activity in terms of goals and means to reaching them stands in stark contrast to the vagueness surrounding the young women’s perspectives on marriage. In principle, they must receive whatever propositions

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may be made, without taking any initiatives. As my acquaintances explained them to me, the rules surrounding marriages, such as “family compatibility” (tanasub), change according to social groups and are implemented in diverse and fluctuating ways. In some families, marriage is preferably endogamic, among members of the extended family, even if this is not the general rule in contemporary configurations: within the same tribe, as I could observe, some women marry outside of the tribe, whereas this is unimaginable for others. Several young women I met evoked family dissension engendered by marriages between cousins, in the event of conflicts between spouses or of divorce. For this reason, some families are against marriages between cousins, while for other families, this remains the best option. Members of different sedentary tribes may intermarry, provided they have the same income level, and the prestige attached to the family name must be considered as similar for both families. The distinction between “tribal” and “nontribal” (qabili and khadiri) seems the most solidly maintained, and intermarriages between these two categories are rare.37 Given these constraints, most of Riyadh’s young women have little leeway to accept or refuse a proposal deemed acceptable by their parents. If a suitor’s proposal is considered acceptable by her parents, and she is also interested, the pair are allowed to meet briefly in the family’s presence before making their final decision. This meeting is referred to in Saudi dialect as shufa shar‘iyya, which means: see each other once, as allowed by Shari‘a. Several young women I met told me that their choices were limited: “There are opportunities that cannot be refused.” It is difficult for them to not accept proposals deemed advantageous for their family and thus deceive her relatives’ expectations. If a woman accepts a proposal whereas her family is reluctant, she risks receiving less support in case of difficulties in her marriage. Therefore, few decisions regarding marriage are in the women’s hands, in contrast to professional life. This does not imply that there are free choices in any context, but constraints can be more or less explicit. In Riyadh, constraints in terms of “family compatibility,” the unemployment of young male college graduates, and the rise in the cost of living have recently led to a scarcity in marriage proposals and an increase in the age of marriage. Nonetheless, choice-centered self-help discourse structured the way in which the young women narrated their existence in general, and not only in their professional life. Concerning marriage, this could lead to apparent contradictions, which they justified in various ways. Regarding their marriage aspirations, young women often mentioned their choice as to whom and when. Many told me that they would like to marry, but only with “the right

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person,” which led them to refuse proposals. During the interviews, the young women evoked three intersecting categories of views on marriage, which I call the contract marriage, the choice marriage, and the love marriage. Contract marriage refers to marriage as a contract that serves to produce children in order to perpetuate the social group following the rules of endogamic patrilineality. In a divorce, unless the father renounces it, custody of any children after they reach a certain age is generally granted to him under the rules of patrilineality. Choice marriage refers to marriage based on (presumably) rational choice. This conforms to self-help discourse, considering existence in terms of choices and goals, yet intersects with customs and constraints regarding marriage. Self-help actually gives all-inclusive methods for choosing a good husband, or for keeping him.38 The young women I interviewed sometimes listed a certain number of criteria that their husbands-to-be must fulfil, first, to be accepted by their families, and, second, to be compatible with their own aspirations. In practice, such criteria were often overlooked when faced with family expectations and the anxiety over the prospect of never marrying; nonetheless, a few stated that they had refused a marriage because their criteria were not met. Love marriage as an ideal going together with ­heterosociality— marriage presumably characterized by coincidental meeting followed by conjugal love—is too improbable to be contemplated seriously for most Saudi young women in Riyadh. Love meetings (with men or women) and marriage are generally considered as separate categories, even if some women joke about marrying a handsome, wealthy Emirati—or even a Saudi met on the Internet or abroad—for love. Several interviewees explained their decision to marry or to refuse a marriage proposal by referring to the balance between paid work and married life. An employee at the head office of a bank related that she had not hesitated to refuse when a colleague at work proposed to her; since two people with filial ties were not permitted to work in this bank, she told me, she would have had to quit her job. It was out of the question that she abandon her job as an executive to get married. Her job and career took precedence over everything else. This choice is relatively rare. However, several professional women I met had asked for a divorce because their husbands were against them working. Practically speaking, Saudi women most often signify their desire to divorce by going back to their parents’ house, which generally leads to repudiation of the wife by the husband, except if he does not agree with the separation, in which case the wife must ask for a divorce in court. In this case, she must reimburse all or

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a part of the amount of money paid to the bride’s parents and often loses custody of any children after they reach a specific age. Inas, a twenty-four-year-old private-sector employee from a middle-class sedentary family in Najd, said of her divorce: I got married a year ago. We were married in the summer [and] separated after eight months. . . . He didn’t want to take on the responsibility of marriage, and it was a simple separation, without conflict. . . . For me, work is something important, I told him and he had no problem with that. But practically speaking, I finish at 3:30 p.m. and he wanted a wife who stays home to prepare his lunch. My parents told me no problem for the separation. Luckily, there were no children. Here, men say that they want a wife who works, but, in reality, they prefer a wife who doesn’t work.

Several employees were in the same situation as Inas: in spite of the dominant social norms and the costs of transgression, they thought of marriage— or at least of divorce—and their professional careers as issues of individual priorities. Young urban women often spoke of a marginal practice: meeting one’s future husband on the Internet. This would allow them to choose based on certain criteria, including family compatibility, while also corresponding to the ideal of a romantic love marriage. Fuz told me about her love relation begun on the Internet: I began this relationship quite rationally. I’m glad I did not have a relationship during adolescence, because adolescent girls are led often by their emotions. But I entered this relationship totally clear. Since I was little, I hung out with my older cousins, so I heard them talk about their relationships. . . . I heard stories and asked myself why they followed their feelings and passions, why they dove into relationships that made them suffer. When I grow up, no, I will be careful that we are compatible first, you know the question of qabili and khadiri, so I won’t get into a fling and pour my affection and enthusiasm into a relationship, just to find out in the end that this relationship is impossible? . . . If the families are not well-matched, might as well stop and limit the damage from the beginning, rather than making yourself sick. I made sure there was compatibility, then I got involved in this relationship. I was first attracted to him as a person. . . . He is reliable, not a player. . . . So I told myself we could get closer, if we got along, our relationship could continue, maybe we could get engaged, get married?

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Fuz’s remarks demonstrate how the three ways of envisioning marriage intersect: the question of family compatibility, which Fuz recognizes the necessity of for her parents (contract marriage), the criteria that she herself chooses for the young man’s personality—he must be “someone serious” (choice marriage), and, finally, the sentimental realm (love marriage), contingent upon the first two objectives. Aspiring to choose one’s future husband integrates the usual protocol of not meeting: virtual or physical meetings previous to the official marriage proposal must be kept secret. Meeting a future spouse on the Internet is a marginal practice, even though it is common, via the Internet, to have love relationships with no prospect of marriage. Nonetheless, some women I met did dream of a choice marriage. This dream contributes to specific ways of thinking about their existence in terms of goals, criteria, means, and choices; specific subjectivities.

Conclusion Although Riyadh’s Saudi women are more and more mobile, notably among the younger generation, being beyond any of the dangers one might encounter in public has emerged as a condition for respectability and an element contributing to class and nationality distinction in urban society. Highly constraining expectations weigh on their public behaviors as Saudi women or “girls from good families.” Precautions taken to stay out of any danger, which contribute to maintaining gender segregation, including in mixed spaces, make their mobility quite costly. It is easier for wealthy women to be mobile, because they have the means to stay out of danger. Young poor and middle-class Saudi women use professional activity (and to a lesser extent higher education) to gain access to mobility. Wage work and investment of public spaces within the city weave a lifestyle that is marked by a certain autonomy regarding relatives and idealized by many young women. Paid employment, particularly in the private sector, is experienced as a way to rise to another, more mobile lifestyle, but also to gain self-awareness, even if conditions are unfavorable: a poor salary, notably in comparison to the public sector, and underqualified work, considering their diplomas. Women I spoke with shrugged off these various drawbacks. In taking up paid employment, they projected themselves into other modes of subjectivation, (normative) models of professional femininity through which they could define themselves as autonomous individuals vis-à-vis their families. They did not describe paid employment as a means for emancipation of women in general (the word “emancipation” is never used), but rather as a

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means of progressing as individuals. Their remarks contribute to forging oppositions between the public sector (routine and boredom) and the private sector (dynamism and progress), or even between “productive” paid employment and unpaid domestic work, which is not considered as productive. In doing so, they become, in some ways, ideal citizens of a new Saudi nation, such as promoted by reform discourse. Probably less demanding than their male Saudi colleagues as to work conditions, they readily contribute to the nationalization of privatesector jobs. Considering paid employment as a means of progressing and evolving makes salary a secondary concern. This way of viewing professional lifestyles is somewhat compatible with models of masculinity and femininity that emerged during the period of the oil boom: the hegemonic model of masculinity for Saudi men, that is, the criteria according to which they are judged good, respectable, responsible men, relies notably on their capacity to support a family and to “protect” women from exposing themselves to the world of paid employment, considered as degrading; this constitutes a source of national distinction. In a context marked by a flourishing array of consumer possibilities, but difficult access to paid work and less advantageous work conditions than before, the “professional femininity” model accommodates the model of male breadwinner, in that the contribution of Saudi women to the household’s needs is presented as supplementary, even if this is not at all always the reality. Through a consensual discourse such as that of self-help, women’s paid work seems, at first glance, to be unsubversive of models of masculinity and femininity promoted by the discourse of national distinction. Men remain responsible for earning what is needed for the family budget, whereas women work above all for personal development and in theory “only” take care of their own expenses, sometimes children’s clothing, and so on. At the same time, it is this discourse that makes acceptable the activities of young urban women outside of the domestic space and the family sphere. Besides, it does not determine the scope of practices: young women’s professional activity can both be presented in discourse as a matter of personal development, rather than breadwinning, and in practice transform power relations within their families through the income these women earn and share with their relatives.

Inside the Riyadh Gallery, one of the city’s latest shopping malls. (All photos by the author.)

The Mamsha, where people come to walk in Riyadh.

The new Riyadh city center (Ulayya).

The Riyadh Employment Fair during the opening days reserved for women only. The stand in the photo is for the new Hafiz unemployment subvention program.

Asian workers building a swimming pool on the women-only Princess Nura University campus.

Women in a shopping mall.

Women waiting for their cars at a shopping mall entrance.

A woman in a shopping mall helping her friend adjust her scarf correctly. The woman on the right is wearing a burqa‘ (face cover with string between the eyes). Both have brand-name handbags. The salesperson behind them is most probably nonnational resident, as most salespersons are.

The niqab (top left), burqa‘ (bottom left), and long black skirt that most students wear on the King Saud University women-only campus.

3

COMING TOGETHER Mothers have obligations at home with children and are not always free to go out. We girls are different; all week we are under pressure, so on weekends I want a change of scenery, . . . you go out shopping with girlfriends, you go out to eat with girlfriends. Hadil, a twenty-three-year-old IT student

W H E N I W E N T T O V I S I T H A D I L in a rather plain house in a lower-middleclass neighborhood, her mother came to greet me. Hadil’s mother had grown up in Al-Majma‘a, a small city along the border of Najd and Qasim, and moved to Riyadh, first to an apartment and then to a “villa,” at the age of thirteen, just after her wedding. Neither she nor her husband had received an education, but she was convinced that this was important for her own children. Hadil described herself as quite different from her mother. Unlike her mother, whose main occupation was taking care of the household, Hadil divided her time between study and leisure, activities that also corresponded to different spaces in the city. She identified with what she called the “category of girls” ( fi’at ­al-banat). Generally speaking, young urban Saudi women are much more mobile than the previous generation and than women who do not live in the city, for whom sociability is often limited to relatives and neighbors. In adopting mobile lifestyles, young urban women traverse greater spatial distances than their mothers, but also greater social distances. The spaces they frequent make other interactions and other forms of sociability possible. At the same time, these women belong to different groups in terms of family and class. They are unlikely to meet in domestic contexts. Many of them, especially single or divorced young women who live with their parents, are forbidden by their relatives to visit friends in their homes (or must be accompanied by their mother or a sister, at least for the first visit). The private space of others is often feared as potentially dangerous for women, not least to their reputations. While, in

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general, adult men can visit whoever they want at home, this constraint specific to Saudi women comes in addition to restrictions on their mobility, and also contributes to constructing Riyadh as a gendered space. One never knows what goes on beyond the high walls of Riyadh’s homes, presented as a sort of trap that may clamp down on the female guest, who would have no means of escape. Twenty-two-year-old Fuz said: Sometimes things happen, you never know. . . . We have heard about problems here, [things] that happened to people, a girl goes to visit a friend she doesn’t know very well and something happens in their home, the people living there do something. . . . For example, the father might go and see her, or the brother. . . . And you know how it is with us, houses are totally closed, it’s not easy to get out if there is a problem. If I go to someone’s house and I don’t trust them completely, there might be a problem. That is why families are afraid to let daughters visit friends in their homes.

It is also not easy for married Saudi women to have friends over. Wives often arrange visits when their husbands are away to avoid any incidents, even though the living space includes separate quarters for men and women. The representation of women as vulnerable, as well as family restrictions linked to a concern for reputation and gender segregation (visits carefully planned to avoid contact with male household members) complicate meetings between female friends in domestic spaces. They do occur, of course, but not often, since they need organization. Public spaces extend potential fields of sociability. Women I met often mentioned a “society of young women” (mujtama‘ alfatayat). The Arabic term I translate as “society,” mujtama‘, actually designates an entity broader than an intersocial group, but more interconnected than a socio­demographic category. It signifies sociabilities and identifications that emerge within shared spaces, bringing together women who do not know one another, offering them new possibilities as to who they can meet and talk to.

Shared Spaces, Groupings, and Identifications How, and to what extent, do peers-only spaces lead to the emergence of a group identification—the emergence of an “us” differentiated from others and defined by clear boundaries?1 Asef Bayat has described, in Iran before the Islamic Revolution, the formation of passive networks among the urban poor in shared streets. According to him, people establish instant communication through the tacit recognition of a common identity, made possible by the shar-

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ing of a common space.2 However, there is one major flaw in this hypothesis: it presents identity as a given, a fixed notion, existing in itself, before and beyond situations of interaction. For the same reason, I consider Bayat’s later concept of “collective presence” as problematic in its assumption that “youth” or “women” exist as obvious collectives.3 My analysis differs in that, first, I do not consider young urban women as an obvious collective. While sharing spaces is a condition to young women’s meeting one another, and their having common practices might lead us to consider them analytically as a category developing specific lifestyles, it does not mean, however, that they necessarily identify with the same group. Each one of them may identify with diverse, sometimes contradictory, belongings. Adopting an ethnographic approach to sociabilities enables us to explore the shifting, episodic identifications expressed by young urban women in situations of interaction.4 Sociabilities in public spaces may be either groupings or gatherings. As Isaac Joseph defines these, “a gathering is neither a group nor a population. It is a configuration of positions and movements, of which the model is . . . waiting in line in a public place. . . . In a grouping, individuals perceive themselves as members . . . expecting moral support owing to their identification with the group.”5 A gathering (work colleagues meeting in the workplace, for instance) may form one or more groupings distinct from ­others.6 Here, the observation of statuses emphasized during interactions helps us analyze the dynamics of proximity and distantiation that are at work.7 ­Ordinary conversations also reveal what may be said or unsaid, and what solidarities may be established among young urban women. In the very different context of women belonging to the same tribe in recently sedentarized bedouin villages in Egypt, Lila Abu Lughod has shown how gender segregation may lead women to create a distinct community sharing ties of solidarity and secrets, without contesting the dominant values in terms of protecting family honor.8 In the context of the contemporary city of Riyadh, gender segregation may favor the development of relations of solidarity between young women, but may also be limited when their different class, family, or regional backgrounds are put forward.

The Campus: Joining the Group The all-female campus is a place where groups of peers are formed, contributing to the emergence of youth as a distinct period in life.9 Above all, it is a separate space in which young Saudi women can form a group of girls (shillat

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banat); quite often, owing to lack of transportation and of permission to go out, they do not see each other outside of this space. Forbidden to leave the campus before noon and dependent for transportation on men, female students socialize and form friendships among themselves. Many students arrive very early, around seven, and spend all morning on campus, often until two or three in the afternoon, whether or not they have classes; they tell their families that they have classes even when they do not. On campus, they can gather in many different spaces: cafeterias, pavilions, at open-air tables and on shaded lawns. The campus is like a city within the city. It is not only a separate place, but also a separate time in one’s life: higher education is a parenthesis in the lives of young Saudi women. Many Saudi families think that it is better for young women to acquire a four-year bachelor’s degree (along the lines of the Anglo-American BA) before accepting a marriage proposal, and most university students are single.10 During this time, they often plan professional futures, including projects they wish to undertake after graduating, such as organizing receptions for women, making clothing or jewelry, interior decorating, and various artistic projects. Some of them follow through with these plans, others do not.11 Students often described the campus as a socially mixed space. The diversity of social, family, and geographical origins is one of the most salient features of the university experience. They spoke of different groups of students in terms of “levels,” referring mainly to material differences: “I liked the atmosphere at the university because there are lots of girls,” twenty-two-year-old Maysa’ told me. “There are different levels of people [mustawayat mukhtalifa min al-nas]. I attended private school, and there all students are from the same social level, have the same ideas, the same culture.” However, this “society of young women” on campus is constituted of informal groups whose members tend to share similar material conditions. The four members of the group with which I spent the most time, all in their early twenties and from poor or middle-class families living in non-prestigious neighborhoods, collectively differentiated themselves from the “rich class” in conversation. They regarded the all-female floor of the Mamlaka as a bad place, for example, because it was filled with people of that “class.” None of them had ever traveled outside of Arabia. All of them experienced the campus as a space where they could “breathe” in contrast to domestic space. Conflicts in the group were often expressed in terms of family origins. Amal, who came from a large bedouin tribe, and Lama, who was from a sedentary tribe in the Najd (the central part of the Arabian Peninsula), disliked and

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mistrusted each other, for example. Lama often stereotyped “bedouin,” even in front of Amal; who in turn judged Lama “rebellious” and unlikeable. Without saying anything directly, each tended to interpret the other’s remarks based on “discrimination” against the group to which her family belonged. Independently of origins, family situations were not all the same. T ­ ahani’s and Amal’s families were supportive—Tahani, who was divorced, left her daughter in her mother’s care while at the university, for example. Lama and Asma, however, had conflictual family relationships. Lama’s family was strict. She was not allowed out unless accompanied by her mother or sister, and was not allowed to have a mobile phone; so she kept one hidden in order to call her boyfriend, whom she succeeded in seeing from time to time with the complicity of her sister. As for Asma, she explained that she felt very lonely in her family and that she had no one to talk to: her parents had never been to school, and none of her siblings pursued higher studies. She had needed to negotiate with her parents in order to study, since they had been convinced that the female campus was a place of depraved morals and that students had relations with young men (shabab). She said that she wanted to get married as quickly as possible in order to leave her parents’ household, which she could no longer stand, and work in a bank. Whether they got along with their families or not, all four group members arrived on campus as early as possible and left as late as possible, experiencing this “parenthesis” as a welcome break from family constraints. The group only existed on campus. Members of Tahani’s group almost always met one another at the same place (in one of the cafeterias or, in winter, on the lawn in the shade of a palm tree). Each member left the group to attend classes, then returned immediately, so that there were almost always one or two of them at their “place.” From time to time, one of them would bring a thermos of coffee and a homemade cake, typical elements of the ritual of household hospitality. This is revealing of how they appropriated the campus. The members of the group came to campus on the university bus and depended on the men of their families for other transportation. None of their families except Lama’s had a chauffeur, which made it difficult for them to get together off-campus. Tahani and Amal, longtime best friends, whose ­mothers had known each other for over ten years, sometimes did visit each other at home. Tahani and Lama, on the other hand, were forbidden by both their families to visit each other. In Lama’s case, her family forbade her from visiting any of her friends. Tahani’s family considered that she had not known Lama long enough. Moreover, their homes were very far apart. Members of the group

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often schemed to meet in a café, or even to go into the desert around Riyadh, but during the two years that they had known one another, they had never succeeded in putting these plans into action, because of both transportation problems and their families’ reluctance to allow this. I attended their first and only excursion, a result of my visit. We went to the Sahara Mall for coffee. Tahani’s and Lama’s mothers, who had never met, also came, since they would not let their daughters go out alone. I met Lama in front of Kudu (a fast-food restaurant). We went in, joined her mother, and sat down at a table in the closed compartment of the food corner. Lama’s mother complained about Tahani being late, not wanting to stay long because during this time she had “girls” (teenage or adult daughters) home alone. Lama took off her niqab and her mother told her to sit with her back to the opening of the compartment, saying, “There are men.” Lama told her: “No, there aren’t, we are in the family section.” Her mother answered: “Families. Aren’t there men in families?” Lama said no, and her mother said that she had seen some. Lama said the men had made a mistake. She didn’t switch places. Tahani then arrived with her mother and her daughter. The two mothers made small talk. Women selling burqas and niqabs passed through the food corner, Lama’s mother stopped them because she wanted to buy herself a new burqa‘. The saleswomen sat down and displayed their merchandise, the new model of niqab that could be adjusted under the chin, the burqa‘ that did not move up over the eyes, and so on. A woman selling “Kuwaiti” lipstick also passed by. Lama and Tahani began talking about “Kuwaiti” makeup, said to be more lasting. Lama, Tahani, and I got up to bring ice cream, donuts and coffee for everyone. The mothers told their daughters to hurry up, not to be gone too long. In walking toward the fast-food counter, Lama told us that she did not like malls, that there was too much noise, and it was giving her a headache. Our purchases made, we went back into the compartment, ate the food and then everyone went home. During this exceptional outing, conversations were considerably less lively than usual with Lama and Tahini, which I attributed to their mothers’ presence, their exacting control over their daughters’ activities and discussions, and the conflictual character of the relationship between Lama and her mother. ­Tahani’s group typifies the relations of sociability and solidarity made possible by the campus, and limited to it, owing to the income levels of their families and the strict constraints to which their families subject them.

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Some students who have less trouble with mobility—often being from wealthier families—meet regularly off-campus without any of their relatives. They often spend time in cafés and restaurants at malls over the weekend, where they are able to develop sociabilities relatively independently of their families. Students whose families are less strict can also meet in one another’s homes or even go to parties together. In my last stays, weekend “DJ parties” (haflat DJ ), a practice that had long been marginal and limited to certain strata of the population, were becoming more widespread. Generally organized in properties situated at the edge of the city (istiraha),12 they are animated by a group of female percussionists (taggagat) or a DJ with professional sound equipment. They are generally organized by young women, who invite their female friends; there is sometimes an entrance fee, which makes them comparable to exclusively female private discos. Not all young Saudi women are allowed to attend this sort of party. Some students explained that they told their parents that it was a graduation party (haflat takharruj) for one of their university classmates, a quite common way to avoid using the term “DJ party” which has negative connotations and is associated with the supposed debauchery (through men and women intermingling, for example, or drinking alcohol) of the wealthiest Saudis. The campus can also be a starting place for student-led projects. Twentyyear-old Mashail, a third-year psychology student, belonged to a rich sedentary family, originally from Qasim; her grandfather was an influential religious scholar. As president of King Saud University’s volunteer committee, Mashail organized charitable activities, such as collections for orphans and visits to a shelter for elderly women, recruiting volunteers from the psychology program. They all met either in a room on campus or in the female section of the Prince Salman Leisure Center, in the eastern part of the city. They also communicated on the university’s virtual forum. On campus, Mashail introduced me to her friends, who were all psychology students “committed to Islam” and active in the university’s committees (literature, charity, and so forth), which were reestablished in 2006, after having been forbidden by the campus administration in 2000. Several groups of students organized charitable or artistic activities, both at the university and off-campus, demonstrating the importance of the shared campus for the formation of peer groupings based on activities in common. The campus is appropriated as a space for friendly sociability and solidarity among members of the same group, a process reinforced by the territorialization of certain groups of students within this women-only space. In

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coeducational contexts, appropriating and occupying spaces are rather characteristic of young men’s groups, while, because of their socialization and the constraints they have internalized, young women tend to hold back and take up less space.13 In contrast, on the women-only campus I observed, each group of students had its favorite hangout: this cafeteria, that bench, those steps. To refer to a group, one often named their preferred space: “the girls who sit on the steps of Building 25,” and so on. Some groups gave nicknames to places on campus: “Italy,” “Disney,” “the palm tree.” Some places had precise connotations: one of the cafeterias was known as the place to establish “sentimental relations” (‘alaqat ‘atifiyya) between (female) students, a term designating sensual, loving, or sexual relations. The most elegant students were said to congregate in the campus promenade called Lane No. 5, dubbed “the Champs-Élysées.” In brief, the campus space was marked by young urban women’s diverse practices, ­sociabilities, and identifications.

Religious Groups: Friendship, and Commitment to Islam Although preachers tend to criticize the mobility of women, judging it excessive,14 women committed to religious groups have fairly mobile lifestyles. Once or twice a week, they attend an event or a meeting at a religious organization, a center for Qur’an memorization, or a private house. In these women-only religious spaces, they develop homosocial relations. This is particularly the case with youth groups. Although I was not permitted to access institutional religious spaces as much as I would have liked to, I met and interviewed several young women who were active in formal and informal religious groups. One of them was Maha, a twenty-four-year-old art teacher in a private school, who helped me gain access to a regular religious meeting ( jalsa diniyya) to which she belonged. For this type of occasion, quite common in Riyadh, women who do not know one another very well visit one another’s homes. Some sociability constraints in domestic spaces disappear. On the whole, religious activity legitimates and facilitates the development of extrafamilial homosociality. Common events in Riyadh, informal (noninstitutional) religious meetings typically bring together university classmates, colleagues,15 and/or women belonging to the same extended family. The meeting I attended with Maha was a monthly evening event hosted by group members on a rotating basis. There were around thirty-five regular members, the group having grown over the years with friends, sisters, and cousins. The group’s members, aged from eighteen to twenty-seven, were from middle-

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class or upper-middle-class families with high levels of education and had grown up in a neighborhood with sponsored housing for civil-service employees. Seven were married. At the meeting I attended, fifteen members were present. They had known one another since childhood, when they had all attended the local Qur’an memorization center; they had then participated in lectures and discussion sessions of the adolescent group, on themes such as “relations with mothers.” The Qur’an memorization center also organized outings to museums, since Islam, one of the participants explained, not only implies memorizing the Qur’an, but also recreation (tarfih) and self-cultivation (tathqif ). At the end of high school, they had decided to continue meeting, but in the evenings, at one of their homes, and only once a month, since most of them worked as teachers in private schools and did not have much free time. They had been meeting every month for nine years and did not see each other outside of these meetings. The session is usually led by a preacher with a diploma in Islamic culture.16 That evening, she had not been able to come, so one of the participants, twentyfour-year-old Ibtisam, who taught religion in a private school, led the session. The meeting began around seven, after the sunset prayer, and lasted all evening. The actual religious session, however, took only an hour. Participants first spent a long time exchanging news; toward nine, one woman took out notebooks, folders, and badges that she makes with another group at a Qur’an memorization center to sell for charity. She explained that the young women of this other group had initially met on the Internet and organized workshops and debates by and for young women (fatayat) to talk about their problems, since they got bored when older women came to lecture them. The meeting’s participants enthusiastically purchased the notebooks and folders, while ­Ibtisam, who had prepared the religious session, became a bit impatient. Finally, around ten participants gathered in a circle on the ground, and she could finally begin her presentation. They first discussed the group’s charitable projects: they were organizing a collection for orphans. Members then shared ideas on themes they might wish to discuss in upcoming sessions, agreeing that they should discuss fatwas that helped them in everyday life. Ibtisam then took out a book of fatwas and a book of interpretation of hadiths (acts and words of the Prophet) by Sheikh Muhammad ibn ‘Uthaymin.17 She read a fatwa on the du‘a’ (prayers expressing wishes) and a hadith on patience, explaining them and evoking passages from the life of the Prophet and various anecdotes illustrating the meanings of hadiths. Group members participated, asking questions, debating, joking, and evoking their personal experiences: the atmosphere was joyful

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and relaxed. At the end, Ibtisam asked every participant to tell what she would retain, what was useful to her from that session. The participants then briefly discussed upcoming religious events and lectures. That was the end of the religious part of the evening, and it was time for a potluck dinner. At that point, some participants had to call home to negotiate with mothers or other family members to be allowed to stay later than planned. Suddenly, the conversation turned to tactics young women use so that their mothers do not notice that they have come home later than curfew—a frequent topic anytime young Saudi women get together. Then one participant suggested that they meet in the desert (barr) sometime, “just for fun, without any religious session.” The others were enthusiastic and suggested reserving a place.18 Just after dinner, the women one by one put on the head abaya characteristic of those committed to Islam, and left as soon as their rides came to get them. Informal elective sociability is a central dimension to the religious session. Religion experienced and appropriated by Saudi women cannot be understood only through reading the texts that they study or write. Although the texts sometimes scarily evoke the Last Judgment and the punishment of women bound for the flames of Hell for failing to respect some religious precept, the atmosphere of religious sessions is rather warm and welcoming. In Yemen, Janine Clark observed that women organizing religious meetings sought to distinguish these from friendly meetings by wearing dark clothing and no makeup, and not sharing food during them.19 But the religious meetings I attended in Riyadh were not very different from friendly meetings, even if religion was the official focus. During the meeting, participants emphasized their status as committed to Islam through their ways of dressing and behaving. They never would have put on music or turned on the TV to a station showing clips as is often done during friendly meetings. However, the structure of these meetings was not significantly different, especially in that most of the time was devoted to conversations on subjects that generally had nothing to do with religion. While respecting the imperative of wearing a long skirt (characteristic self-presentation of those committed to Islam), participants were dressed fashionably and wore makeup. Among themselves, they did not attempt to give an impression of austerity (in mixed spaces, the head abaya belied the trendy outfit beneath). Fariba Adelkhah has described religious meetings in Teheran as places to meet and essential components of many women’s social lives.20 They are public, in the sense that they are accessible to all women, but are not very well attended by young women. The hostess displays her wealth and her connections through the food served

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and the number of women present; otherwise, the entire meeting is devoted to religious activities.21 In Riyadh, however, the religious session is not open to all women. Participants constitute a perennial group, which cannot be joined without being introduced by a personal contact. The meeting I attended was not an occasion to display wealth and generosity, contrary to receptions sometimes organized by certain wealthy, devout families who invite some famous female preacher to give a talk. In fact, it was even less formal than having friends (or relatives) over: the woman whose turn it is to play the host is absolved from the usual duties. Each guest brings something, they share, and no one seeks to demonstrate wealth or generosity by bringing a larger or fancier dish. When participants described how the group began, they emphasized the elective characteristic of this sociability and its difference from family obligations. They explained that they had different origins and made no distinction between them. They insisted on diversity as a value shared among young women of their generation, as opposed to the so-called discriminatory, racist (‘­unsuriyya) practices of previous generations. During an interview prior to the religious meeting, Maha, who belonged to a bedouin tribe, said: “What bothers me here is the mentality of caste/class [tabaqiyya], especially among our parents’ generation. They see the family name and only talk to people of their tribe or their social level. Our generation is less interested in that. We don’t see the difference, and if you only talk to people of your tribe, you’ll be called a hick [garawiyya].” Throughout the interview, Maha strongly identified with young women, in general, as a group. Another participant, Muna, a twenty-four-year-old Arabic teacher in a private school, was more specific. She confided that she was generally very mistrustful in her friendly relations, but less so toward members of the religious group, since group members “are girls who are pure of heart.” She even invited them to her engagement party. Group participants thus gave priority to their status as committed to Islam, expected to transcend differences in geographical and family origins. This shared status was the basis for their friendly relations, maintained through religious groupings. The different forms of sociability described are more or less compatible. Those organizing home-based meetings of the committed to Islam may also form groups on campus or meet on Thursdays at the shopping mall. Colleagues at work may also organize religious meetings. However, those committed to Islam do not attend DJ parties because of the music that is played there. Most of the young urban women I met were manifestly uninterested in religious sessions, and the committed to Islam were a minority.

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Beyond Discrimination? As we have seen, members of religious groupings claim to go beyond discrimination based on family origins which they call racism (‘unsuriyya), caste/class mentality (tabaqiyya), or other forms of discrimination (tafriq). Many friendly relations do indeed go beyond the boundaries in terms of family origin. On this theme, I often heard general interpretations stating that discrimination was due to anti-Islamic traditions perpetuated by uneducated hicks. Many women complained of the ban on marriages between those who have tribal ascendance (qabili) and those who do not (khadiri). Yet the criticism of these social divisions was ambivalent, as shown by the description of a debate between twenty-year-old Ashwaq and one of her friends, during a dinner. Ashwaq was a secretarial student at the administration institute. I spent a lot of time with her, and she often took me to family and friendly get-togethers to which she was invited. One evening, we went to the home of her best friend Sana, a business student at King Saud University. Two other friends of Sana’s, also students, joined us. Ashwaq’s mother, who went everywhere with her, as insisted upon by her father, and Sana’s mother were seated in the next room. The debate began on the subject of the principle of preventing some marriages based on supposed genealogical incompatibility. Ashwaq said: “You should devote at least three hundred pages of your book to the marriage problem!” Everyone agreed and their common denunciation made them appear as a united group having a common cause at this particular instant of the discussion. Sana and Ashwaq, who knew each other well (and whose families got along well), could have married each other’s brothers, they explained. But this was impossible, since Ashwaq’s family had no tribal ascendance (khadiri), whereas Sana’s father belonged to a large sedentary tribe and her mother was Palestinian.22 The discussion then turned to a young woman’s degree of freedom, vis-àvis her father’s wishes, to accept or refuse a marriage proposal. “If your father is convinced and he has discussed matters with the suitor’s family, you cannot make him fail [tufashshilih] by refusing the marriage,” Ashwaq explained. “But if you yourself are convinced that a suitor is good, and your father disagrees for some reason, you cannot persuade him.” Sana contradicted her: “My father will respect my wishes. On the condition that the suitor is from a good tribe—well, except a tribe from the south—he would agree.” Ashwaq and the others then reviewed all the factors that would be unacceptable to her father. What if the suitor’s family was not equivalent to theirs on

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a material level? What if he came from a village and not the city? What if he was much more liberal or, conversely, much stricter than their own family? Voices were raised. Sana denied everything and ended up saying: “Maybe your fathers would not accept, but mine would.” One of her friends replied: “You think my father is backward [mutakhallif ]? It’s not my father, it’s society that is like that!” This exchange and other related debates during this dinner are significant of two types of ambivalence I observed more generally. Many young women affirmed a desire to transcend boundaries between “incompatible” groups, and they condemned discrimination based on family origin. Yet they often mobilized stereotypes of groups considered as different from their own. Another exchange in the conversation is revealing of such stereotypes. One of the guests asked me if I had ever attended a wedding in Saudi Arabia, and if it had been a wedding of sedentaries or of bedouin. When I said that I had mostly attended bedouin weddings, all of them expressed their surprise, then they conceded that they must have been “open-minded bedouin,” even if most of them were “bedouin-bedouin” (badu-badu). Many of the young women I met denounced the constraints imposed on them by their families, yet blamed society as the sole instigator of these practices, without designating a more precise culprit. Many, like Sana, sought to exonerate their immediate relatives from any responsibility for the constraints they were up against. This is understandable: they belonged to nuclear families, within which they lived and whose reputations they also needed to defend. Such ambivalent attitudes are very widespread and inhibit the adoption of positions that would unite a young generation of urban women who come from a variety of regional and family backgrounds, against discrimination or other practices they generally judge as unfair. The way young women invoked status and stereotypes, in spite of their affirmed desire to rise above discrimination, appeared to be accentuated in gatherings of people who did not know one another very well. Twenty-nine-year-old Ala had been working for several years in a public home for children. She and her colleagues (without hierarchical relation) decided to launch a dawriyya, term that in Saudi dialect designates regular invitations to one another’s homes, on a rotating basis. Every fifteen days, Ala and her colleagues would get together at one of their homes. Before this dawriyya, they had never seen one another outside of work, except on occasions such as the wedding of one of them. One evening, then, Ala was invited to the home of a colleague. In addition to herself, three other employees were present (a fifth colleague could not

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make it), along with the hostess’s sister, who also lived there, and the sister-inlaw of one of the guests—it is common to bring along female family members for visits. Ala and her colleagues arrived around 8 p.m. and began discussing a common position that they had adopted regarding their superiors. They had received a warning, since as public-sector employees, they were supposed to come to work in a head abaya rather than their usual fashionable embroidered shoulder abaya. Their superiors required that they sign a document attesting that they would never again wear a shoulder abaya to work. This didn’t bother them, they said. Signing promises (ta‘ahud) was presented as a sort of routine practice without importance. At this point in the discussion, they expressed themselves as a collective, as colleagues adopting the same position toward their superiors. However, during the course of the conversation, they then positioned themselves as belonging to different categories owing to their family backgrounds, and asked one another highly stereotyped questions about their respective customs. Ala’s colleagues were black, whereas she herself was from a bedouin tribe. They asked her questions about bedouin weddings, evidently considering bedouin as backward. Ala had to explain to them why the bride does not usually attend her own wedding celebration.23 The guests then discussed customs in other Gulf countries and ended up agreeing that, whatever the family, tribe, or social group might be, the atmosphere of weddings in Saudi Arabia was more relaxed than in Qatar or in the Emirates, where dancing is frowned upon. They then spoke of several other subjects: sentimental relations between girls in schools,24 and a new talk show hosted by the Saudi filmmaker Hayfa al-Mansur that discussed this topic; insecurity in the city that would make it impossible for them to drive, even if they were allowed to; men in their families who were reluctant to take them where they needed to go; the best malls for shopping; the education of adolescent girls; and the irresponsibility of men today, who spent their time out of the house but failed to bring home any money. In this, they mobilized a common status that united them: several of them were divorced and jaded on the subject of marriage. Toward the end of the evening, we all went into another room for dinner. The entire floor of the room was covered with food dishes. We ate, then left. In the car, Ala commented that at these meetings between colleagues, they restricted themselves to small talk and avoided personal subjects, because they did not know one another well enough. She complained about the hostess showing off and trying to impress them with the mountains of food. The

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­ awriyya participants had agreed from the start to limit expenses—they were d all from families with modest incomes—but from one meeting to the next, the cost had been rising. Ala told me that if the goal was impressing the guests, she was going to leave the dawriyya, and that evening’s get-together did indeed turn out to be the last. It was interesting to observe how the guests went from an “us” that united them as colleagues faced with hierarchical superiors judged too punctilious, or as divorced women vis-à-vis men, judged as irresponsible, to a formal “you” marking distance based on family status that they accentuated and defended. In the two groupings described, the “us” was fragile and was often abandoned in order better to mobilize stereotypes and insist on differences between various groups, such as bedouin, sedentaries, and blacks. The specific use of these statuses as grounds for “othering” reveals the limits of young Saudi urban women’s identification with a common category: reference to a shared status is mobilized only episodically. This fragility of collective identification may be reinforced by the reserve that characterizes most discussions.

Reputation and Reserve Sociability tends to be “unsociable” in cities.25 It is marked by reserve, a certain superficiality, and even a “right to mistrust.”26 People are careful not to confuse the different worlds that they frequent with the roles that they play there, even while revealing certain elements of these various commitments to those close to them.27 Yet, even with their close friends, the young women I spent time with gave me the impression of being particularly cautious concerning the boundaries of what could be said and what could not. Indeed, a preoccupation with reputation not only follows them in their movements in the city and conditions their interactions with men; it also influences the ways in which they commit to situations and get involved in relations with their peers.28 Several young women told me that they did not make friends easily. One explained that she confided mostly in her sisters or cousins, since they did not repeat what might harm the family: “Your interests are their interests, your reputation is their reputation.” Others told me that they carefully kept their distance, aside from with one or two close friends. For example, although groups of friends have no difficulty discussing the question of intimate relations outside of marriage in general, it is much rarer to talk about it in the first person. This mistrust can extend to numerous subjects, including family conflicts surrounding marriages and divorces, constraints imposed by parents on their

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daughters, and a family’s material difficulties. I had the opportunity to observe this mistrust, since some interviewees chose to confide in me with personal (sometimes family-related) questions or problems. In doing so, they took numerous precautions to make me understand the necessity of keeping the ­secret. For example, before confiding her secret love affair, one student sought reassurance many times that the recording of the interview was for private use and would be anonymous. She specified that she would only tell me this story because the affair was over. It would have been too dangerous to confide during the four years in which she was in this relationship. She then explained that she had not told any of the three other members of her group about this relationship, and elaborated on the various schemes and lies she had used to deceive her relatives. Her mother finally suspected something, although she had no proof, and refused to speak to her for a year as a result. Although I had guaranteed her anonymity at the beginning of our discussion, another student became afraid and demanded that I explain when she saw that I had written the nicknames of members of her group (that was how they had introduced themselves) in my notebook. I reassured her, telling her that it was just to keep track of who had said what in the conversation, but that the names would all be changed. Young women were careful to hide their family secrets from their friends and their personal secrets from their close relatives. Several explained to me that they had to protect themselves from indiscretion and attempts at intrusion (tadakhkhul, tatafful ) by extended family members. Such mistrust prevents the airing of private problems even among friends. In spite of this, I was sometimes surprised in a few situations when a person started talking without reserve about very personal problems. During a conversation on campus, I heard a student tell a group of eight, far beyond her close friends, that she had been fighting for six months to divorce a backward, dirty husband, with whom she had only stayed three months (she had gone back to her parents, the usual informal procedure of women requesting a divorce). She spoke at length about her husband’s ignorance of sexual practices, then called her own father backward in that he refused to inform her of how the divorce negotiations were proceeding. She was afraid, she said, that her father would remove her from the university, which he had already done once a few years earlier. In this instance, it was the highly conflictual situation within family that broke down the need to protect reputation. Since this student did not care about defending her family’s reputation, she allowed herself to express her indignation over her father’s behavior in public.

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Women rarely confided in me about personal matters—probably fearing, on the one hand, that the story might be repeated, and, on the other, of being judged. Moreover, how can one anticipate the point of view of one’s interlocutor concerning practices that are considered as normal for some and “deviant” for others? Aisha, a thirty-two-year-old journalist, told me about a situation significant of these dilemmas. Aisha’s sister had asked her to host two of her friends in her absence and warned her not to smoke in front of them, saying that they were “conservative.” Aisha welcomed her sister’s friends and found them likeable; they joked and did not take each other seriously. She wanted to smoke a cigarette and held out a new pack to her sister’s friends in such a way that they could not tell whether she was offering it out of politeness or if she herself smoked. Proposing cigarettes is unusual in female groupings, but Aisha counted on the indulgence of her guests since her mother was Syrian, she explained to me. The guests accepted. This case is significant of strategies employed to master impressions produced on one’s interlocutors. Young urban Saudi women tend to do what they think is “normal” for others in a given grouping, which can lead to situations in which everyone refrains from smoking or speaking of love relationships, for example, thinking this to be unacceptable to the others. This reserve may in part be surmounted through “virtual” sociabilities.

The Internet: Access to Anonymity A significant proportion of Riyadhis have access to the Internet, far beyond the upper classes.29 Internet use contributes to young urban women’s access to public spaces and new sociabilities.30 Similarly to the campus, the workplace, the shopping mall, and religious groups, the Internet is experienced as a space of autonomy outside of the family; many young women have computers in their rooms and shut the door to surf for hours at a time. Given the constraints imposed on young urban Saudi women, the Internet provides an anonymity that their city rarely offers. This is also the case in other Gulf societies.31 Some women said that they sought anonymity to escape from family order and the preoccupation with reputation. The Internet can be used as a space for expression of private problems, as Nura, a twenty-four-year-old student, explained: I log on to the Internet, and I write a lot about myself but no one sees. . . . There are a lot of women in Saudi Arabia who write, a lot, a lot. And most of them, no

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one sees, they do not show it, or maybe with a pseudonym; no one recognizes them. . . . Last week, we were at home with some friends from the university and we said, why . . . don’t we ever write under our real name, without being ashamed of it. One of them said something that we all agreed with, that if someone read us, they would not understand us fairly. We are very afraid of rumors, of what people would say [kalam al-nas]. . . . I can write about myself [on the Internet]. About things that happened to me and that I cannot talk about with anyone. . . . I write about myself as if it were not me, as if it were someone else’s story. This is how I most like to write.

Nura particularly emphasized that she could say things on the Internet that she would not tell any of her friends. On a forum, she established relations with people who were geographically far from her. She presented this distance as what allowed her to express herself without fear: There was one who was Iraqi and lived in Australia, and my best friend on the Internet is American. His father is Qatari and his mother is American. . . . We share many things. My best friend is maybe the only friend that I have. . . . He knows a lot of personal things about me. I think that it’s less risky to know people far away from you.

Nura explained that people who were far away could not harm her: they could never come to see where she lived or blackmail her by threatening to tell her parents that she communicates with men. The imperative of invisibility that conditions the practices of young urban women in public spaces does not disappear; what changes is that on the Internet, anonymity is possible. Though sometimes cited as a source of emancipation, anonymity may also be experienced as a constraint, in the sense that it is not chosen. Revealing one’s identity can lead to trouble. A student from a wealthy nuclear family presenting herself as very liberal and belonging to a large sedentary Najd tribe explained how, after first deciding to write under her real name (which her parents accepted), she went back to a totally anonymous profile after having received messages from unknown people who criticized her behavior as the daughter of “such a family” (referring to her tribe, her family name). This constraint conditions Internet use by young urban women. For example, few among those I met wrote blogs, which tend not to favor invisibility, even if there are anonymous blogs. Besides, blogs expose to government control those writing about politics, much more than Twitter, for instance, whose popularity in Saudi Arabia

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has become huge in the very last years. There are female Saudi blog writers, often among those who travel frequently or have lived abroad and belong to liberal families,32 but it is a marginal practice among the people who are the focus of this book. Insofar as it respects anonymity, the Internet opens doors to sociabilities. Many women affirmed that they wrote on political forums (e.g., Iqla‘ ), much used by Saudis in the 2000s. Some of them specified that they got information on the Internet, since they did not trust Saudi journalists. They often emphasized that they appreciated the opportunity to debate with all categories, as Hadil, a twenty-three-year-old student, very explicitly stated: My Internet friends are Saudi women, Arabs, but also boys, young men. Internet society [mujtama‘ al-Internet], you feel that it is a society . . . a virtual world [iftiradhi]. Everyone talks together, boys girls, there are no limits [ hudud], there are no separations [ fawasil ]. . . . There are things that we cannot do in our usual lives that we can do on the Internet, since there are no limits, you can talk about any subject with anyone. . . . For example, it is not allowed here to sit with young men and debate a subject, but on the Internet you can talk with men of your age, younger than you, or older than you. Here in society, it is forbidden. On the Internet there is freedom.

The Internet, according to Hadil, was a double exception: a space of freedom concerning both what one could talk about and with whom. In some cases, virtual space allowed young people to get beyond very concrete physical boundaries: although King Saud University is totally segregated, with male and female campuses very far from each other, students can meet on the Forum of male students and female students of King Saud University.33 Several women mentioned chatting online, notably at sites such as ‘Alam al-rumansiyya (The World of Romanticism) and Qulub (Hearts), which provide political forums (where they could, e.g., discuss the boycott of Danish products following caricatures of the Prophet), forums on Islamic precepts and religious practices, forums reserved for male or female students, meeting forums, and forums on subjects such as fashion, photography, drawing, and conjugal life. Some specified that they had chatted a lot during adolescence, but then stopped, since online discussion sites attract young males, who may seek to cause problems for them or injure their reputations. However, unless they are discovered by their parents, Internet users run no risk as long as they stay anonymous; from the moment they give their name or

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number to their interlocutor, they put their reputation in his hands and run a risk. This does not mean that young urban women do not meet men online. Most relationships with men mentioned by women I met had begun on Internet forums, whether specifically devoted to such meetings or not.34 Several women committed to Islam explained that they debated with everyone on forums, since these were public situations, but avoided conversing online with just one person: it could be a man and, the exchange being private, it would put them in a situation forbidden by Islam: khalwa. They adapted virtual space to the same Islamic precepts framing their relations of sociability in physical space. Beyond opening a space to the desire for gender mixing (ikhtilat), the Internet homosociality is part of a continuum of new spaces accessible to women in the city. Numerous sites are addressed exclusively to women,35 where they can inform themselves and debate. The subjects range from makeup techniques to Islamic precepts, conjugal problems, and injustices to women in society. Such women’s sites, often with an Islamic orientation, propose to answer anonymous questions with the help of advisers in fields such as psychology, education, religion, and family and conjugal life. This contributes to the airing of private problems on a therapeutic model, and thus to shaping new subjectivities and subjectivations—ways of cultivating the self along specific norms. The Internet is thus a privileged space where anonymity and self-expression can be cultivated. It serves to sensitize young Saudi women to diverse causes, and, given anonymity, it can be an ideal space for denouncing injustices. Although women’s reputations may be endangered by publicizing their images on the Internet, it is at the same time an ideal space for going beyond the reserve that prevents them from discussing these problems. A campaign against online blackmail denounces “the defamation of Muslim women on Internet sites or through mobile phones” and “attacks on their modesty.”36 Fuz had a plan to launch a web site where young women could discuss being blackmailed. She stressed how well the Internet, which allows total anonymity, is adapted to putting an end to the fear of talking. The Internet differs from the other spaces of interaction and sociability described. It allows women to transcend gender segregation, and as a privileged context for airing private problems, it lessens the reserve characteristic of relations between young urban Saudi women in the physical world, contributing to transforming subjectivities. The combination of visibility and anonymity could also create new repertoires of activism, on the model of Women2Drive

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campaign, which urges Saudi women to film themselves driving—with their faces covered, if needs be, making them unrecognizable—and post the videos on the Internet.37

Conclusion In a context where domestic space of others is the object of some mistrust, public spaces accessible to Saudi women constitute a necessary condition for the development of homosociality among them. Young urban women exploit the potential for sociability of any space accessible to them, whether a campus, shopping malls, or religious get-togethers. Development of homosociality is accompanied by a discourse condemning discrimination based on family or geographical origins, between categories identified as bedouin and sedentary, tribal and nontribal. The young women I met distanced themselves from those who made such distinctions, treating them as backward. Through such affirmations, they defined themselves as young urban women as opposed to other categories. They described themselves and their “society of young women” as open, tolerant, and, implicitly, modern. Through ordinary conversations between colleagues and between friends, they tended to affirm their belonging to a group of peers meeting similar obstacles and differentiating themselves from other categories, such as the generation of their mothers, men, rural Saudi women, and, tacitly, non-Saudi women. This imperative of nondiscrimination is ambivalent, and in certain situations, stereotypes are reactivated and hierarchies reinvented. In addition, solidarities between young urban women and their speaking out, even among friends, are up against obstacles: on the one hand, they must avoid criticizing their own families, denouncing, instead, certain constraints imposed on them by “society,” which does not mean that they have an attitude of resignation. On the other hand, the concern for reputation requires a certain reserve in friendly relations. This limits the subjects it is possible for them to discuss with their peers. At the same time, the way some of them spoke about their need to relate intimate experiences anonymously to strangers, especially on the Internet, but also sometimes to very close friends, suggests transformations in subjectivities, in how they regard the boundaries between hidden and visible. Studying the diversity and the ambivalence of statuses mobilized according to contexts, which are highlighted by the person speaking or assigned by ­others, allows for avoiding both a fixed description of young women’s identities and a linear (wrong) analysis of the passage from family belonging to

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belonging to a class and/or to a generation: their belongings are plural and sometimes contradictory. If solidarities between young urban women are up against obstacles, the feeling of belonging to a category confronted with similar problems is emphasized episodically in certain situations, analyzed in more detail below.

4

BREAKING THE RULES Everything is forbidden, so they do everything. A teacher in a public high school, talking about her students Had I waited two more minutes, I would have had to enter through the security post and show my student ID, which I never had in my wallet except on exam days at the end of each semester. This wasn’t carelessness, but rather a trick learned from the students who went before us. Better not to have your ID on you, that way if the monitors stop you . . . , you can give a fictional name and escape punishment. Seba al-Herz, Al-Akharun (The Others)

O N E M O R N I N G at the Open Arabic University, a private but inexpensive establishment, I found out upon arrival that the student who had asked me to come, Sahar, had not requested permission for my visit. She showed me around the buildings, then we settled down in the cafeteria with a group of her friends or classmates. I explained the purpose of my study and took the opportunity to mention that it would be best if they did not tell anyone about my presence except their peers, given that I had no authorization. Whereas I had expected that this would make them mistrustful, the opposite happened. They assured me that there was no problem and added: “Anyway, they don’t want us to have any contact with the outside world, that way we won’t know how things are in other places”; “They want us to be content and satisfied with our situation”; “Anyway, at the university everything is forbidden.” I noticed that my lack of authorization created a form of complicity between us. Together, they and I were on the same side of the divide. After conversing for a few hours, we saw the director of the female section who had just entered the cafeteria where we were seated. Seeing her look our way and fearing that she noticed the intruder, Sahar launched with remarkable skill: “How do you do, professor? Did you know that we miss you?” Under cover of showing friendliness, she put acting skills to work in order to distract the director and frame the interaction as a convivial and egalitarian exchange, rather than a hierarchical one.1 In this way, she got away with a flagrant transgression of the rules. I was frequently able to observe such transgressions, which were more or

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less obvious or intentional depending on the person. This especially concerned transgressions in the dress code of what I call official Islamic rules, since they are mainly justified by a maximalist application of Islamic precepts that appear in fatwas and publications of official religious institutions, in school textbooks, and in some legal texts and sectorial codes. Public spaces, particularly campuses and shopping malls, are stages for interactions between young Saudi women and the authorities in charge of enforcing principles for regulating public order. Transgressions of these principles through one’s attire are visible to all women, and to men as well if they occur in spaces open to them. This public aspect distinguishes them from private transgressions such as an intimate relationship outside of marriage. To what extent can these public transgressions be regarded as protestations? How do they contribute to undermining and discrediting official Islamic rules? The sociologist Nilüfer Göle has shown how, in Turkey and in France, public spaces can become places of “Islamic performativity” in which ways of dressing signify transgression of the secular foundations of public order.2 The opposite is the case in Riyadh, since the regulations defining public order that young women transgress are based on Islamic referents. Such transgressions may be considered as “accommodating innovations,”3 or even a subculture of protest or resistance to the Islamic foundation of public order (as several authors have analyzed in the case of Iran).4 However, such an interpretation would oversimplify the experiences of the young women I met. It is necessary, here, to distinguish three different, though interconnected, aspects: • Insofar as young Saudi women’s transgressions are performed in front of others, they are collective and contribute to renegotiating the behavior acceptable in public. • Since these transgressions do not generally involve speaking out, interpreting them as resistance is problematic. They must be examined in light of criticisms formulated in private and, exceptionally, in public. • Such transgressions indicate the formation of episodic collectives and shared identifications, a process that implies new norms characterizing those who perform them as a group.

On Campus Through numerous fatwas, three rules for Muslim women’s dress in womenonly spaces have been promulgated by the Council of Senior ‘Ulama: (1) it must

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“hide female forms” and not attract attention; (2) it must affirm Muslim identity and not “imitate the West”; and (3) it must affirm female identity and not “imitate men.” The Alaysha campus’s dress code corresponds to these principles. Students must arrive in a “dissimulating and unembroidered” abaya; a specification that is frequently disregarded. On campus, where the abaya is removed since there are no men present, students must obey the rules posted on the walls, requiring that they wear a long skirt and “a blouse . . . that, conforming to the rules of decency, is not transparent, has no images or writing, and whose sleeves cover the elbows.” Although the students do wear skirts—defined by official Islamic discourse as more modest, more feminine and “less Western” than pants5—some wear them short and/or tight. Others wear tank tops, soccer jerseys, or even T-shirts with slogans such as “Love is a game, insert a coin”; “You are not supposed to be lovers”; “Anything boys can do, girls can do better”; “Love will always find a way”; “Peace and love and freedom”; and “Love is the answer.” Although some of them don’t understand what their T-shirts say, wearing T-shirts that blatantly display slogan in English means they are choosing to break the rules. Many students blow-dry their hair, apply makeup, and wear fashionable sunglasses. The goal, according to the expression they use, is to have a “style” (pronounced in English), that is, to be both in style and original. Until 2008, the campus promenade favored by show-offs and the trendiest, most elegant students—these being the two meanings of the frequently used dialect adjective kashkhat—was called Lane No. 5 (Shari‘ khamsa), or “the Champs-Élysées.”6 Students parade around ostentatiously exhibiting their latest designer outfits. Upscale brands are not banned from campus, and the clothing worn rarely complies with the rules of sobriety and modesty. These transgressions are not only enacted by the “rich class” (as it is called by some of those who do not belong to it). Women who had taught or studied in various secondary schools reported that transgressions of rules are just as visible in public schools in residential ­middle-class or poor neighborhoods, such as Al-Shifa’ or Al-Nasim, as in the most expensive private schools, some of which are known for rebellious students. Although adopted in public, the transgressions described are rarely punished by teachers or monitors. When they do decide to reprimand a student who violates the dress code, they most often make her sign a promise (ta‘ahud) to never do it again. This is, generally, not taken seriously (given that they are used to signing such documents), although disregarding it could lead to points taken off of their grades. Above all, students cultivate the art of playing with

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the boundaries of what can be transgressed without punishment, adopting a flippant attitude to the rules and those responsible for applying them. When I noticed that Sahar had a phone with a camera and asked her if it wasn’t forbidden on campus, she responded by sticking out her tongue while looking up—a characteristic gesture—and said, “Ayy kalam—no one gives a damn, everyone has one . . .” Students explained that if monitors reprimand them, they lied (“I didn’t know it was forbidden”), and this is also what many acquaintances suggested I do in various situations. Students “committed to Islam” sometimes urge their peers to respect the Islamic precepts expressed in the rules of the university, but only a few of them dare do so. Most students on the Alaysha campus looked down on this attitude, condemning it as bigotry, puritanism (tazammut), or even rigorism, intransigence (tashaddud).

In Mixed Spaces In mixed public spaces, the religious police (CPVPV) are responsible for promoting rules defining Islamic clothing. CPVPV members regularly visit shopping malls. Yet shopping malls are used as places to parade around showing off and being seen. Young Saudi women are veiled, but the veil, supposedly serving to hide the body according to official religious texts, is diverted: the shoulder abaya, fluid, embroidered, sometimes decorated with sequins, becomes a seductive fashion accessory, accentuating the curves displayed by a highly perfected way of walking. Some Saudi women—especially the younger ones, even adolescents, walking in groups of three or four—put their hair up in order to give it a more voluminous appearance under the veil; others wear bold eye makeup (bright colors, glitter) under their niqab: though not recognizable, they make themselves visible. The staging of self is sometimes so ritualized that they appear to be on a runway, or even part of a parade, as analyzed with regard to interactions between men and women by Erving Goffman,7 except that here it is not for men; it is done most frequently among women. In the Mamlaka mall, for example, interactions on the women-only floor conform to the parade model. Some walk slowly down the corridors, adopting a swaying gait on high heels, or more laid-back in sneakers. Those who are seated on benches and in cafés watch them go by and comment on their abayas, their hairdo—since most remove their veil in this women-only space—their makeup, shoes, and handbags. These various elements of apparel seek to catch the eye. One Thursday, while I was strolling with an acquaintance, we saw a twenty-something woman

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whose abaya was open showing jeans and a belt with the buckle blinking with the word “Play.” After looking at the belt for a second, my acquaintance told its wearer: “That belt is deadly [khatir]!” This form of civility, banal in womenonly spaces, conveyed that her glance at the belt should not be interpreted as recrimination or envy, perhaps creating a brief, ephemeral feeling of mutual complicity and appeal. Such dress practices are criticized by diverse “moral entrepreneurs.”8 Brochures and cassettes of preaching are distributed in Islamic spaces and state institutions condemning the shoulder abaya. A typical example of such brochures, found on campus in April 2006,9 contrasts the virtuous woman who wears the head abaya and walks down the road to Paradise with the unvirtuous woman, dressed in a shoulder abaya, walking toward the flames of Hell. Legends to the drawing read: “She is like impious women [kafirat] and watches satellite channels”; “She is constantly going to malls”; “She dresses short and tight and likes to show off and uncover her face.” A Muslim woman’s hijab must be “thick, ample, wide, and without adornment,” the brochure specifies; “the abaya must be placed on top of the head and resemble neither a man’s clothing nor the clothing of an impious woman [kafira].” Young Saudi women transgressing these rules, and thus exposing themselves to comment by the CPVPV, adopt attitudes that range from indifference to deliberate provocation when facing its members. I was often confronted by the CPVPV, both when alone and with acquaintances and friends, especially during the very rare mixed popular events, which generally involve a large police presence. One weekend, Tahani (mentioned in chapter 3) invited me to the Flower Festival (an event organized by the city every spring for the fourth consecutive year) with her mother, her sister, and her little daughter. On the promenade (mamsha) in King Abdullah Street, various stands displayed flowers and all sorts of plants for sale. Five highly recognizable CPVPV vehicles were stationed at the end of the road where the festival was taking place, and several members were posted at each entrance to prevent lone men from attending: only families (women, or men accompanied by women) were allowed to come and enjoy this weekend festival. We strolled about looking at the stands. Three CPVPV members (mutawi‘a) circulated among the crowd, highly visible since they were the only group of lone men, wore the ankle-length shorter thawb specific to men “committed to Islam,” and one of them wore a black coat over it. They were reproving women and verifying that no group of lone men—except for them—had succeeded in

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crossing through the checkpoints at the entrances. They said to Tahani, who was wearing a niqab: “Cover your eyes!” She kept walking, apparently paying no attention to them, then said to me mockingly: “Why would I go to a flower festival if I have to keep my eyes covered!” I was wearing a shoulder abaya and headscarf (tarha), and they told me to cover my face. Tahani told me to ignore them and look the other way, or to pretend not to understand. At any rate, the mutawi‘a walked among the crowd without stopping, without checking whether or not the women followed their orders. We stopped at the festival cafeteria and sat down at a table. When Tahani saw the mutawi‘a go by, she told me to sit the other way and turn my back to them. As we left, heading toward Tahani’s brother’s double-parked car, which was waiting for us, a young ­mutawwi‘ began to circle around me, repeating, “Cover your face, cover your face.” This made Tahani laugh. Tahani and I often recalled the episode of the young mutawwi‘ with amusement, and it inspired a sense of complicity between us. This type of interaction with members of the CPVPV is quite common, and mocking the authorities’ hyperactive vigilance becomes material for identification as a common group. Some transgressions, far-less common, are interpreted by many young women as provocations toward the CPVPV. One evening at the time of the sunset prayer, for example, I observed two mutawi‘a and a police officer posted on a promenade at the Faysaliyya mall. A group of unveiled twenty-somethings were seated on a bench a stone’s throw away, flaunting their highlighted, blow-dried hair and flashy makeup, but these men did not come over to reprimand them. Other small groups of young women of similar appearance strolled around the mall. When one of these groups passed right in front of the mutawi‘a, who told them to put their veils on, they threw the veils carelessly on their heads, still revealing their hair, and let them fall again a few steps away. These women had little fear of being arrested, since it is difficult for members of the CPVPV to physically coerce a woman, especially in public, in a prestigious mall like the Faysaliyya: in the maximalist interpretation of Islam promoted by CPVPV, a man must not look at a woman unless he is her m ­ ahram, let alone touch her. Also, being poorly veiled does not, in itself and as far as I could ascertain, constitute a basis for arrest. If any conflict did arise, women could always run away and take refuge in the women’s prayer room, where members of the CPVPV are not allowed to enter.10 That evening, the only people who had serious problems with the CPVPV were two adolescent males unaccompanied by women (and thus not allowed in

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the mall on weekends) who had managed to slip through the net. After speaking to them for around fifteen minutes, the mutawi‘a escorted them to the exit. I could not see if they simply threw them out of the mall or if they took them to a CPVPV post, where they would be held until transferred to a city police station. Men who brave the mall’s regulations and enter on weekends are in more danger from the CPVPV than unveiled women, who do not transgress the mall code and are more difficult for the police to arrest. Thus, women can sometimes afford to ignore CPVPV orders, although there are situations in which they really do run the risk of being arrested—for example, if they are found in the company of a man who is not related to them. It may be surprising that the CPVPV do not react more in the situations described. The attitude of the police to women may be explained by what I refer to as the principle of subsidiarity, meaning that Saudi women are under the authority of their families’ men, who are implicitly considered as responsible for preventing them from adopting transgressive public behavior. That means it is up to them, and not the police, to punish women who act in ways that might harm the family’s reputation. Personal IDs for women did not exist in Saudi Arabia until 2001, which illustrates this subsidiarity.11 Before that, women’s names were included on the IDs of their legal guardians, without photographs. The creation of a women’s ID signifies a shift in the government’s way of dealing with Saudi women.12 Notably, it seeks to establish a more direct relation between women and state institutions. However, this does not concern all sectors or all institutions, and the principle of subsidiarity continues to govern police responses in many situations (with notable exceptions, such as the systematic arrest of any woman who drives a car). Although family expectations linked to the concern for reputation do have a disciplinary effect on young women, they are negotiable: if a form of behavior is considered as widespread and accepted within the social group with which members of the family identify and wish to be identified, it may be acceptable even if it transgresses official rules, which is why the collective dimension is essential to transgressive practices.

Coordinated Actions in Controlled Spaces The transgressions described might be assimilated to what Asef Bayat calls the “quiet encroachment of the ordinary,”13 that is, practices that engender change without the voicing of protest. They are not what James C. Scott calls “hidden transcripts,”14 or practices through which the dominated make fun of the dominant behind their backs.15 On the contrary, their repeated occurrence in

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public, in the faces of the authorities, engenders a disordering of the latter’s rule.16 Thus Tahani, who had frequented the campus since 2003, remembered that monitors had originally chided students who wore tops that didn’t fit the rules, but by 2008–2009, they rarely bothered. Today, some transgressions have become so common that, according to a joke among students, a girl dressed according to the rules would be under suspicion of using connections (wasta) to get into the university. The female campus appears to be a highly disciplinary institution, with rules for everything, letting nothing escape, even small details; yet most rules actually have little effect, owing to their widespread, visible transgression, which goes far beyond minor contraventions tolerated or secretly indulged by any institution.17 Most of the rules do not—or no longer— correspond to norms. Transgressions of them thus have a potential for transformation. Their daily repetition and their reproduction among students in the space of mutual visibility (the campus) engenders a disordering of the rules, which progressively leads to new norms of self-presentation. In a similar way, in mixed spaces, rebukes addressed to women by members of the CPVPV only have a disciplinary effect if they are considered as shameful by their peers and their families. If they become commonplace and only meet with indifference and mockery, they lose their shaming effect. If Saudi women no longer have reason to fear them, they lose their value as punishments. This effect of transgressions relies upon an unspoken coordination. Young Saudi women neither organize collective action nor make common claims, 18 but transgressions in spaces of mutual visibility are widespread and relatively accepted among them. Without this collective tacit acceptance, it is unsure whether individuals would adopt them. In other words, the individual, noncollaborative character of their transgressions does not signify an absence of coordination. According to Howard Becker, deviance constitutes a “collective action” in the sense that people “do what they do with one eye on what others do, are doing, or might do in the future. Individuals seek to mutually adjust their lines of action according to the perceived or expected actions of others. We can call the result of all these adjustments ‘collective action.’”19 Here, I speak of “coordinated action” in order to avoid confusion with the usual use of the term “collective action” in sociology. Transgressive practices by young Saudi women are not collaborative, but they are coordinated. It is because they are repeated every day and adopted by a large number of them that they do not injure the reputations of those who adopt them, which could cause problems for them within their families. It is the unspoken coordination between young

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Saudi women that allows for these transgressions to go unpunished, generally, by their families. For the transgressions considered most provocative (such as not wearing a veil in a mixed shopping mall), two configurations are possible: some know that their parents accept their behavior; others are in complete rupture with their families and have decided to behave however they want without worrying about consequences in terms of family conflicts. Unspoken coordination occurs in a context where events in public spaces are rarely authorized, often cancelled at the last minute without any explanation, and if they do take place, are very strictly controlled by authorities. This was the case, for instance, with two events I attended—a concert marking ‘Eid al-Fitr, the Feast of Breaking the Fast, celebrating the end of Ramadan, and an Open House at a women’s college campus. All public demonstrations are forbidden, no matter what the cause: for example, three men who wished to show their solidarity with victims of Israeli bombings in Gaza—a cause unanimously supported in Saudi Arabia—were arrested in January 2008.20 The ban on demonstrations was reaffirmed in February 2011 in the context of protest movements in neighboring countries; demonstrations, which took place mainly in the Eastern Province, were strictly suppressed. In Abha, the capital of Asir Province, in the south of Arabia, female students protesting in 2012 against bad study conditions and disrespect by the university administration were violently suppressed by the authorities (security guards, civil police, and CPVPV); fiftythree students were injured, and according to some sources one died.21 Coordinated transgressive acts may be seen as protest, in that they contribute to undermining the credibility of institutions that control public spaces. In some situations, transgressive acts can be performed collectively. In 2008, on September 25, the national day commemorating the foundation of the third Saudi state, the CPVPV went into the Mamlaka mall to reestablish order, probably because of the unusually dense crowd, which put women in proximity to men. The crowd reacted strongly. People yelled and booed the CPVPV and marched or ran around the mall, filming the crowd and the religious police with their mobile phones. The police were clearly overwhelmed. Surrounded in the middle of the mall, they seemed powerless to do anything.22 Although some people seemed panicked by the presence of the CPVPV or the crowd, others took advantage of the opportunity to participate in creating mayhem in a public space, an exceptional situation in this silent city, where gatherings are forbidden. One might think that the mall’s security guards would try to prevent this disorder, totally beyond the CPVPV’s control. However, although the mall’s

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regulations must conform to principles laid down by the CPVPV, the security guards do not usually collaborate with them when they come to patrol. And in this case, the crowd was so large that it is difficult to imagine how the security guards could have intervened, all the more since in Riyadh, they cannot remove women from a shopping mall, which would mean throwing them onto the streets when their cars are not there, thus exposing them to all sorts of “dangers.” Shopping malls in Riyadh thus become sites for coordinating isolated acts of defiance of the CPVPV, notwithstanding that according to works in radical geography and urban studies, demonstrations are usually considered impossible in these closed, controlled spaces.23 In the case of the national day agitation, something like a spontaneous flash mob, an unorganized gathering that looked like a protest, erupted in the shopping mall, a place where people usually assemble with no shared motive, in reaction to the presence of the CPVPV.24 The reaction of many of the participants, both men and women, was to film the scene on their cell phones and put it on YouTube. Such events must, however, be interpreted not only as results of initiatives taken by various people tacitly coordinating their acts, but also in light of a political context that favors them. The CPVPV is subject to highly mediatized criticism, in the context of a discourse combating terrorism and “deviant thought.” Since 2002, several scandals linked to the religious police have been revealed in the press, starting with the incident in which CPVPV members prevented students from exiting during a fire in a girls’ school in Mecca, resulting in their burning to death,25 followed by many cases of torture and rape in prison.26 In spite of opposition, the government has taken some measures to reform the CPVPV, while insisting nonetheless on its necessity (there is no question of abolishing it). The presence of a city police officer alongside CPVPV members is now obligatory, and people arrested by CPVPV must be transferred to police, rather than kept in CPVPV centers. In 2009, the CPVPV’s longtime director Ibrahim al-Ghayth was removed from office and replaced by a sheikh from outside the organization, who was in his turn replaced in 2012 by Abdulatif al-Sheikh, who promised to limit the members of the force’s activities.27 Official questioning of its practices has most likely encouraged transgression, not only because the institution lost some of its repressive prerogatives, but also because its increasingly negative image made its reprimands addressed to young Saudi women more acceptable in the eyes of their families. We thus observe a synergistic effect between the official reform discourse that stigmatizes rigorists (mutashaddidin) and the transgressive practices adopted by young Saudi

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women. Although one should not minimize the role of young Saudi women as initiators of transgressive actions that otherwise might have never caught on, they are in some respects in harmony with the government in its project of reform, which they appropriate to their own ends.

Transgressions and Discussions Young Saudi women clearly constitute a “population that cannot express its claims because of the nature of the political regime or a lack of . . . resources,” to quote Mounia Bennani-Chraïbi and Olivier Fillieule.28 No organization allows them, for example, to claim rights; owing to the political context and constraints limiting their public activities, they have few means to express their dissatisfaction. According to the analytical grid of “mobilization of resources” that has been elaborated in social movement studies, not everyone has access to the same resources to express their claims, and some people might even not express them at all, or only through distorted ways and silent resistance, because they do not have any means to do so.29 Young Saudi women’s transgressive selfpresentation could thus be interpreted as protest against the strict regulations to which they are subjected.30 However, such a formulation assumes that they would like to protest and claim rights, but cannot. This may lead to an overestimation of the meaning of their acts. This debate has figured in research adopting a gendered approach to analysis of Arab societies. The tendency of certain feminist authors to interpret everything in terms of resistance, and not to take seriously the meanings that women attribute to their own acts, has been criticized, for example, by Saba Mahmood.31 Taking into account such criticism, yet without concluding that the people studied are apathetic, it is important to analyze to what extent transgressions are articulated with explicitly formulated protests. I have observed that criticisms, and even the questioning of official Islamic rules, are quite common in private conversations. In rare situations, criticisms expressed in private became public, articulated in the name of an “us” of young women; this raises the question of the role these ordinary criticisms play in the emergence of common identifications. Students at King Saud University are often highly critical of its regulations. In conversation, they complained about the strictness of the rules (“In any case, at the university, everything is forbidden”) and suggested that it was nearly impossible not to transgress in some way or other. Several of them insisted on their right to personal freedom (hurriya shakhsiyya) in regards to their violations of the dress code. This constitutes a politicization of the question in the

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sense that they refer to values that should, in their opinion, be the basis for life in this society.32 Several students sought to take advantage of my presence to openly yet anonymously express their claims: certain young women punctuated their denunciatory statements with imperatives such as “Write! Write!” (Ktibi! Ktibi!). They criticized the university administration for concentrating on insignificant details, such as students’ appearance, while there were many other problems within the establishment. They also complained about being treated like adolescents, criticizing the ban on leaving campus before noon, whereas male students could circulate freely. A recurring statement was “There is no organization” (ma fi nizam). When I asked students what they meant by this, they referred to the mediocrity of courses offered by the university, the gap separating it from U.S. universities, the unsatisfactory teaching methods, and the lack of courses in English and IT, essential for landing a private-sector job. They criticized the university for being both too strict and too poorly organized. Sometimes students extended their criticisms from the university to the country as a whole and expressed their desire to leave in order to study or live abroad. It must be kept in mind that these statements were made in front of me— someone foreign to their society and conducting a research. The atypical situation may have led the young women to criticize their country and its norms in unusual ways, according to what they thought my expectations were. My presence may have encouraged them to make the effort to explain things clearly, and also to express themselves in ways that differ from what they would say in usual situations. However, the observation of other situations in which I did not play the central role confirmed that such criticisms were widespread in ordinary conversations among young Saudi women in Riyadh. Ignoring or provoking the CPVPV is a frequent subject of conversation. In June 2007, during a dinner at twenty-two-year-old Dua’s house, a discussion began at the end of the evening between four women aged from twenty to thirty: Dua, single, a student; her elder sister, married and working at the headquarters of a bank; a distant cousin of Dua’s; and one of her friends, originally from Jiddah, who had moved to Riyadh two years before, when she got married. The guests began by talking about adolescents who put on makeup to go to the mall “as if they were attending a wedding” and then talked about the CPVPV. Each had her anecdote. Dua mentioned that the CPVPV had come to check what she was up to surfing the Internet with a friend in a café at the mall. Dua’s friend told of being arrested in a café with her husband. As the conversation progressed, they all increasingly adopted heroic postures in recounting

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their interactions with the CPVPV, presenting themselves at some points as upholders of justice. When the religious police reprimanded her for not being covered “like a Muslim woman,” Dua’s cousin said, she had replied: “You are ex-convicts. Everyone knows you just got out of prison.”33 A circle of young men that had gathered around had even applauded this act of rebellion. Finally, Dua’s sister told us how when she had been shopping at a mall, a member of the CPVPV had come and looked her in the eye, saying, “Cover your eyes. You have pretty eyes, cover them.” She had responded: “You are so rude! It’s up to you to look away!” In telling these stories, Dua and her interlocutors demonstrated their knowledge of and experience with the religious police, who did not frighten them. Their criticism was not aimed at Islamic precepts, but at the institution in and of itself, which they participated in discrediting through this type of private conversation, articulated with acts of public defiance. The discussion shows how such acts have become sufficiently normal (as opposed to “deviant”) to be evoked without shame and even with pride. This type of conversation is not unusual: interactions with those responsible for the application of official Islamic rules are often discussed among young Saudi women, who tell of ruses adopted to get around bans, make fun of sanctions considered unjustified, and describe scenes of insubordination when faced with authorities. These ordinary conversations among young Saudi women unite them in an “us” transcending distinctions such as income level or family origin, mobilized in other situations. Exceptionally, the “us” that appears in conversations about official Islamic rules is expressed in more public situations—but opportunities are rare. The colloquium on the subject of “Our Children: How to Prepare Them for Successful Marriage?” organized by the university in 2007 is an example of the opportunity to express collective identity.34 Students filled the large amphitheater, even sitting on the stairs. They especially came to attend lectures by Sheikhs Salman al-‘Awda and Aaidh al-Qarni, famous preachers who rarely addressed a specifically female audience: this was considered a big event. The preachers spoke from the male campus of King Saud University in front of an audience of male students, and the lectures were relayed to female students via video­ conference. Al-‘Awda’s lecture on “The Role of Dialogue as a Factor for Successful Marriage” essentially used the register of self-help, notably through advice on dialogue between spouses: how to manage conjugal disputes to prevent them from degenerating, how to communicate and vent disagreements to prevent conflicts, how to resist pressures from relatives and their interference with

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the couple’s private life, how to recognize one’s mistakes, keep calm, and so on. Students’ questions led the debate toward less consensual territory, particularly through their denunciation of various types of injustices. While Al-‘Awda was finishing his speech, a line formed in front of the (women-only) room to use the microphone (on stage) for questions. One student asked why religious experts had a “weak position” regarding questions concerning women, calling it a pretext to forbid “everything” to women. She gave the example of the “blockage of means” that justified the ban on women’s driving. Whereas “everything is always allowed to men,” she said, for women “everything runs the risk of corruption and decadence of society.” Other questioners blamed “society,” “the family,” “customs and traditions,” or “men,” rather than the religious authorities. Several students criticized the “inferiorizing” gaze to which men subjected women. One charged that men did not understand that “women have their own personalities and rights.” In his responses, Al-‘Awda insisted that “women were created, not only to stay home, but also to work and study” and congratulated himself on having such a “direct” dialogue with young women. Students took the opportunity of the lecture to express their dissatisfaction and their demands by referring to general principles, such as religious teachings, psychological balance, or the equality between men and women. Without questioning Al-‘Awda’s speech, they treated him as a religious authority and sought to make him recognize the legitimate character of their claims. Beyond the interaction with Al-‘Awda, the lecture was also used as an opportunity to call attention to the differential status of men and women (or, as I often heard it put, discrimination against women), and to establish a sort of competition between male and female audiences, at opposite ends of the videoconference network. At question time, (women) moderators of the debate insisted that women students should monopolize this time, arguing that, unlike male students, they rarely had access to this “Dr. Sheikh” (shaykh duktur). During this lecture, female professors from the women’s section and female students presented themselves as en bloc defending the interests of women faced with male interlocutors, even though Al-‘Awda was highly respected and adopted positions mostly in accord with what the questioning students seemingly wanted to hear. These students expressed themselves as an “us,” meaning young Saudi women, and were supported in their claims by their professors. The next day, the closing session of the colloquium was devoted to “Lived Experiences of Success and Failure in Marriage.” The discussion degenerated

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following the comment of one student, who attributed failure in marriage to that fact that young spouses did not know how to behave with the opposite sex. This was the result of gender segregation, which led to misunderstandings and should be abolished. Controversy burst out in the female section, and the lecture was rapidly interrupted by the administration, which generally terminates any situation threatening to become a conflict. Thus the “us” of students—speaking in the name of young Saudi women—only appears in certain situations, and its affirmation is always tenuous. In a context where any claim seeking to extend women’s rights leads to a highly charged debate counterposing “Westernization” and “virtuous Islamic society,” few women express the desire to publicly claim more rights, even if, in private conversations, and rarely on more public occasions, they may, for example, argue in favor of “personal freedom.” Criticism is rarely expressed outside of conversations with close friends, and changes in norms occur above all through transgressions in public spaces.

Circumscribed Criticism If the transgressions do indeed include a dimension of protest, it is important to correctly identify what is contested. First, transgressive practices are not symptoms of a general condemnation of the Islamic foundation of public order. Young women justify their practices of transgression in two ways: (1) In recognizing a gap between their convictions and their practices, and (2) In questioning the way in which official religious institutions define Islamic principles, affirming a difference between official principles and their own convictions. In the first case, they justify themselves by explaining that they would ideally like to apply a certain Islamic precept but “for the moment” lack the courage: they put together their own classifications of religious precepts, distinguishing between those they esteem necessary and those they esteem optional. These justifications are often voiced spontaneously when speaking about oneself. This was the case, for example, with Nada, a twenty-eight-year-old executive secretary at a women’s training center, who is married and mother of two children. Following an interview at her workplace, I met with her on the women’s floor of the Mamlaka; though I did not ask her about her dress, she tried to justify it by explaining that if she truly respected Islam, she would not wear tight jeans, a lowcut shirt, would not listen to music, put on makeup, or pluck her eyebrows. But, she told me, “Thanks to God, I do my five prayers, I fast [during ­Ramadan].” Thus, she affirmed her own classification of Islamic precepts, considering the five pillars as necessary, the rest as secondary.

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As for the gap between one’s own convictions and the official interpretation of Islamic precepts, it is rarely made explicit, since it seems obvious to many young Saudi women that they do not violate Islamic precepts by wearing a shoulder abaya instead of a head abaya, or uncovering their eyes (although they are aware of official fatwas that require covering them). Most of those I met considered that hiding their hair and “female forms” is a religious obligation, but contrary to official religious discourse, they thought that wearing a black abaya and covering the face is part of the “culture of the country” or “customs and traditions.”35 Although young Saudi women’s practices question a public order founded on a maximalist reading of Islamic precepts, most do not identify with “liberal” intellectuals who express themselves publicly in favor of Saudi women gaining additional rights. Most of the young women I met criticized liberals, considering that they go too far, are too influenced by their experience in Western countries and cut off from society, or claim rights that either make no sense or are not priorities for Saudi women. The distance they claimed regarding these liberal intellectuals is founded in the perception of a class and culture gap between them and wealthy elites whom they judged to be “Westernized.” The majority of women I met defined themselves (without my asking) as neither liberal nor rigorist, as seen in this typical statement by Huda, a twenty-sevenyear-old journalist: I do not agree with liberals, since, for example, I don’t want to work in a mixed space eight hours a day, even if it doesn’t bother me to see a male colleague if I am wearing a niqab. For liberals, there are no limits. I don’t agree with them. I think we need to keep our identity. It’s good to benefit from different experiences. But I’m a Muslim woman and a Saudi woman even if I’m wearing jeans. As for rigorists [mutashaddidin], they are closed in on themselves, whereas the world is open.

Many women insisted on the gap separating them from the handful of women intellectuals said to be liberal (e.g., those who got behind the wheel in 1990 or who claimed the right to vote in municipal elections in 2005 and 2011),36 some of whom are currently foregrounded by the government.37 This stance toward liberals does not signify that there is no similarity between the opinions expressed by young women during informal discussions and the claims made by liberals. In both cases, many emphasize that gender mixing and women driving are not forbidden by Islam. Moreover, the young Saudi women I met

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had developed lifestyles and subjectivities that in many ways corresponded to liberal ideals. Statements insisting on the “happy medium” between liberal and rigorist positions echo government discourse on the struggle against terrorism and need for religious moderation. This does not suggest that women only parrot official discourse: when they justify practices that are transgressive of public order, they voice their own distinctions between what is negotiable in Islamic precepts and what isn’t, and what is Islamic in official rules and what is not. These justifications, common among young urban women as a peer group, are significant of the appropriation, on the scale of their own concerns, of current rhetoric in the public sphere, such as that of Islam versus customs and traditions. Finally, state institutions are generally not described as repressive. I often heard it said that King Abdullah was “with women” (ma‘a al-mar’a), but that “society” hindered his initiatives. This corresponds to the discourse most widely diffused and least critical of the regime. Violations of university regulations, defiance of the CPVPV, and even subversion of the dress codes promoted by religious authorities constitute highly localized resistances to certain institutions, clearly distinguished, in the statements that I heard, from the king and the government.

When Transgressions Become Norms The practices of transgression and criticism described are shared by young Saudi women, belong to them, and reinforce their identification with this category. Also, they are specific to gatherings between peers and tend to become norms within these, which translates into new criteria of classification between respectable and reprehensible behaviors. Certain dress-code transgressions are widespread and tacitly considered as acceptable in certain spaces and gatherings, but not in others. One of the skills that I acquired during my stay in Riyadh was adapting my appearance to different situations in which I participated: for example, wearing a long black skirt at the university and covering my face to get through the entrance of a religious institution. Other precautions aimed at not getting myself arrested included looking totally foreign, wearing no veil, and pretending not to understand Arabic to police officers and soldiers at checkpoints in the diplomatic quarter, but covering my face if I went in a car with a Saudi man, in order not to attract the attention of the CPVPV. These precautions took a long time to learn, and my ignorance at the beginning earned me a few mishaps. Later, I thought of the adaptation of my appearance to different situations as an ethnographer’s ruse. As my fieldwork advanced, I became aware that

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young Saudi women practiced this juggling of different self-presentations as a daily habit.38 This could include wearing a long skirt for a religious gathering, but pants elsewhere. For example, Maha put on a skirt for the evening religious gathering described in chapter 3 (as did other attendees), but when I met her later for an interview at a mall, she was wearing pants. This does not signify that she acts hypocritically or pretends to apply Islamic precepts; she participates in this group and has committed to Islam of her own free will. Perhaps she does not personally adhere to the principle of a ban on pants or thinks that it is a secondary precept that can be transgressed. The juggling of norms from one gathering to the next is, in general, an automatic gesture that was sometimes explicitly explained to me as a foreigner. When inviting me to an extended family celebration, an acquaintance emphasized that I must wear a skirt instead of pants, her family being a bit conservative. It is also common to wear a head abaya only when entering religious spaces. Twenty-two-year-old Aliyya, a self-described fashion enthusiast, decked out in designer brands, who led a summer workshop in a dar (pl. dur), or Qur’an memorization center, said: “In the dur, girls are different. For example, no one wears pants. It is not a place for fashion shows, but a place to learn the Qur’an. The atmosphere is psychologically relaxing. You listen to the Qur’anic suras, [and] you feel relaxed and at peace with yourself.” Young Saudi women adapt their self-presentations to fit into the framework of various gatherings. Similarly, some women mentioned reasons for being totally veiled in Saudi Arabia, “country of the two holy places” where it is necessary to preserve virtue, whereas they do not wear veils when abroad. These shifts in self-presentation may imply secrets for some persons in some situations. Thus May, whom I met when she was working as a hostess at a womenonly event, arranged to meet me at the Mamlaka mall. She arrived veiled, her face covered, and gave me books on Islam aimed at converting non-Muslims. We sat at a table of the family section, which was not closed off. May told me about her family, her father’s second wife whom she hated, her older brother who had become her legal guardian according to her father’s wishes. She mentioned her boyfriend, a Kuwaiti whom she had met on the Internet and with whom she had spoken by telephone. She was not paying attention to her veil, which gradually slid down her hair while she spoke. I saw May again many times. During one of our meetings, we ate lunch in the food court of the Faysaliyya mall and she showed me satirical images, such as of abaya-wearing Saudi women drinking whisky, stored in her telephone. Later in the conversation, when I asked her to talk about her neighborhood, Al-Badi‘a, reputed in

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Riyadh to be a stronghold of rigorists, she told me that she had taught children in a Qur’an memorization center there, an activity she loved. I asked her if she could take me for a visit to the center. She agreed but seemed a bit uneasy, and added that I must not mention in the center that we had seen each other in shopping malls in the north-central district, nor—she gestured at her veil, which left half her hair uncovered—that she had been dressed like that. Changing self-presentation in this way is a widespread practice, part of life in society, all the more so in the city, which by definition calls for a diversity of roles according to situations,39 even if this takes specific forms among young Saudi women in Riyadh. Everyone tries to master the impressions given in the specific gatherings in which they participate.40 In her neighborhood, May sought to be seen as a virtuous young woman living according to Islamic precepts, and she emphasized this dimension of her identity at certain points in our conversations. But when faced with me as a person she identified as a Western woman, she felt it would be appropriate to tell me a few of her secrets; this was probably accentuated by the fact that she sought to convey a modern, liberated image of herself, and perhaps to align with the practices that she supposed me to follow, in order to earn my esteem and my friendship. In asking me to be cautious at the Qur’an memorization center, she showed that she perceived a contradiction between these two commitments, or more precisely that she anticipated that members of the Qur’an memorization center might see a contradiction. However, she did not consider it necessary to justify herself to me, creating a certain complicity between us, and she let me in on the secret of her ruses to control other people’s impressions. For her, it was obvious that one could be both committed to Islam, let one’s veil fall in a mall, and have a boyfriend via telephone. In general, young urban Saudi women do not present themselves in the same way at the university, at a mall, or during family celebrations. Each gathering involves negotiations between its members, leading to different norms. In the campus context, it is accepted and even normal among students to transgress norms of modesty and sobriety in dress underwritten as much by official religious discourse as by the rules of the institution. Highlighting the specificity of the campus, some students described the most transgressive selfpresentations (punk hairdos, piercings) as fashion statements restricted to the university. Once they had their diplomas, graduates would conform to a more standard appearance in order to increase their chances of getting married. Although this may apply to certain individuals, the practices that more or less radically transgress the official rules are nonetheless too widespread, from

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campus to shopping mall, to be regarded as suspensions of daily reality, marginal practices inscribed in a given context or even ritualized contestations that merely reinforce established principles.41 On the contrary, they contribute to de­ regulating these principles. In addition, many young Saudi women do not significantly change their lifestyles after marriage, for two main reasons. First, many marriages end quickly in divorce. Second, the segregated organization of urban spaces makes socializing as a heterosexual couple and “mixed” leisure activities nearly impossible; thus, many married Saudi women continue to frequent spaces reserved for women, all the more so those who exercise a professional activity. Increasingly common, transgressions become norms among young Saudi women.42 For example, if the diversion of the abaya into a seductive accessory originally meant a transgression of Islamic precepts as they are officially interpreted, this practice has lost part of its transgressive value, inasmuch as it is largely accepted in Riyadh, except within religious spaces. This does not mean that young urban Saudi women blindly imitate one another. Their practices may involve criticism. Motives for adopting these practices are diverse and ambivalent, from the will to transgress to the desire to conform to the group. This is specific to the younger generation: most mothers of the women I met generally wear the head abaya, since they do not belong to the generation for whom the abaya is a fashion accessory, and are not seeking to present a stylish public image in the same way. For many of them, the division was between those who wear the burqa‘—signifying belonging to a bedouin tribe, and regarded as more revealing than the niqab, since it allows more of the face to show, around the eyes—and those who wear the niqab, a neutral accessory that does not connote a specific identity beyond that of Saudi nationality and conformity to Islamic precepts.43 Many expressed the feeling that transgressive dress is a precondition for belonging to a peer group of young urban Saudi women. This was the case with twenty-four-year-old Sumayya, who had been a student on the Alaysha campus. It had taken her a long while to get used to campus life, she explained, because I looked like a [typical] college student. . . . And you feel that you should be like the others, either you become like them or you are weird [ghariba, i.e., strange or foreign], and girls saw me as that girl wearing the required skirt and no makeup. I was a student and was focused on my studies [i.e., as opposed to fashion]. So no one comes up and talks to you. Here, appearances are very important. If you know how to dress—if you have a designer handbag, if you have the Chanel bag—you are terrific [anti khatira]. If you are a normal girl, no one is interested in you.

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Many persons voiced fairly similar descriptions of “the society of female students” on campus (mujtama‘ al-talibat). Their descriptions show the emergence of negotiated norms among young urban Saudi women, norms that some experience as constraints. Finally, these young women themselves classify transgression practices. During a conversation in a café on the women’s floor of the Mamlaka mall, two old friends, Ghadir and Shuq, aged twenty-four and twenty-five respectively, reminisced about the relatively expensive, upper-class private high school they had attended together.44 Ghadir said: It’s a very funny place [laughter]. They [the female administration of the high school] act like rigorists [mutashaddidin]. Sometimes when you arrive in the morning, the teacher looks at your heels. If they are more than four centimeters high, she confiscates them and gives you washroom flip-flops [laughter]. Do you remember? [laughter] What else, Shuq? If you arrive with nail polish or your nails are too long, if you arrive with nail polish, they make you take it off in front of everyone. There are badly brought up girls who behave rudely and refuse, who yell and talk back. . . . I remember one time a friend’s sister came to say hello and gave me a hug because it was my birthday. The director saw [us] and . . . thought we were. . . . Because unfortunately the school’s reputation is a bit. . . . Actually, it only happened to me once that a girl came on to me. It’s the only thing that happened to me, and otherwise I never saw deviant girls [­shadhdhat].45 . . . Anyway, the teachers knew I was respectable [muhtarama] . . . even if the last two years . . . well, I did not misbehave [shakli ma kanat sa’i‘a],46 but I had a Metallica T-shirt. I really had my own style . . .

Ghadir portrayed the strictness of the school’s female administration as insincere (they “act” like rigorists, she said), motivated by the need to protect its reputation. Although Ghadir and Shuq presented themselves throughout the interview as being opposed to the constraints imposed on them and adopted a mocking tone toward those responsible for applying them, Ghadir made her own distinctions between behaviors that she considered acceptable or unacceptable, in qualifying certain students as “badly brought up” and “deviants” (i.e., seeking intimate, sensual, or sexual relations with other girls) while describing herself as “a respectable girl.” Similarly, Dua and her interlocutors, who unanimously condemned the CPVPV (see above), nonetheless distinguished themselves sharply from adolescents who wore too much makeup. I often encountered criticism of girls whose appearance was too flashy, who were accused of simply showing off.

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Other young women would ask: “Where are their mothers?” Many women I met did not judge those who talked back to the religious police negatively, although aside from those convinced of the merits of the CPVPV,47 they most often regarded it as blameworthy for Saudi women not to go veiled in malls. Some felt that as Muslims and as Saudis (two intertwined dimensions in official discourse), Saudi women should wear a veil out of respect for the country and its society, especially because the two holy mosques are on national territory. This is another boundary between acceptable and unacceptable behaviors which the young urban women I met affirmed throughout our conversations.

Conclusion Transgressions of official Islamic rules by young Saudi women contribute to displacing limits on behaviors allowed in public. Though these acts are individual, they are tacitly coordinated, which is what allows women to put them into play. These acts do not correspond to strategies, and it is difficult to identify intentions, although a parallel may be drawn with criticisms of rigorism and controlled public order expressed by young Saudi women in various types of situations. Such actions and criticisms are embedded in shifting power relations in a context of competing official discourses: between the prominent values of Islamic awakening, the current reform discourse, and the rise of consumerism. Finally, these transgressions and criticisms allow for cultivating complicities and contribute to reinforcing the “us” of young urban Saudi women through the emergence of norms of behavior and self-presentation in public specific to them, which differentiate them from other categories of women. Transgressions of official Islamic rules imply conforming to other norms within a peer group, which in no way diminishes their potential for change. The co-presence and mutuality that pertain among young urban Saudi women in spaces such as shopping malls and university campuses are conditions for the reproduction of these practices. Paula Fass has described a somewhat comparable phenomenon among U.S. students in the early 1920s.48 Fass shows how, in groups marked by conformity and competition between peers, male and female students normalized behaviors that transgressed puritanical norms, shocking their parents and university administrations: for example, female students began smoking in public, something previously done only by “women of ill repute.” These practices, which might seem trivial, symbolically embodied a certain freedom of choice. Behaviors adopted in public by young urban Saudi women—wearing T-shirts with provocative slogans, extravagant haircuts, and so on—question

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the model of Islamic femininity promoted through the discourse of national distinction. These practices, as well as the criticisms that they proclaim in concert, contribute to young urban Saudi women’s identification with a common group in certain situations. But if most of them adopt some practices that transgress official Islamic rules, they also confirm the boundary between acceptable, even desirable transgressions, on the one hand, and “blameworthy deviations,” on the other.

5

CONSUMING FEMININITIES Here a girl spends a lot. She must dress well and wear designer brands. In Saudi society, you have to be well dressed and that’s expensive. Inas, a twenty-five-year-old civil servant Through our visits to many malls entirely for women, we saw what may be called “women’s malls style” . . . : transparent clothing, tight pants, makeup in loud colors, earphones screwed into the ears, hairdos made to attract attention, masculine haircuts. The Saudi magazine Al-Mustaqbal [The Future], May 2004

O N E S P R I N G DAY in the Alaysha campus cafeteria, Tahani, Lama, and Asma, who come from low-income families, were once again discussing where they might go together for a change of scenery. Lama suggested going to the desert (barr) near Riyadh, but all three agreed that this would be difficult, since they would need a man to take them there. Lama then suggested getting together at one of Riyadh’s many women-only amusement parks (malahi). Asma objected: since everyone is unveiled there, they would need to do their hair and put on makeup. She wasn’t up to it. When I expressed surprise that makeup and a hairdo were presented as obligations Tahani explained: “If you don’t wear makeup, they [the other women] will think that you either aren’t interested in feminine things, don’t have any makeup, or don’t know how to use it if you do.” This frequently mentioned obligation involves two related criteria through which they feel their peers judge them. First, it is necessary to demonstrate certain skills and proclivities in order to conform to a certain stereotype of femininity: an interest in makeup and knowing how to use it. Second, a certain degree of affluence: other women must not be led to assume that one cannot afford to buy makeup. Though I had observed that much care was given to appearances among young urban Saudi women, I did not consider it as an explicit and conscious obligation, to the point where they sometimes would prefer going to a mixed space in order to avoid removing their veils and abayas. Nonetheless, being seen is at the heart of the homosociality developed by young urban women: exposing themselves to the gazes

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of unknown women is another way of going beyond domestic spaces and feeling that they belong to urban society. Self-presentation may be the object of brief comments—generally compliments—between young urban women mingling in shared spaces: one looks at the other and tells her, for example: “Your top is really pretty!” or “I love your haircut! What beauty parlor did you go to?” These exchanges of gazes and comments constitute ordinary civilities between young urban women. They may establish complicities among strangers, but also contribute to building hierarchies and to drawing boundaries between them. Why take an interest in self-presentation in public in relation to class and gender? In conceptualizing class distinction, the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu did not take into account this staging of self in the course of interactions. Bourdieu analyzed class distinction through cultural practices and consumer habits that contribute to building hierarchies, but did not elaborate on their public staging. He has shown that the attention given to self-presentation depends on class, yet his work does not include the production of norms, or the mutual gaze that contributes to shaping these norms in a particular social group—in other words, the relation between public self-presentation and class distinction.1 For Riyadh’s young women, self-presentation goes beyond reproducing existing divisions. Given the absence of historical grounding for class-based identity, as well as contemporary consumerism, self-stylizations in public do not primarily signal preexisting divisions. They contribute to the emergence of new hierarchies and classifications among Saudi women. The norms of femininity described here are mainly negotiated in homosocial situations—the self-presentations are intended almost exclusively for other women.2 Insofar as women may seek future wives for their male relatives in women-only contexts, such situations do go beyond the “world of women,” but that intention—although notable at wedding celebrations I attended—was marginal in the spaces I studied. Thus, the transformations in self-presentations shaping femininity are more the result of interactions among young urban women than with men. The styles performed in women’s public spaces are mostly invisible to men, except for related ones. Norms of femininity are a field of tensions. Styles performed in public contribute to changing classifications and hierarchies with regards to gender, class, and sexuality—as well as nationality and ethnicity. Generally speaking, selfpresentations reveal attempts to conform to a new norm, which I shall refer to as “consumerist femininity.” I shall first discuss the “new” characteristic of

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this norm, then analyze the modalities of differentiation within a group of acquaintances. Finally, I shall describe the subversion of the hegemonic model of femininity by the buyat, individuals categorized as women but whose selfpresentations are described as “masculine.”

From Gold to Designer Brands No major historical or sociological study has been conducted on consumerism in Saudi Arabia. Such topics have only been evoked in economic mission reports and brochures offering advice for businesspeople interested in investing in the country; academic references to such topics are rare.3 It is often assumed that Saudi Arabia suddenly became a consumer society at the time of the oil boom, as the widespread image of a bedouin parking his Cadillac in front of his tent suggests. For most Saudis, however, the major change brought about by the period of the oil boom was access to electricity and running ­water, rather than a Cadillac. During the 1980s, a variety of commercially packaged products replaced goods sold in bulk in the market, which eliminated the means of subsistence for certain categories of the population.4 Supermarkets and malls progressively became central in the daily lives of Riyadh’s inhabitants. The widespread adoption of European and American clothing and cosmetic brands is fairly recent.5 Although this benefits foreign businesses that make profits in Saudi Arabia, it does not equate to “Westernization” of Saudi society, but rather to the fashioning of a national consumer culture.6 In other words, accessories, makeup, and clothing take specific social meanings in context.7 As many young women I spoke to put it, the goal is to have a style. They use the English word “style” (stayl in Saudi dialect) to designate a self-presentation considered as fashionable, modern, and cosmopolitan, signifying mastery of the latest trends and the frequenting of the Italian, British, and American establishments that have mushroomed within the city’s shopping malls. I have favored the term “style” in this book because of its repeated use by urban Saudi women themselves, rather than because of its centrality in the study of subcultures.8 Some women with whom I spoke of my interest in consumerism denied that it was something new, insisting that showiness had been central to the societies of the Arabian Peninsula long before the past few decades, and even before the rise in oil revenues starting in the 1950s. They referred to the practice of displaying one’s gold, also cited by the anthropologist Salwa al-Khatib. Sedentarized bedouin women interviewed by Al-Khatib in the 1980s showed

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off their gold “even if they were impoverished, since it symbolized their social position and [was] their guarantee for the future.”9 Displaying one’s gold is now only done by some women and in specific situations. At weddings, some women wear all the gold they own, or at least all the gold they received at their own weddings. This custom is, however, rejected by many as old-fashioned. Starting around the 1950s, the wealthiest Saudi elites distinguished themselves by displaying foreign brands, which could only be purchased abroad. This constituted a mark of distinction and prestige, since it signified that they traveled. With the exception of the wealthiest class, Saudis used to do their shopping in markets, today called “popular souks” (suq sha‘bi)10 to distinguish them from malls, which are called souks (suq). Although saying that a dress was bought in Milan is still more prestigious than saying one got it at the Faysaliyya, Riyadh malls make a large range of foreign brands accessible to Saudi women far beyond the wealthiest class, even if their prices are high in relation to many women’s incomes. Those who purchase foreign brands are not necessarily rich and do not all have the opportunity to travel abroad, whether because of financial or visa reasons or because their families do not allow them to. Thus, the relatively free circulation of goods contrasts with the impossibility of circulating freely for many young Saudi women. It is easier to buy a Vuitton handbag in Riyadh and dream of the Champs-Élysées than to obtain the authorization of one’s legal guardian, a visa, and the price of a plane ticket to Paris. Nowadays, there are strategies for exhibiting wealth in specific situations: a forty-something woman belonging to a very wealthy family explained to me that her daughter, a high school student, could dress fairly simply in daily life, but at weddings, family celebrations, and other social occasions, she needed to wear “Chanel or higher.” This was an “investment in the future” that would allow her daughter to live in luxury all her life through marrying a very rich man. For high-income families, luxury brands have replaced gold as demonstrative signs of wealth, alongside other signs such as the choice of private school, of a certain car, or of venues for weddings.11 However, I observed that self-presentation did not always, and not exclusively, signify the women’s income level: wearing designer-brand accessories is a sign not only of wealth, but also of “modernity.” Besides, it does not only signify the family’s income level, but may be a sign of personal income, earned through professional activity, that is spent in order to conform one’s self-presentation to a specific model of consumerist femininity.

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Promoting Consumerist Femininity Women often showed me professionally taken photographs of themselves in poses reminiscent of popular Lebanese or American singers.12 These photographs indicate an image of themselves that they would like to give and show to their friends—and to me: feminine, modern, open-minded, often dressed in jeans, with sophisticated hairstyles and makeup. The poses they take often correspond to a ritualized image of stereotypical femininity, characterized by exaggeration, standardization, and simplification of elegance, romanticism, dreaminess, sensuality, and other traits attributed to the feminine.13 I do not suggest that this is the exaggeration of true femininity but rather the exaggeration of a model of femininity that is, itself, already constructed since “the original identity after which gender fashions itself is an imitation without an origin.”14 Of course, given the necessity of remaining invisible, these photographs do not circulate. Performing these sorts of consumerist and “modern” femininities implies specific experiences of one’s body. That is, the stylization of relations to ­others implies specific modes of stylization of relations to self, which rely on consumer practices.15 Some women seek to transform their bodies by means of diets, sports, aesthetic techniques, hair sessions, wearing colored lenses, or even cosmetic surgery.16 These practices are partially new, since certain criteria of beauty and femininity—thinness, for example—are linked to current lifestyles or to the widespread availability of cosmetic brands, but also to the aesthetics and gender performances displayed in musical clips, TV sitcoms, and movies. Through these experiences of self, as Lisa Rofel puts it, women embody a specific definition of femininity and of their own being-in-society.17 Marketing agencies specifically targeting female consumers have adopted slogans, current during the 1960s in Europe and the United States, admonishing women to take care of themselves, to think of themselves, rather than always devoting themselves to their families, their husbands, and their children.18 It is in their commercial forms that such slogans currently circulate in Saudi ­Arabia, through advertising discourse, as well as in beauty parlors, malls, aerobics clubs, luxury boutiques, and cosmetic surgery clinics. Spaces accessible to women represent opportunities for lucrative activities that target them. The Third Forum of the Modern Woman, organized by the Saudi businesswoman Maha al-Malik in December 2008,19 is a prime example of this phenomenon. Promoting a concept of “the modern woman” characterized professional activity, self-presentation, and ways of thinking of oneself as an individual in soci-

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ety, cosmetic surgery clinics, hairdressers, establishments offering microcredit, and training institutes, often with a self-help approach, all had stands at the Forum. Far from being condemned, the invitation to Saudi women “to take care of yourself ” and enhance their beauty is relayed by certain official institutions. On the Alaysha campus, a poster at the student activities headquarters announced a workshop on beauty techniques: “Harakat! [What class!] I have a new stayl today! Do you want your makeup to be original? Do you want to use beauty accessories and cosmetics like a pro? Would you like to appear with a different look every day? If so, join our workshop on ‘The Art of Being Beautiful.’”20 A Beauty Fair is organized every year on campus, with stands selling hair accessories, makeup, creams, and jewelry. Some stands tout the benefits of cosmetic surgery and laser hair removal. In the middle of all this, there is also the stand of a bank, a stand selling books and Islamic preaching cassettes, and another with Palestinian embroidery. When I expressed surprise that such an event had been organized on campus, the students did not understand my surprise and explained as if it were obvious that it is normal, since they are not allowed to go out to shop. This promotion of consumerist femininity by institutions whose regulations refer to Islamic precepts can only be understood in the context of gender segregation. Saudi women are not veiled most of the time, in contrast to other, less segregated national contexts, where those committed to Islam would be veiled outside of the home and would not wear any makeup. For this reason, in Riyadh’s women-only spaces, there is no obvious sign that differentiates those committed to Islam and others, concerning clothing and makeup. Unlike in other societies,21 specifically Islamic styles of clothing have not been developed beyond those worn in mixed spaces (head abaya, niqab covering the eyes). Being committed to Islam does not preclude conformity to a model of consumerist femininity. Consumerism is, in itself, rarely criticized by religious authorities. It is not rampant consumerism as such but gender mixing and women indulging in unnecessary shopping at malls, rather than taking care of their families, that are condemned by the Council of Senior ‘Ulama.22 The latter’s fatwas actually encourage women to take care of their appearance, citing the hadith “God is beautiful and loves beauty.”23 Even if preachers advise women not to waste time in frivolous activities such as recreational shopping, they do not clearly oppose consumerism. Certain religious centers reserved for women organize workshops on beauty techniques, and several Islamic women’s magazines have a column with advice for dressing well and putting on makeup.

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In the magazine Hayat, intended for young women committed to Islam, an article published during the religious celebration of the sacrifice (one of the main Islamic festivals) advises readers to wear golden makeup for a “sparkly” celebration. On the following page, an article gives practical shopping advice for choosing colors best adapted to one’s complexion.24 The magazine’s cellphone messaging service includes several paid Listservs, one of which, entitled “Be the Most Beautiful,” texts daily beauty advice to its subscribers.25 Another magazine addressed to women committed to Islam devoted an article to a Japanese study that showed that makeup helped women to have self-confidence and affirm their femininity.26 The promotion of a consumerist model of femininity does not negate rules of modesty previously evoked. Makeup, hairdos, and jewelry must be totally hidden in mixed spaces by those committed to Islam, and clothing, even in women-only spaces, must be ample, dissimulating, and “feminine.” Articles in Islamic magazines for women mention additional arguments forbidding jeans: not only do they imitate men and “Westerners,” and do not hide “­female forms,” but they may also cause sterility.27 Islamic institutions reject the style called “free”—for example, leaving one’s face uncovered in mixed public spaces or wearing jeans in women-only spaces. Aerobics clubs for women, a sector recently in rapid expansion, are condemned because of the music that is played there. The women I met explained to me that other practices are considered as forbidden by Islam because they modify the appearance of the face, particularly cosmetic surgery, eyebrow plucking, and hair extensions. While they respected these bans, some of the young women I met saw a link between religious practices and beauty practices. One woman committed to Islam explained that she fasted two days per week in order to respect the Sunna and to lose weight. She thus sought to transform herself through quotidian efforts and discipline, and to achieve her ideal self-image in terms both of religion and of current gender norms defining desirable female body. The promotion of consumerist femininity within women’s religious spaces influences both subjectivities and classifications mobilized to judge other women. I several times heard young women committed to Islam comment on the elegance of a certain well-known preacher’s self-presentation. Most of the young women I met, whether committed to Islam or not, thought a woman had to be feminine, and that this meant dressing well and knowing how to use makeup. Taking care of one’s appearance was even seen as indicative of a good upbringing and superior morals.

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Interactions and Differentiations In practice, how do interactions among young urban women contribute to “­doing difference”?28 Interrelationships among employees of Organization A (see Introduction above) reveal gendered processes of class differentiation. The organization’s building is reserved for women. Most employees wore jeans, which in Riyadh signifies informality and especially “open-mindedness,” in that it is forbidden in strict families, among civil servants, and in public universities, schools, and religious institutions.29 These women had sophisticated haircuts, some of them going to the hairdresser’s every week and regularly changing their hair style. Colleagues emulated one another as regards self-­ presentation. Several told me that they appreciated this concern for appearance, style, and fashion at their workplace. A twenty-four-year-old secretary with an upper-class background explained that she would not accept a job in a mixed space: she would have to wear an abaya all the time, and dressing fashionably and wearing makeup were part of the pleasures of work. Twentyseven-year-old Rana, a married social worker, also with an upper-class background, said: “I like it here because it’s girls only, we’re all around the same age, we can dress however we want, put on makeup, do our hair.” Interactions between employees and beneficiaries of the organization are significant of ways of “doing class,” which depend on performing the model of consumerist femininity. Within Organization A, the employees maintain relations with the mothers of children both to give them advice and to keep themselves informed of the family’s income and needs. Social workers and elementary school teachers visit the mothers in their homes. I went with them several times. The gap between the young urban professionals and poor unemployed mothers was expressed and reinforced by self-presentation and ways of speaking. Here, although of a younger age, and in some cases single or divorced without children, the young professionals are in the dominant position. In the beneficiaries’ homes, the employees keep on their abaya—often fashionable, embroidered—showing that they are only stopping by, whereas the beneficiaries receive them in housedresses. Whereas the beneficiary generally attempts to show hospitality by offering coffee or tea, the employees try to limit interaction to a professional visit, refusing drinks offered, or only consuming the strict minimum, so that their behavior will not be seen as insulting. They ask to visit the home, which goes against usual social rules, people outside the family only having access to the receiving room (majlis) except for very close friends.

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Once, I attended a visit whose goal was evaluating the needs of the family (who were Saudi). During the interaction, the social worker was called by her first name preceded by abla, the title by which children usually address their teacher (“Abla . . . ”), whereas the mother was spoken to as “Mother of [name of the child in care]” (“Umm . . . ”).30 In addition to differentiation through appearance and clothing, this reinforced the impression that the social workers were defined above all by their professional status—even if some of them were also married and had children—whereas the beneficiaries were above all regarded as mothers. This professional status was a way of performing “modernity” and through that, doing difference in terms of class. The children’s mothers sometimes came to the organization to meet the teachers and social workers. The appearance of employees, in jeans, T-shirts, and sneakers, contrasted with that of the mothers. Within the organization’s premises (forbidden to men), the mothers removed their niqabs or burqas and wore their head abayas (the kind that covers the most) on their shoulders, so that their heads were uncovered. Their clothing was not from malls but from “popular souks” where wide, cheap dresses made in China, Pakistan, Syria, or Egypt are sold. Whereas some of the organization’s employees felt that they were dressed humbly by wearing jeans and a T-shirt “without jewelry,” such clothing was the clearest sign of their difference from the beneficiaries, who would not adopt such self-presentation, considered immodest in a place where they were confronted with strangers. This type of interaction contributes to doing the difference between young urban women and other categories of women. In an interview with me, Rana described the beneficiaries’ families and the strategies that she used to put them at ease as follows (emphases added): They are very poor families, [and] they need many things. They have twelve or thirteen children. There is no food. The husband is always out, [but] he doesn’t work. It’s good to see other cultures. . . . I didn’t know that such things existed in Riyadh. . . . It makes me aware of . . . the luck that I had. Their homes are built of mud, very old, and there is only one bathroom for ten children. There is no food—the mother tells me that they do not know what meat tastes like. Rain comes through the roof of the house. This is in the south of Riyadh, and these families are often from the south. Usually, they are bedouin. The mother can’t take care of herself, [so] how can she take care of children? Their salaries are very low—perhaps 1,000 riyals [around U.S.$270 (a month)] for a watchman [haris] or a woman cleaner. They have no car. We try to see what

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they need. For example we offer to install air conditioning. . . . Sometimes we pay for the taxi, the driver who comes to get the child. We have good relations [with the mothers]. They tell us everything. I know what the mother is worried about. I speak to them in bedouin. I don’t wear jewelry, I don’t wear makeup. I don’t want there to be any barrier between them and me. I don’t want them to feel that I am here [gestures up] and she is there [gestures down].

Rana very likely exaggerated the extent of privation and the number of children of the beneficiaries’ families. Herself from a very wealthy sedentary family working for the royal family, she tended to associate poverty with “bedouin­ ness.” Although not all the beneficiaries were bedouin, she mentioned that she spoke to them “in bedouin.”31 Such othering of “bedouin” or “villagers” is widespread in urban Saudi society. Rana’s intentions were good, and her choice to confront such situations through visits to the beneficiaries’ homes had a cost for her: visiting unknown people, even in a professional context, is often looked down upon. But her relatively condescending attitude highlights the class gap separating them. Like other women from financially comfortable families, Rana mentioned spending her salary mostly on clothing, makeup, and accessories. This is even more accentuated for those who live with their parents and have no family obligations, no children to provide for. Many purchase luxury brands. Some invest in a new panoply (outfit, accessories, makeup . . . ) for every celebration or social occasion that they attend, which they can afford because they do not have to shoulder household expenses. Such a way of spending their salaries, however, diverges from the stereotype that opposes the male breadwinner and the female consumer, given that young women spend the money they earn by themselves. Relatives rarely criticize young women for spending their salaries on handbags and designer-brand clothing. This would not generally be the case with a young man, who would be reprimanded for not helping his parents and his sisters or not saving in order to marry someday. The right of Saudi women to spend their money however they choose following the principle of qawwama (not honoring it can justify a demand for divorce) is, additionally, one of the arguments women supporters of the Islamic Awakening use to promote their model of society, which they oppose to the “Western model.”32 Spending a significant part of one’s salary on clothing, makeup, and accessories allows for negotiating one’s place among young Saudi women within Organization A. Some feel excluded, as is shown in the story of Nuf, a twenty-

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nine-year-old woman who spent a few weeks undergoing a trial period for a secretarial position there at the time when I began my research in the organization. Nuf thinks she was not hired because she did not correspond to the style of the organization’s employees. By this, she essentially meant clothing style and appearance. Nuf came from a humble family belonging to a large bedouin tribe. Divorced, she lived in her parents’ home with her brothers and sisters, in the residential neighborhood of Al-Rawda, in the eastern part of Riyadh. Her father was retired from the military; her mother brought up their eleven children and never worked professionally. After finishing high school, Nuf worked as a receptionist in a clinic for four months while trying to gain entrance to the university, which was not possible because her high school grades were too low. She then worked as a secretary in a hospital for three years but stopped at the time of her marriage. In spite of having agreed in principle prior to their marriage, her husband demanded that she stop working at the hospital, a mixed building, even though she worked in an all-women office. Forced to choose between her marriage and her professional career, Nuf quit her job and stayed home. She had a child, then started looking for a new job, a difficult task in that her husband continued to refuse to allow her to work in a hospital, the sector in which she had some experience. She didn’t find anything and considered that this was owing to her lack of a university diploma. After a year and a half of marriage, Nuf and her husband divorced of common accord. She went back to live with her parents, and, after a year’s search, found this job at the organization. She explained that she could not go back to work at the hospital, a mixed space, as a divorced woman, for the sake of her reputation, since “society still has a slightly backward view of the hospital.” During our first interview, which took place at the time of her trial period, Nuf said that she had high hopes that this job would “save” her from the boredom of the family home. With her salary, after paying the driver, she would help her parents financially—Nuf was not among the women who, having no family obligation, could allow themselves to devote their salaries to taking care of their style. She especially hoped to save a bit of money to study. She planned to pursue training in English in a private institute and maybe someday start a center for relaxation and amusement for women, with a café, a beauty parlor, a sewing workshop, and shops. During this first interview, Nuf spoke in a confident tone. I attribute this attitude to the fact that, still feeling like an outsider among the organization’s employees, she was happy to be able to confide in someone who was also foreign to this group. In fact, she felt under pressure

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during the trial period. “They observe you too closely, under a microscope,” she complained. The following week, while the organization’s staff got together for cake to celebrate one of their birthdays—significant in that the Council of Senior ‘Ulama condemned the celebration of birthdays as an innovation and imitation of the West33—Nuf learned that she would not be hired by the organization. Nuf felt herself to be a victim of injustice: her direct superior and the director had given different reasons for not keeping her, she said. She was in despair, since it had taken her a year to find a job, and she needed money. She did not come back to the organization, but I visited her sometimes at her parents’ house, and we phoned each other regularly. Nuf stayed in touch with only one of the employees, who had “the same background,” she said; she was also from a large tribe and had also worked in a hospital for several years before joining the organization, even if her family’s financial situation was better than that of Nuf ’s family. Both agreed that the atmosphere of the organization was “strange,” and that it was actually easier to work in a mixed space. We talked about this several times, and Nuf explained that she thought that she wasn’t hired because of her appearance, her style, the fact that she was not “free” enough. She explained that she wore clothing respecting the rules of modesty not out of any particular conviction, but because this was the habit she had learned at the hospital. She told me what her friend who had stayed at the organization had said, that the secretary hired instead of her was not more competent but only more “free.” This word “free” signifies both following trends and not respecting official Islamic rules, but also seems linked, based on what Nuf said, to a certain level of affluence. The father of the secretary with whom Nuf shared an office gave her the equivalent of her monthly salary as an allowance to spend on shopping. Nuf could not afford such a lifestyle. Organization A’s employees came from various social backgrounds and material circumstances; not all of them corresponded to the “free” style that Nuf interpreted as the cause of her not being hired. Two years later, in January 2009, I had the opportunity of talking about what had happened to Nuf with the director and another leader of the organization, who claimed not to judge an employee’s competence based on appearance. However, this led them to thinking aloud about consumerist displays among the employees. They explained that the woman who had been Nuf ’s direct superior, Turkiyya, had married a man who was not as rich as her father, and she tended to show off designer-brand articles fend of comments about the step down that she had taken through her

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marriage. In addition, the director remembered that an employee had come to her saying that as the director, she must herself sport a designer handbag, for the sake of the organization’s prestige: not to have one was, to use her own word, shameful (‘ayb). She mentioned that although all the employees had the latest outfits and cell phones, most of them did not possess laptop computers or other equipment that was not seen. Whether or not it was the cause of her not being hired, Nuf felt excluded for not conforming to norms of self-presentation, in that she could not participate in a central game among the other employees, at least among the Saudi women (the majority). Among them, those with conflictual relations in particularly strict households, such as Budur (see chapter 2), tried to hide this as much as possible from their colleagues. They attached particular importance to the interviews taking place in private and explained to me that they never spoke of family problems with the others. The imperative of openness promoted and staged among employees led some of them to fear being stigmatized by anything that their colleagues with more “open” families might judge as backward. Finally, the non-Saudi employees—Filipino cleaners and an Egyptian admin—did not participate at all in this game of self-stylization among colleagues, seen by the women themselves as specific to Saudi society. The sole exception was an employee with Yemenite citizenship, but who had been born in Riyadh. Other foreign employees did not take breaks with Saudi employees and rarely attempted to socialize with them. Their salaries were much lower than those of the Saudis, and they did not spend them in the same way. The performance of “modern femininity” thus contributed to fashioning new distinctions among Saudi women, while also reinforcing and renewing the ways in which they distinguished themselves from non-Saudi women.

Criticisms and Ruses Some of Nuf ’s former colleagues at Organization A conformed to the prevailing model of consumerist femininity but lacked the material means that this demanded. The experience of Amal, employed elsewhere, exemplifies this. Not long after having started a new hospital job, Amal, who had just earned a degree in psychology, explained during a conversation that since all her colleagues dressed “very chic” (kashkhat), she had bought fake matching Gucci tennis shoes and handbag. Like her colleagues, Amal wore a wide white hospital blouse over a long black skirt at work; she was veiled and a niqab covered her face. To feel comfortable among the hospital employees, she felt obliged

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to display the imitation Gucci handbag and shoes. At the same time, although she described this purchase as necessary, she seemed delighted to have invested in a panoply of fake Gucci gear. Although she regularly strolled around the fashionable Faysaliyya Mall, to make these purchases, Amal had gone to the Al-Andalus shopping center, where Asian-made knockoffs of European and American designer brands are sold, along with imports from Egypt and Syria. In this way, the increasing openness to global commercial exchange leads not only to the multiplication of malls and the implantation of major brands, but also to many parallel industries that import products that are either counterfeit or authentic, but sold at a reduced price. These come from delocalized production sites and arrive via Dubai. These two types of merchandise are very widely available; the “students’ souk” of the Alaysha campus sells counterfeit handbags and sunglasses of major brands, for example. This can be compared to the “subaltern cosmopolitanism” described by Diane Singerman and Paul Amar.34 Many members of the middle or lower classes went shopping in discount stores, even while frequenting the most upscale malls to walk around and see friends. These spaces are characteristic of young urban women’s sociability, as they allow for creating illusions regarding one’s household income level, or at least allow for not revealing it, to networks of acquaintanceship among university classmates or work colleagues: “If you are ashamed of your home, you see your friends here,” a female teacher of religion at primary school who frequents one of the Mamlaka’s cafés almost every day told me. As in any public space, only a partial glance is given to one’s background, activities and statuses, and one can attempt to master the impressions received by the people one meets. The practices of young Saudi women thus make malls into the most prestigious places for staging an imaginary repertoire of urbanity and modernity. The ruses of Amal and others demonstrate the inventiveness they deploy in order to conform to the model of consumerist femininity in spite of their limited means. In their own way, they appropriate the norm of showing off by displaying luxury brands. Their ruses can be considered as tactics (in Michel de Certeau’s terms)35 or “skills in terms of shopping” (as described by Daniel Miller).36 Even so, the result reinforces the model of consumerist femininity by its reproduction, its performance in public, rather than criticism or transgression. The ruses reveal power relations exercised through the promotion of this model of femininity by certain institutions and among peers. These “arts of doing”37 do not in any way erase the inequalities in income that lead some young urban women to practice such ruses in order to adopt a self-­presentation

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that is financially inaccessible to them.38 Many young urban women I met were critical of consumerism, but this criticism is most often ambivalent. Some moralistically denounced the consumerism of people poorer than themselves, without questioning their own practices. This, for example, was the case with Sultana, a twenty-four-year-old student from a family that had made a fortune in business. Sultana, her sisters, and I were having a discussion in the sumptuous living room reserved for the daughters of the house. They spoke of their expensive private school and the exorbitant cost of the year-end party that they had organized. Sultana added: Our society is a society of showing off, where people are too interested in the material side of things. This is not very good. Money is important, but it’s important to use it well. Here you can find a fairly poor family, but because of society and the environment around them they . . . buy expensive clothes and jewelry, and you then discover that they are in debt. It’s stupid. Given the importance of appearances, people who have less want to have the same appearance as those who have more. It’s become like Hollywood.

Sultana thus evaded criticism of showing off among the class to which she belonged. Moralistically denouncing the consumer practices of the poor was an expression of class distinction. Women who felt excluded from the game of conspicuous display and “showing off ” also denounced the superficiality of their peers. This is the case with those who worked to reimburse debts incurred by their fathers, to provide for their divorced or widowed mothers and siblings, or to pay for the purchase of independent housing with their husbands. During an informal conversation, Hissa, a twenty-eight-year-old graduate student, parodied the conversations of her colleagues who had “nothing to do”: “Your outfit is pretty! Where did you buy it? How much did it cost?” Unlike her colleagues, she explained to me, she had only herself to count on; no one gave her any money. That said, several women who were in this type of situation and talked this way when I met them later got better-paid jobs; they then developed consumer habits that conformed more to the dominant norm, investing in designer handbags, for example. For others, it was getting married that gave them the opportunity to lash out at shopping malls. Unless her father took it, the amount of money (mahr) received by the future wife used to be kept, in the form of gold, as a sort of insurance in case of repudiation, but today it is often at least partially spent on designer clothing. In the event of a divorce requested by the wife, the condition pronounced by the judge is often that she reimburse

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all or part of this amount to the husband, which can cause difficulties, because whereas gold keeps its value, fashionable clothing loses it very quickly and cannot be resold. Finally, some women felt the constraints linked to the model of consumerist femininity at least as strongly as those of the official Islamic rules.39 Criticisms of consumerism are ambivalent, however, and very different from the transgressive practices and denunciations of official Islamic rules analyzed in chapter 4. Women may criticize the model of consumerist femininity but often conform to it in practice. Their criticism and distantiation do not lead to lessening what they feel as the constraining power of consumerist norms in their lives. It is easier for them, somehow, to transgress official Islamic rules than to transgress consumerist norms.

The Buyat: Subversion of the Hegemonic Model of Femininity The model of Saudi consumerist femininity is in practice subverted in public spaces by the buyat—a neologism formed by adding the Arabic suffix of feminization -a (plural -at) to the English word “boy.” 40 In several Gulf countries, persons categorized as young women who dress in a way regarded as masculine—that is, in clothing that masks their “female forms” other than in an Islamic way—are called buyat.41 They wear men’s shirts, soccer jerseys, or another wide top, and sometimes a band to hide the chest. Buyat generally have short hair; some wear men’s perfumes and some have themselves called by a male first name. The ones I talked with had themselves called by their female given names and pronoun; at some point in the conversation, without me asking them, they would define themselves as buyat. This phenomenon is also sometimes designated by the term of masculinization istirjal.42 The performances of buyat in public, as well as the interpretations that are made, are significant of conflicts and negotiations around femininity in spaces shared by young urban women. These conflicts integrate consumer practices: the buyat style necessitates the purchase of fashion accessories and from foreign brands, and going to a hairdresser to get a haircut and dye one’s hair according to the latest trend. During the 2000s, buyat were rare, considered as original or eccentric, known by all on the Alaysha campus. Rajaa Alsanea’s novel Girls of Riyadh (Banat al-Riyad), which is partly set on the Alaysha campus, portrays one of them, Arwa, a student with short hair and a “masculinized” walk: “Was there anyone among the students at Alaysha who hadn’t heard of Arwa? . . . Everyone

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was afraid of her.”43 Rumors circulate about Arwa: a white sarwal (worn by men under their thawbs) has been seen under her black skirt; she put her arms around the waist of a girl in an ambiguous way (mashbuha), and so on. One of the main characters of the book, Sadim, avoids being alone with her. At the time of my research on campus, such a description would have been ridiculous, in that the buya style was widespread,44 considered as fashion, highly visible on campus and, though somewhat less so, in some shopping malls. Through lengthy discussions with them, and with students who did not self-define as such, I became interested in the way in which the self-presentations and behaviors of buyat are interpreted, typified, and categorized by others. On the Alaysha campus at the end of 2008, the zone near the new R ­ -Lounge café (along the lines of Starbucks) was where the buyat strolled and let themselves be seen. Many students had short hair, spiked or of different lengths, sometimes dyed fluorescent green, pink, or purple. One of them, for example, had short hair in a frizz, with spikes, and wore a white shirt, a black V-neck sleeveless sweater, suspenders, her mouth painted in fuchsia, and large sports sneakers. Some had piercings in the upper part of the ear or on the eyebrow. Several mentioned the influence in terms of style of Shane, a character often described as the most androgynous on the American TV show The L-Word, viewable on the Internet, which tells of the tribulations of some lesbians in Los Angeles. That said, the figures of transgression of dominant norms are also invented and circulate throughout the Arabian peninsula. Thus, in the ­Kuwaiti show ‘Adil ruh, broadcast for the first time during Ramadan 2005 (thus not long after the first showing of The L-Word), the actress Shujun alHajiri incarnates a buya character. Popular among young Saudi women, this show stages the fortunes and misfortunes of a rich Kuwaiti family, including a buya, among the adult children of the household. Some women described being tomboys since childhood, whereas others said that they had only adopted this self-presentation over the past few years, often since high school or college. Twenty-two-year-old Samira had been a buya for a few years, but had then resumed a “feminine” appearance. She explained: “My mother said: ‘I want my daughter to be feminine.’ I don’t like dresses and high heels. My mother was scared. I was a buya for four years, and now I’ve had enough, I’m growing out my hair.” Self-presentation as a buya may be hidden—some students can change themselves upon arriving on campus, or even put on their abayas before going out of their rooms, so that their parents do not see their outfits. When not hid-

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den, this can often be a source of family conflicts, as nineteen-year-old Suzan explained: “My parents know that I am a buya and give me a hard time. I tell my parents that I am normal, that my inside is worth my outside. My mother knows my appearance, but not [that I am] lesbian. She says that I pretend, [that] I am playing, and I tell her that if I made myself into a girl, that would be playing.” Some said that they wanted to contest the dominant model of femininity through self-presentation, which did not signify that it was a choice or a strategy. Several justified their self-presentation as buyat by saying that they would have liked to have been men, which would have given them greater freedom of movement (“I want to drive, not wear an abaya, to breathe”). They are tired of having to always justify their comings and goings to their parents, asking permission to go out (“Parents are always saying: you are a girl! You go out at this time, you come back at this time, etc.”). One of them deplored the fact that Saudi women were convinced of their physical weakness and their need for male protection and assistance. Some affirmed that they would not hesitate to fight, saying that there were sometimes fights between students on campus (some of which I had the opportunity to witness). These justifications do not constitute the motives that led them to adopt such self-presentations, but suggest the meaning they give to these, at least in our conversations within a group, in front of their friends and/or college classmates. Thus, the performance of a “masculine” self-presentation goes together with criticisms of the hegemonic model of femininity and the constraints that young Saudi women are up against, as opposed to the relative freedom (particularly of movement) enjoyed by Saudi men. Some buyat refuse to wear a veil over their hair in mixed spaces and complain of having to wear an abaya, that directly places them in a gender category, whereas without the abaya, they can be categorized as male, or at least not as female – they raise doubt in people’s minds. Discussions with non-buyat women showed me how buyat challenged habitual assumptions about gender and sexuality. Self-presentation as a buya is often described as a style, which some young women adopt for the sake of fashion, according to non-buyat. It may range from a simple short haircut, which is quite common, to a supposedly masculine gait and gestures. In 2008–2009, students—buyat or not—went beyond the diversity of appearances in distinguishing between “real” buyat, that is those who have wanted to dress and behave like men since childhood, for whom the desire came from within, and those who adopted short haircuts and ambiguous appearances just because it

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was stylish, to “attract attention,” as Fuz (who did not define herself as a buya) explained: There are girls who wear men’s soccer jerseys, etc., like American rappers, they wear them and walk like boys, but on the inside, no, you talk with her and she’s a girl, but it’s her style. . . . . . . You see that in some places where I go a lot. You find that for example in the Mamlakat al mar’a [women’s floor of the Mamlaka mall]. You find it sometimes there, girls with boyish haircuts wearing no veil and walking like that [tries to imitate what she means by “masculine”].

This passage shows the murkiness that buyat provoke for those who see them. Are they just following fashion in dressing as “girl-boys,” which would be another way of incorporating consumerist femininity? Or is this a way of rejecting norms of femininity experienced as constraining? Are they in the vanguard of fashion or subverting the dominant model of self-presentation among young urban Saudi women? Many non-buyat expressed doubts and questions about buyat’s intimate and sexual practices. On the Alaysha campus, some students walk in couples, hand in hand or with their arms around each other, one (as many of her classmates would say) “masculinized” (short hair, baggy sweatshirt, men’s sneakers) and the other “feminine” (blow-dried long hair and tight, form-fitting outfit). They pass by slowly, letting themselves be seen and shooting hostile looks at those who stare too intensely. These categorizations and classifications though derived from English words take on a particular meaning in Saudi dialect, in terms of style and/or identity. The buya-cute couple marks an opposition between two types of gender performance (one typified as “masculine” and the other as “feminine”). These categorizations are often associated with the “lesbian” word (or “lez lez,” “lesbo”) who, in spite of the appropriation of the English word, is also used to designate forms of subjectivity that are plural and specific to this social context. Fuz explained: There are masculinized girls who behave like men, or who would like to be men, and who have friends who are really stylish, cute and feminine [na‘uma, bannuta], I am the boy and you are the girl. . . . Those are lesbians. But not even always, sometimes they are not lesbians, sometimes you realize that the girl is just happy that someone takes care of her, that’s all, she is not lesbian. Sometimes not.

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Fuz’s terminology reflected the classification of gender performances in ­Riyadh’s “society of young women.” She not only used the Arabic adjective for “masculinized” in describing the buya but employed the adjective na‘uma to describe the “hyperfemininity” of the buya’s partner. She called the latter a ­bannuta, which means both “cute little girl” and a man who performs femininity. These words suggest a denaturalization of gender classifications by questioning the equivalence between declared gender identity and actual gender performance. To a certain extent, buya-cute couples subvert the heterosexual married couple in forming a couple in the absence of men.45 This “couple” is performed in a context where because of gender segregation, married couples do not really have any public presence: in Riyadh, one rarely sees a Saudi husband and wife strolling with their arms around each other or holding hands. They can walk together as long as they keep a certain distance from each other, and the woman wears an abaya, generally with her face covered. Buya-cute couples thus perform a public image of the couple that otherwise does not exist in Saudi Arabia. They make somehow visible intimate and/or sexual relations that are most often stigmatized and hidden. This type of visibility is characterized by its engendering doubts rather than certainty for those around them—this is still different from invisibility, which would mean hiding. Some, but not all, define themselves as “lesbians,” but would do so only in certain, specific, situations, for instance with some close friends. Moreover, as shown in Fuz’s comments, they are not necessarily categorized as such by those around them.46 Students tried on classifications, none of which were simple. Fuz’s hesitations reveal the doubts raised by this kind of “couple” on display in women’s spaces: are they just friends or do they have a sensual, love or sexual relationship? What are the boundaries between these types of relations? Doubts are not dissipated, both because they do not explicitly ask these questions and because the categories are fluid, which makes any classification perilous. Within women’s spaces in Riyadh, holding hands or putting one’s head on the other’s shoulder are quite common between friends and considered normal. They do not signify a relation other than friendship. Students walking in twos know that it is highly frowned upon to have a relation on another level with a “friend,” and that it should be kept secret, but that tenderness between friends in public is admitted. Many affirmed that although regarded as “deviance,”47 secret “sentimental relations between women” are nonetheless widespread among young Saudi women, well beyond buyat, who, moreover, do not necessarily have such sexual practices. A clear distinction is made between self-presentation and sex-

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ual practice. There were “lesbians” on campus who “did not look masculinized” and “did not tell anyone,” Fuz claimed. “They don’t say, ‘We are lesbians,’ those girls, and they look normal.” Others automatically associated “masculinization” with “loving women” or even “homosexuality.” In an interview, a non-buya said: “Here the proportion of homosexuality is very high in schools. My sister, who is a few years younger than me, says that there are a lot of buyat, those masculinized girls. They do not shave their legs and cut their hair very short, like boys, and they love girls.” Non-buyat find it difficult to categorize buyat performances and what they imply in terms of sexuality, since habitual classifications cannot be used to define and describe them. In terms of Goffman’s interactionist framework, this constitutes a subversion of norms.48 As for buyat themselves, most of those I spoke with on the subject confided that they have had different types of relations with other women, but that no one knew about it aside from a few of their close friends. They employed different words to qualify their practices and their relations, as seen in the following discussion with a group of students, including buyat. We were talking about the university and the campus when Shaykha, the most welcoming toward me, and who did not define herself as a buya, abruptly asked me point-blank if I was surprised by the presence of lesbians on campus. Later, we spoke about how others see buyat: Shaykha: For me, it’s about personal freedom. I’m with everyone. I sit with everyone. I don’t have any relationships, either with boys or with girls. Badriyya: I’ve had relations with girls, and now I don’t have them anymore. I stopped because it’s forbidden in Islam [haram fi-l-islam]. Nura: I went out with boys, then with girls, then with boys. Badriyya: What we’re telling you here, no one knows, otherwise we’d be in trouble. Shaykha: But actually, very few girls don’t love either girls or boys, are straight, can feel good without having a love relationship. Nura: Sorry Shaykha! But straight, that means those girls who love boys [laughter].

The unfolding of the conversation was based on permanent slippery slopes between questions of “masculinization” and “sexual orientation.” The conversation was equally marked by the different meanings given to terms borrowed from English, like lesbian and straight. Shaykha defined herself as “straight” to me because she did not engage in clandestine love relations, either with boys or with girls, not feeling the need. She gave the word a meaning specific to the Saudi context, in which relations outside of marriage are, in theory, banned.

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Nura used it according to a different normative framework, that is, to classify sexual orientations (a specific, situated discourse on sexuality). A little later in the conversation, Nura and Badriyya explained to me that to designate an intimate relationship they used the term khawiyya, an old, obsolete Saudi dialect word for “friend,” and that outsiders did not know its hidden meaning. Thus, although some transgressive styles and terms designating sexual categories may circulate transnationally, globally, and regionally, they are charged with specific local significance. Young urban Saudi women reinvent and redefine them. The fact that self-presentation said to be masculinized may be considered as a style is linked to the importance of consumerism among urban Saudi young women. In some ways, the spread of this “style” protects transgressive practices and contributes to it not being totally stigmatized, since appearance may or may not correspond to sexual “deviance.” This condition favors wide diffusion on campus, where performances transgressive of regulations are up to a point rather valued. In a way, this transgressive style may be partially adopted by students who don’t define themselves as buyat and don’t transgress dominant norms of gender and sexuality in other ways. It reveals, here again, ambivalence between resistance to dominant gender norms and consumer practices.

Struggle against “Masculinization”

The buyat’s transgression of gender norms has a cost. While most students transgress rules of self-presentation such as reserve and modesty, as defined by university regulations and the fatwas of the Council of Senior ‘Ulama, buyat transgress a model of femininity that has become dominant within the peer group. These transgressions are denounced through different types of discourses. “Be proud of your femininity: excuse me, but masculinization [istirjal ] is not for you; we rise up against whatever confuses your feminine nature,” a poster on campus in spring 2007 proclaimed, announcing a lecture by a female preacher aimed at buyat.49 Peers—other students—and relatives may also pronounce this type of injunction, participating in what might be called the “gender police”: the actions condemning or punishing what is currently considered as transgressive of norms defining femininity and masculinity and associated with women and men in a binary way.50 On campus, buyat are very numerous and visible and monitors seem to have shifted focus to subversions of the hegemonic model of femininity rather than transgressions in rules of modesty. This constitutes a displacing of the

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boundary on tolerated behaviors. At the beginning of the 2008 school year, according to students, the posts destined to monitor them were multiplied, from the entrance of campus (where monitors are supposed to check that entrants have their cards and respect the dress code) to the inside of buildings, where behaviors violating the regulations must be sanctioned. Posters signed by the Bureau of the Supervision and Guidance unit responsible for monitoring students indicate the displacing of this boundary and new transgressions by some students: It is strictly forbidden to wear large chains on which are hung designs going against proper practices such as skulls, indecent expressions, [and] photos of famous people, as well as putting piercings in unusual places such as the chin or the mouth, the tops of ears, near the eyebrows, etc. (message posted in December 2008)

Although university regulations promote principles of modesty that do not forbid either piercings or short haircuts, university monitors presently defend the requirement of conforming to a certain model of femininity, which has become the norm on campus, but is subverted by buyat. Monitors may convoke students who wear short hair or “unusual” piercings. However, whereas non-buyat I spoke with presumed that buyat had many problems with the administration, buyat told me that they did not. At worst, they were summoned, told to let their hair grow, maybe sign a promise not to do it again, sometimes lose points on their average if they “relapse.” They are so numerous and the administration cannot expel all of them from the university for such behavior. Generally, they adopt a cavalier attitude toward monitors, just as toward remarks by members of their households. The incitation to conform also comes from peers. Keep in mind that not all non-buyat reject buyat: at the university, the latter do not constitute a separate group from “feminine” students, even if some groups like Shaykha’s include some and others do not. However, many non-buyat, some of whom may have had some buyat friends, expressed negative judgments of them. The remarks heard most often were: “They just want to get attention”; “We don’t hang out with them”; and “They have a psychological problem.” As in media discourses, “affective relations between girls” were sometimes interpreted as the consequence of “emotional isolation” or of earlier sexual abuse.51 Criticism of buyat is often mixed with other types of distinction in terms of ethnicity and class, in spite of the fact that buyat belong to all social groups. A student thus evoked

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a “group of black buyat” who hung out on the steps of one of the university buildings: they had strange short haircuts and were “scary,” she told me. This is consistent with what I heard on the subject of the taggagat, Saudi women musicians, generally black and from poor backgrounds, often described as (sexually) deviant. The link between conforming to gender norms and class belonging is clearly stated by Aliyya, a student who described her own family as prestigious and lived in a chic Riyadh neighborhood. During an interview, she spoke in these terms about “deviants” at the university: “You recognize them because they wear a lot of makeup, . . . they have piercings in the mouth, in the ears. I don’t have any friends at all among these girls. If I feel that a girl is deviant, I stop seeing her right away, because it’s forbidden by our religion.” Aliyya explained that she only talked to girls dressed in a “natural” way. She herself received me dressed in jeans and an expensive brand-name polo shirt. She explained that she loves designer brands because she loves “wearing clothes with a clean, classy, and elegant appearance.” She mixed categorization in terms of income level and morality: “Among [deviants] there are girls from good families, but [because of their behavior] I regard them as lower class.” For Aliyya, appearance, class, and lifestyle are intrinsically linked. Background is indicated by appearance, which allows girls from good families to recognize one another: I have a lot of college friends. I see them on social occasions, I go out with them. We go to cafés, to restaurants, to Tahliyya or to the Mamlaka. My friends are from the same background as me, we dress with the same style. . . . My friends have the same appearance, the same lifestyle as I do. Because if I had a dirty friend [wiskha], people would think I was like her. It would damage my reputation.

Aliyya is very preoccupied with her reputation and believes that friends with whom she hangs out in the mall or the university contribute to the image she seeks to present. Her remarks are atypical, in that most of her peers say that one should not judge based on appearances, but this is revealing of some classifications in use. In criticizing buyat, the discourse of some young urban women aligns with that of official institutions to reaffirm the hegemonic model of consumerist femininity, founded on a mix of femininity, material comfort, fashion or style, and reputation. Through self-presentation in public spaces, they show others that they are young urban women from good families, following fashion and adopting a “modern” lifestyle that implies specific and limited transgressions of official Islamic rules.

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What is new in the buyat phenomenon? In the absence of a history of gender norms in the Arabian Peninsula, this is difficult to determine. That people legally classified as women adopt self-presentations usually attributed to men is surely not new. The novelty of the buyat lies neither in their performance of masculinity nor in the intimate relations some of them have with women. Rather, it is to be found in the psychologizing explanations offered for the phenomenon: boredom, “emotional need,” and “breakdown of the family,” to cite only the most common examples. In addition, buyat styles give them a public presence and make them exist as a category, linked to consumer practices and reinterpreting existing transnational models, albeit one with fluid boundaries. Afsaneh Najmabadi has shown how the binary and rigid association of femininity and masculinity with people categorized as women and men respectively consolidated during the modern era (roughly from the end of the eighteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth) in Iran under the Qajar dynasty, where to the detriment of homosocial gatherings, heterosociality was promoted as a sign and component of “modernity.” According to her analysis, interactions between men and women in the context of the promotion of the gender binary and heterosociality contributed to rigidifying the definition of femininity and restricting the range of allowed behaviors.52 In Riyadh, heterosociality is not currently clearly promoted, even if certain liberals influential in the government plead in its favor; it is, on the contrary, punished on various levels. Owing to the absence of men, women-only spaces and gatherings probably allow digressions from dominant norms of femininity to be less violently repressed, and buyat are visible and numerous. This differs from other, less segregated societies, where, for instance, the veiled/unveiled divide is an important criterion of classification among women (which it is not in Riyadh’s womenonly spaces). The divide between those committed to Islam and those not is more important, though it is relatively fluid. As for the buya/non-buya divide, also fluid, its visibility and centrality seem relatively specific to the Gulf region. On the other hand, homosocial gatherings are also spaces for circulation of a discourse strictly defining the norms of femininity to which persons categorized as females must conform to be respectable: this is what I have called the model of consumerist femininity. This is the object of tensions and negotiations. The adoption of a fashionable, “modern,” and “feminine” self-­ presentation, contrary to the austerity of official Saudi dress codes, has become dominant within peer groups. It is subverted by those who adopt a “masculine” appearance, condemned by women preachers. Islamic discourse and the insti-

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tutional rules of the university campus, which condemn the “masculinization” of girls, are thus in opposition led to join with cosmetic manufacturers in promoting consumerist femininity.

Conclusion In homosocial spaces and gatherings, young Saudi women negotiate norms of public behavior in the context of reform discourse, liberalization of exchange of goods, and global and regional circulation of fashions and styles. The model of Islamic femininity founded on modesty is transgressed, first, through the model of consumerist femininity performed within shared spaces between young urban women. The use of cosmetics, the wearing of designer brands, as well as regional and global circulation of famous women’s images contribute to fashioning this model of femininity. Participating in this appearance game is a way of negotiating one’s place within the society of young women. Not all Saudi women participate in the same way in gatherings allowed by homosocial spaces. Some feel relatively excluded owing to the impossibility of conforming to these norms of femininity; others develop tactics that enable them to conform to the hegemonic model more cheaply. This means looking rich, even when you are not; showing off designer-brand clothing and accessories, even if they are fakes. This behavior does not mean that the women involved are not critical of consumerism, but this has little influence on their practices, hence the ambivalence. The second mode of transgression of the Islamic model of femininity subverts the model of consumerist femininity that has become hegemonic. In adopting a “masculine” appearance, buyat seem like a dissonant element within women’s spaces, because they give rise to doubts concerning both gender and sexual practices. Their performances in public are accompanied for some of them by criticism of the constraints imposed on the activities and mobility of Saudi women in Riyadh. The warnings given to buyat by institutions and their peers contribute to reaffirming the model of consumerist femininity that has become hegemonic. They reveal how the contours of the legitimate definition of femininity are negotiated within women’s spaces. Especially in contexts that are thought of as particularly strict in terms of morality, consumer lifestyles of the “young” or of “women” have sometimes been interpreted, along the lines of cultural studies, as arising from a “youth culture that subverts dominant norms in terms of generation, morality and gender.”53 The notion of a subculture generally designates underground, subordinate, or subaltern cultures, sometimes regarded as deviant, developed by

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people in dominated positions owing to their class, gender, ethnicity, or age, which differ from the dominant category.54 This notion has been criticized, both because it runs the risk of reifying the studied object, and because it has often led to focusing on the study of countercultures that were masculine and young, and whose protesting or nonconformity has sometimes been idealized.55 Lifestyles of young urban women, which include a dimension of cultural invention, have not been interpreted here in terms of subculture. It is impossible to identify a single subculture of young urban Saudi women, since the styles that they invent and perform are diverse and are sites of tensions for some of them. All do not share the same relation to official Islamic rules: buyat do not position themselves in the same way as those committed to Islam, for example. We can certainly consider buyat and those committed to Islam as subcultures. However, rather than establishing typologies, the analysis points to the production of norms and hierarchies in homosocial spaces and gatherings. Norms are recomposed and displaced through ordinary classifications mobilized by young Saudi women in situations of interaction. New norms negotiated within a peer group become criteria for hierarchization between those who conform and those who do not.



CONCLUSION

T H E L A S T T I M E I W E N T T O R I YA D H (in 2013), one of the many barriers described in this book had fallen. The family sections in shopping mall food courts are not closed off anymore—they still exist, but they are no longer surrounded by walls that conceal the people sitting in them.1 The two friends who told me about this change were annoyed by it. They were used to removing their niqabs in these spaces, and could no longer do so since they were now in full view of everyone, rather than separated and concealed. They missed the intimacy (khususiyya) they used to have when those spaces were forbidden to single men. At first glance, such a change may seem trivial; my hope is that this book has shown that such arrangements are highly significant in shaping a specific spatial economy of gender. They not only affect the daily lives of urban Saudis but are indicative of changes in ways of governing (governmentalities). Spaces, visibility, and invisibility are negotiated through many entangled power relations. State institutions, the private sector, global consumer capitalism, transnational discourses on women and gender, and various injunctions, whether addressed by the family or peers, all impact on Saudi women’s scope of action.

Transformation without Contestation Although young urban Saudi women share common spaces, practices, and lifestyles, these are not necessarily the basis for organized feminist mobilizations. Indeed, women’s renegotiations of public order and gender norms are ambiva-

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lent. In a context where women’s access to public spaces has been constructed as a symbol of Western hegemony versus cultural and/or Islamic authenticity, most young urban Saudi women do not adopt confrontational positions, but rather appropriate consensual discourses in creative ways. Through these discourses, they push the limits that constrain their mobility and activities. One example is self-help discourse: while it promotes a therapeutic, apolitical, or even depoliticizing interpretation of problems encountered by individuals, its appropriation by young urban women contributes to publicizing subjects that were previously little discussed, and to legitimating new activities. Reform discourse, particularly on women’s rights in Islam and the injunction to contribute to society also constitute relatively consensual arguments, appropriated by young urban women in negotiations with their families. Transgressions of official Islamic rules may be considered as forms of resistance to the rigorist disciplining of both women’s and mixed spaces. However, it must be observed that these do not give way to more generalized collective claims or organized demonstrations. At the same time, their daily repetition, widespread among young urban women, contributes to displacing the permitted norms of behavior, and thus to transforming public order. Transgressions are grounded in everyday sociabilities, from gathering to grouping, and thus participate in reinforcing an “us” of young urban women. It is interesting to consider these actions, negotiations, and appropriations in relation to debates in the public arena (mainly newspaper columns and petitions) about women’s mobility, often linked to concepts such as Western influence, Islam, customs and traditions, progress, and Saudi Arabia as a nation. The young urban women I met did not participate in this public arena. In some cases, this was perhaps because they did not want to call attention to themselves. Or perhaps the terms of the debates did not seem to involve the issues that concerned them. The repertoires available to them are restricted in a context where any collective action, apart from petitions, is repressed. Whatever the case, most of them seemed quite indifferent to these debates. They identified neither with liberals nor with rigorists, the two terms with which they designated public figures. The discourses they did identify with, such as self-help, were not considered as part of the “Western influence versus authenticity” dichotomy. The qualification of discourses or practices as Western is selective, and I never heard anyone telling me that self-help was a result of Western influence, notwithstanding that books by American psychologist authors are best sellers in Saudi Arabia. This may be because personal develop-

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ment is not perceived as a political discourse, unlike women’s rights’ discourse, which is considered as highly political. Young urban Saudi women nonetheless collectively displace norms, both by appropriating consensual discourse and through reproduction among themselves of practices transgressing official Islamic regulations. This is made possible by their high level of education, an asset in family negotiations, and by their sharing of women-only spaces, allowing both the spread of transgressive practices and the development of homosociality, formed by ephemeral ties as well as more durable relations of friendship. In inventing these new lifestyles and subjectivities, they subject themselves to new norms.

Extending the Scope of the State Complex interactions between state transformations and transformations of the family institution affect, and are affected by, new behaviors among the younger generation. The current definition of the family has been shaped by processes of state centralization, progressively eroding tribal structures and families with lineage on which the political organization of the peninsula’s societies was previously founded. A “nuclear” definition of the family was institutionalized, and legal guardianship became a state tool for reaching female citizens through a male relative, designated among the closest ones. In practice, however, the development of segregated institutions for women in the 1970s and 1980s contributed to lessening the role of the legal guardian, and thus of the nuclear family as intermediary between state institutions and Saudi women. Since that period, an increasingly large proportion of women have received an education shaped by public schools and colleges, and a small proportion of them have become agents of the state as professors and administrative employees. They developed time spaces and activities that are not linked to their nuclear or extended family, though their participation in these activities had to be authorized by their legal guardian. Indeed, most young urban women cited restrictions imposed by their nuclear or extended families as the greatest hurdles to their mobility or their activities. The way in which they identified difficulties and obstacles signifies a specific discourse and world vision: it reveals that they consider their own individual activities and desires—outside the family—as legitimate. Concern for reputation reveals much about these transformations. Compromising one’s invisibility is, for example, among the violences feared in mixed public spaces. Moreover, reputation can also be a negotiating tool. Young urban Saudi women, who are generally more educated than their par-

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ents (or at least their mothers), negotiate greater autonomy from their families using arguments such as women’s rights in Islam or the danger of being considered backward by their peers. They often use the same arguments in the context of their own goals and limitations as experienced within their families as the government uses in its reform discourse; notably, they invoke Islam and moderation against what they call backward customs. In this way, young urban Saudi women contribute to spreading and entrenching a discourse marked by the stigmatization of a reinvented past and of the people associated with it, seen as backward. More specifically, decontextualized mobilization of elements of a real or imagined past serves to legitimate changes currently taking place. Furthermore, through their transgressions of official regulations, including sometimes when faced with those responsible for enforcing them, young urban women contribute to questioning the model of Islamic femininity promoted since the 1970s, founded on a maximalist interpretation of religious precepts. This also resonates with the government’s reform discourse. Finally, they appropriate the injunction to exercise salaried employment inasmuch as this allows them a degree of autonomy from their families. In these ways, young Saudi women’s relation to the state has become increasingly direct—a process stemming from state institutions through the generalization of personal identity cards, the creation of women’s sections in state institutions and ministries, and promotion of female employment. Young urban women who appropriate state discourses in their own aims are equally responsible for this shift: their agency is essential to the process. Since the family is experienced as the most significant source of limits to their mobility and daily activities, young urban women invent themselves elsewhere, subject to other norms, through which they take on other statuses, other ways of belonging. While appropriating elements of the government’s reform discourse, they contribute to delegitimizing public order founded on a rigorist interpretation of Islamic precepts, but also the family order itself. Indeed, in using reform discourse to go beyond the limits they face, young urban women contribute to upholding it. In this way, they participate in the long-term formation of the Saudi state: the relation between Saudi women and state institutions is increasingly direct, which means that a group previously marginalized becomes increasingly central in state policies, and that the state extends its scope. This dynamic seems even more accentuated in recent years, marked by what has been called the Arab Spring and the many measures announced by the king in that regional context, which have often been interpreted as a response to the potential revolt of Saudi

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youth, who are largely unemployed. The state has increased its control of the population both in direct ways, for instance, through its growing control of telecommunications and social networks,2 and indirectly, for instance, by creating files on those who receive unemployment subsidies. This is all the more the case for Saudi women: they are increasingly visible and controlled, as suggested, in a very physical way, by the removal of the walls around family sections in shopping mall food courts, a change said to be for security reasons. With this change, all customers, men and women alike, are made visible at a glance. The new requirement that women reveal their faces for security checks, introduced by the Consultative Council in November 2012, has the same connotation.3 For different reasons and in different ways, two groups among the adult population were mainly controlled in indirect, subsidiary ways by the Saudi state: Saudi women and non-Saudi residents. Saudi women’s relation to the state and other institutions was almost always mediated by their male relatives. Before the creation of women’s identity cards in the early 2000s, for example, the government did not possess photos of Saudi women; if a woman had to be identified, it referred to her male legal guardian, or mahram. The relation to the state of nonnational residents has been mediated by sponsorship (kafala), a complex system that, depending on their situation, could link them to their employer, a male relative (for some women and children), and/or a Saudi citizen, who could be male or female. These modes of mediation have not disappeared, but the state more and more closely and directly controls both populations, for interrelated purposes. For nonnational residents, this is in the framework of the nationalization of jobs, a policy that aims at replacing them by nationals and relies notably on direct controls in firms. At the same time, this policy is one of the ways in which Saudi women are increasingly directly targeted by state education, training, and employment programs, giving them access to spaces such as shopping malls, supermarkets, and the women-only sections of private firms’ premises. Urban Saudi women’s new lifestyles and visibility are thus significant of, and participate in, the formation and increasing scope of the state, as well as transforming the image of the Saudi nation.

Transforming Gender Norms and the Image of the Nation The increasing visibility of urban and “modern” lifestyles has led to a transformation of dominant norms of femininity. These specifically Saudi urban femininities, performed within public spaces of the capital, indirectly participate in renewing the nation’s image, an objective central in the project of reform.

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Transformations of gender norms participate in transforming images of the nation. In shopping malls, behind the tinted windows of their cars, in banks, in newspapers, on television, and in bookshops, young Saudi women are both visible and invisible. They take many precautions to not be recognized, identifiable as a daughter of such and such a family. They nonetheless are recognized precisely as young urban Saudi women, wearing the shoulder abaya with rhinestone borders in purple or turquoise, sneakers or high heels, a Vuitton or Gucci handbag—whether a real one or a fake. In addition, mixed public spaces let this “Saudi society” be seen, staging and incarnating an image as much for Saudis as for foreigners, in contrast to women’s spaces, which cannot be photographed or filmed, except when the women are not there. Some consumer products whose brands have a Western connotation in the Saudi context are given specific significations, since they are appropriated by young urban women, who stage themselves in front of strangers as openminded but also as rich and sophisticated, feminine, “modern” subjects. While stigmatizing backwardness, the women I met implicitly expressed criteria for the legitimate way to behave as Saudi women today: paid work in the private sector, a high level of education, fluency in English and IT, tolerance as opposed to rigorism, the ambition to move up in the world and to “grow” through various activities, the desire to contribute to society, to do something for the nation, the rhetorical assertion of nondiscrimination on the basis of family or geographical origins, a self-presentation that is cosmopolitan, feminine, stylish; all this “with respect for Shari‘a,” since transgressions among young urban women do not constitute a break with this, but rather from the rigorist interpretation inherited from the Islamic Awakening. Such are the most valued lifestyles for Saudi women today. Reform discourse aims at changing the rest of the world’s image of Saudis, but also at refounding a nation on other grounds than those that favored the spread of a violent Islamic activism, threatening the regime’s stability. Whereas Saudi women were put aside by the development discourse of the 1970s and 1980s, young urban women play a central role in the national project of reform. Through the lifestyles that they adopt, they constitute a central category for the modern and tolerant image of the Saudi nation currently promoted by the government. This less austere image of the Saudi nation remains founded on the strong distinction between Saudis and foreign residents, affirmed in daily interactions both through respect for Islamic precepts and through economic superiority. Conforming to and appropriating the model of consumerist femininity, young urban women differentiate them-

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selves in public spaces from nonnational female residents, whose resources do not allow such sophisticated self-presentations, or who do not conform to the codes of feminine elegance as negotiated among young urban Saudis. Also excluded are those women who cannot access public spaces owing to a lack of mobility or (paid or unpaid) assignation to domestic spaces. In mixed spaces, wearing a form-fitting abaya bordered in rhinestones with matching scarf, with or without a niqab, is a sign of both refinement and distinction from other models of femininity that are not specifically Saudi or Islamic. Young urban Saudi women’s performances in public spaces contribute to “doing difference” in terms of nationality, notably through the staging of income level and religious belonging. Shopping malls, photographs of which often illustrate articles in the foreign press about Saudi Arabia, in some ways are theaters for staging this modern image of Saudi Arabia, offered to Saudis and to the world. Nonnational residents (especially the women working in women’s public spaces or homes) are relatively invisible in this image.4 Besides, some Saudi women do not ­conform to this image. Among these are the buyat, who reject the imperative of femininity; women excluded from consumerism by poverty, although some of the younger generation of these adopt the lifestyles described and use ruses to belong to the peer group; and some women with rural or other regional backgrounds who have recently arrived in Riyadh and do not see the point of “walking in circles” in a mall where everything is more expensive than in the “popular souk.”

Segregations, Securitization, and Homosociality Gendering the approach of segregations –especially, but not only for a city like Riyadh—adds another perspective to the “death of public spaces” argument, which denounces their privatization and the spreading of surveillance technologies. Generally speaking, Riyadh’s inhabitants are compartmentalized: men separated from women, the wealthiest from the poorest, and Saudis from foreigners, who themselves are compartmentalized according to nationality, income level, and gender. These various forms of segregation translate into walls, tinted windows in cars, checkpoints, and borders maintained in situations of interaction within shared spaces, particularly workplaces or shopping malls. In the wake of 9/11 and the 2003 attacks on Saudi territory, some of these boundaries correspond to a governmental strategy, as in the case of totally securitized compounds (the Saudi equivalent of gated communities). Surrounded

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by barbed wire and guarded by checkpoints with tanks and machine guns, these spaces are only for specific nationalities (Saudis are forbidden in most of them). They allow an upper class of expatriates (generally American, European, or Arab) to enjoy mixed swimming pools and drunken parties without being bothered by the CPVPV, which has access to any house outside compounds. In this case, compartmentalization can be a public policy geared toward having qualified, rich, mostly Western expats come to Saudi cities without them being confronted with, or having to conform to, local rules and norms. Although gender segregation is the result of the shaping of a new state, it is articulated in specific ways with the city’s general securitization, especially through the multiplication of shopping malls and their popularity among Saudi women. Although forms of segregation are layered upon each other, ­archipelagos of closed, securitized spaces can nonetheless be used as public by those who can access them. Indeed, it is because these segmented spaces are securitized that young urban Saudi women can have access to them. The city of Riyadh is a prime example of this disposition rather than an exception. Such an analysis does not aim at defending shopping malls and securitization, but rather at showing that inequalities in access to public spaces—or the way in which urban space, supposedly accessible to everyone, is gendered—contribute to the success of these new havens of security devoted to consumerism. Contrary to the discourse on women’s rights, neither shopping malls nor the major brands that are sold there are seen as “Trojan horses of Western hegemony.” Practices developed in them are central to the transformation of interlocked hierarchies of gender, class, and nationality. Increasing control and compartmentalization combine in specific ways. Recent years have been marked by the widening of both women-only spaces (with the creation of the “world’s largest women’s university,” for instance) and mixed spaces (especially many workplaces and shopping malls). The latter participate in transforming modalities of control and compartmentalization: less gender segregation, more exclusion of the poor and uneducated; the inclusion of (certain) women in a mixed world seen as more modern and professional. Since being able to work and spend leisure time in mixed places is increasingly valued by Saudi women, some walls might disappear. However, this will not necessarily be experienced as liberation by all Saudi women. This transformation may lead to the exclusion of some of them who actually prefer homosociality. The “unmixed” environment claimed by certain radical feminist movements in other contexts is generally imposed on Saudi women, but was

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also preferred by most of those I met. It engenders the exclusion of Saudi women from the main sites of decision-making and considerably limits where they can go. Nonetheless, segregation has shaped a “society” of young urban women around large homosocial gatherings. Staying among women most of the time allows them to adopt behaviors that would be unimaginable in mixed spaces, as well as presentations questioning the hegemonic model of femininity, even if there are also sanctions in this women-only archipelago. The absence of men’s direct control contributes to shaping specific forms of autonomy. Women-only spaces are thus central to understanding how young urban Saudi women invent new lifestyles, while simultaneously transforming the dominant Saudi norms of femininity.

R E F E R E NCE M AT T E R

AC K NOW L E D GM E N T S

I am greatly indebted, first and foremost, to those I spent time with in Saudi Arabia, who introduced me to their friends and relatives and were willing to share their experiences with me. My “family” in Riyadh has been a fundamental support for my presence there, and I hope its members know how important they are to me, although I cannot mention their names here. The King Faisal Center for Research and Islamic Studies has hosted me every time as an invited researcher, and I would like to thank all my colleagues there for being so welcoming and supportive. This project has evolved a lot, and this book is the outcome of a long process. I would like to thank Kate Wahl at Stanford University Press for her enthusiasm for and work on the text. Anonymous reviewers provided suggestions that helped me transform the book. Kate Rose, who worked with me as a translator, spent considerable time searching for the best words and formulations. She has been highly supportive and patient throughout the project, and I am deeply grateful to her. I also thank those who have worked on the project at Stanford University Press, especially Mariana Raykov, Frances Malcolm, and Peter Dreyer for his editing work and valuable comments on the manuscript. Working on this project has been possible thanks to my position as a researcher since 2011 at the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), the French National Center for Scientific Research. Warmest thanks to my colleagues on PRO team at the Centre Maurice Halbwachs, especially Sophie Pochic and Patrick Michel, for their support for this project, which enabled me to obtain partial funding for the book’s translation, in addition to offering me a friendly and stimulating working environment. I am grateful to all those who have contributed to this project in various ways, from discussing and suggesting analytical arguments to offering moral support, during the writing of this book or at earlier stages, notably Lila Abu Lughod, Séverine Arsène, Laure Bereni, Yasmine Berriane, Anne-Sophie Bonnet, Eli Bureau, Bintou Dembélé, Ulrike Freitag, Marie-Laure Geoffray, Lucille Grüntz, Reguina HatzipetrouAndronikou, Marylou Impellizeri, Alex Jaunait, Abir Krefa, Soline Laplanche-Servigne, Stéphanie Latte Abdallah, Laurence Louer, Catherine Marry, Elisabeth Marteu, Marine Martin, Charlotte Prieur, Carole Stromboni, and Hélène Thiollet. I also thank the scholars and students in gender studies, and the feminist friends who challenged my assumptions in France and Saudi Arabia, as well as in Rabat and Berlin. Finally, I thank my friends, family, and those close to me for sharing the energy necessary for a project like this one with me.

NOTES

Preface

1.  See “Un Zoo féminin dans le désert saoudien” [A female zoo in the Saudi desert], Charlie Hebdo, August 22, 2012, and “Arabie Saoudite: Bientôt une ville réservée aux femmes . . . pour les émanciper” [Saudi Arabia: A women-only city soon . . . to liberate them], Causette, no. 27 (September 2012). While no study has systematically analyzed media coverage of “Saudi women,” Madawi Al-Rasheed’s recent book gives useful insights about how “the Oriental gaze . . . still fascinated by the hidden lives of veiled Muslim women” shapes the evaluation of Saudi women’s literature in the international press (Al-Rasheed 2013: 217). 2.  See, e.g., “Saudi Arabia and Its Women,” New York Times, September 26, 2011. 3.  Most Saudi women in Riyadh cover their faces. This is done either with a thin, transparent scarf that covers a woman’s hair or by wearing a niqab or a burqa‘ (pronounced burga‘ in Saudi dialect). The slit enabling the burqa‘ wearer to see is generally larger than that of a niqab, and it has string between the two eyes. The burqa‘ has “bedouin” connotations, since it was worn by women of some nomadic tribes, and official fatwas consider it less proper from an Islamic point of view than the niqab. Women “committed to Islam” generally drape a very thin piece of fabric over the niqab or burqa‘, which also covers their eyes. What is called a burqa‘ in Saudi Arabia (bottom left on the cover), has nothing in common with the Afghan burka. 4.  G. W. Bush quoted in Abu Lughod 2002: 783. 5.  For more details, see chap. 1. 6. Vitalis 2007. 7.  Amar and El Shakry 2013. 8. The abaya is the black overgarment worn by all females in mixed-gender public spaces in Saudi Arabia from around the age of eight onward (it is required to attend third grade). The “head abaya” (‘abaya ‘ala-l-ra’s) should be distinguished from the “shoulder abaya” (‘abaya ‘ala-l-katf). The first covers its wearer from the top of the head to the feet and is very wide, whereas the second is put on like a coat, on the shoulders, and can thus be more fitted (it is worn with a veil). Fatwas of the Council of Senior ‘Ulama (a state institution) recommend wearing the head abaya, since it completely hides the body. Abayas are only worn in mixed-gender spaces; in spaces forbidden to men, women do not wear one. This means that most women (except those working in mixed spaces) actually only

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wear an abaya for one or two hours per day, during their commutes between home and the university, for example, or when they walk around a mall or shop in a supermarket. It is important to keep in mind that Saudi women do not wear the abaya all day, everywhere. Hijab is the generic term for clothing that respects the principle of modesty for women. There are debates about what constitutes hijab: covering one’s hair? one’s face? wearing a long skirt? wearing an abaya? wearing a head abaya or shoulder abaya?

Introduction

Epigraph source: Al-‘Iraqi 2003: 113. Most of the epigraphs in this book are extracts from interviews or texts written by Saudi women. 1.  The English equivalents of the commonplace Saudi terms mukhtalat (mixed) and ikhtilat (gender mixing) are used throughout this book to designate situations occupied by both men and women. 2. Doumato 1991, 1992. 3.  For more details, see chap. 1. 4.  Foucault (1982) 2000. 5.  My analysis of Saudi reform discourse has been greatly inspired by the analysis of “remaking women” as part of modernizing projects in the Middle East, though the context and historical period differ. See Abu Lughod 1998, and also Kandiyoti 1991. 6.  Abdullah has been king since 2005, but he has governed since his predecessor, King Fahd, delegated authority to him in 1996 after suffering a stroke. 7.  See, e.g., “Three Years of Reform and Progress,” Arab News, June 30, 2008. 8.  These changes met with various practical complications. See Hertog 2010. 9. Vitalis 2007. 10.  See esp. Abu Lughod 1998. 11.  On queer theory and Middle Eastern Studies, see Amar and El Shakry 2013 and Mikdashi 2013. 12. Rofel 1999. 13. Hanieh 2011. Also see Aarts and Nonneman 2005. 14. Hibou 1999. 15.  Corruption documented and denounced notably by the Twitter account ­­@­mujtahidd, massively followed since 2011. 16.  Here I am inspired by Rofel 1999, as interpreted by De Koning 2005. 17. Mouline 2011. 18.  The Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice (CPVPV) is never called the “religious police” in Arabic, but rather the Committee (hay’a). The name derives from the Qur’anic principle of “the promotion of virtue and the repression of vice” (al-amr bi-l-ma‘ruf wa-l-nahi ‘an al-munkar), according to which each Muslim must encourage those around him or her to live according to religious precepts. This activity was not originally paid work. However, the CPVPV today is a state institution employing civil servants, sometimes assisted by volunteers. Its members are called ­mutawwi‘ (pl. mutawi‘a). They wear the thawb, a long white djellaba, whereas regular police officers wear uniforms.

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The CPVPV is empowered to arrest people and remand them in custody, and it collaborates very closely with the city police in controlling morality. Checkpoints are common in the city, and police officers inspect who is in the car. A man and a woman who are not married to each other run the risk of being arrested not only by the CPVPV but also by city police. 19.  Here I am inspired by the concept of power used by Foucault 1998 (1976). 20.  Houssay-Holzschuch and Teppo 2009. 21.  Habermas (1962) 1989. 22. Davis 1992. 23. Valentine 1989; Lieber 2008. 24. Joseph 1999; 2002; Goffman 1966; 1971. 25.  I found the analysis of De Koning 2009 on Cairo very helpful in this regard. 26.  Butler (1990) 1999. 27.  This is not the case with Butler. See Brickell 2005. 28.  In other Islamic countries as well, the question of women’s presence in urban public spaces has been central to conflicts regarding “Western influence,” often invoking an attachment to a reinvented “authenticity,” be it on religious or national grounds. See, e.g., Göle (1993) 1996. 29.  I am inspired by Goffman (1956) 1959 and Butler (1990) 1999. Also see Brickell 2005. 30.  As conceptualized originally by Weber (1905) 2002. 31. Foucault 1988: 244. 32.  Abu Lughod 1998: 13. 33. Çinar 2005. 34. Foucault 1997: 60–65. 35.  This is partly the framework used in the analysis of “young upper middle class professionals” in Cairo in De Koning 2009. 36.  The few studies previously conducted on different categories of women in Saudi Arabia (e.g., Almana 1981, Altorki 1986, and Yamani 1996) focus on particular groups and have demonstrated considerable disparities between them. For a more detailed analysis of academic works, but also contemporary essays and novels on women in Saudi Arabia, see Al-Rasheed 2013. 37. Boltanski 1982: 51. 38.  Saudi Arabia, Central Department of Statistics and Information, “Quarterly Unemployment Rates, 2013,” www.cdsi.gov.sa/english/ (accessed December 13, 2013) 39. Khalifa 2001: 229. 40.  In the early 1980, the average number of children per Saudi woman was 8.26; it was 4.37 in 2000. 41.  For the percentage of brides according to age, see Ministry of Economy and Planning, The Eighth Development Plan (2005–2009), www.mep.gov.sa/home/Home/ English/8Plan/Contents.htm, p.78 (accessed July 3, 2009). 42. www.arabnews.com/news/468431; www.alarabiya.net/articles/2012/02/15/19

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4847.html; www.saudigazette.com.sa/index.cfm?method=home.regcon&contentid= 20130323158091 (accessed December 13, 2013). 43. Katakura 1977: 94. 44.  The fatwas of the Council of Senior ‘Ulama allow for contraception provided it “delays” births rather than preventing them. 45.  West and Fenstermaker 1995. 46.  For more details concerning the poor, see Le Renard 2008b. 47. Al-Sana‘ 2005. 48. Vitalis 2007. 49.  The bedouin/sedentary distinction refers to past nomadism, although some tribes include both branches said to be bedouin and others said to be sedentary. Another distinction, that between qabili and khadiri, is based on possession of tribal genealogy, that is, knowing one’s ancestors, which is held to be prestigious. While “tribals” (qabili) can recite the list of their ascendants, “nontribals” (khadiri) have one or more ancestors who did not belong to an Arabian Peninsula tribe (in which case they are often of foreign origin) or who are unknown, which raises suspicions of adultery or of banishment following a crime. Those identified as “black” or “descendants of slaves” (‘abid) are most often considered khadiri, even if some have the names of tribes, because slaves used to take the name of the people they were serving. Children of slaves were born free, and slavery was abolished in 1962. Bedouin are, in general, all attached to tribes (qabili). Sedentaries can be either “tribal” or “without tribal ascendancy.” ­Hierarchized classifications thus established are relatively rigid and most often determine marriage possibilities. Generally speaking, it is seen as more prestigious to be qabili, that is, to have a tribal genealogy, than to be khadiri, that is, not to have any. The distinction between bedouin and sedentaries is ambivalent, because the Saudi state was constructed through marginalization of the bedouin (see chap. 1). Many bedouin regard it as more prestigious to be bedouin, whereas many sedentaries tend to transmit stereotypes of bedouin as “backward.” Finally, the use of the term “slaves” (‘abid) to designate black Saudis is considered an insult, though it is significant of the status of “black” Saudis in Riyadh. A. M. Vasil’ev treats the peninsula in the eighteenth century as a castebased society and asserts that contemporary Saudi society remains influenced in some ways by this structure (Vasil’ev 2000: 56–58, 430). 50.  On this approach of modernity, see Rabinow 1989 and Abu Lughod 1998. 51. Pouillon 1995; Al-Fahad 2004. On sedentarization, see also Vasil’ev 2000: 421– 424. 52. Vasil’ev 2000: 459. 53. www.arriyadh.com/Eng/Ab-Arriyad/Content/getdocument.aspx?f=/openshare/ Eng/Ab-Arriyad/Content/Riyadh-in-year-2013.doc_cvt.htm (accessed December 13, 2013). 54. Haraway 1988. 55.  Conforming to the wish expressed by the employees of the organization, it must not be recognizable, which is why I have given few details. 56.  A notable exception is Ménoret 2008. 57. Schwartz 1993: 282–283.

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58. www.booz.com/media/uploads/Womens_Employment_in_Saudi_Arabia.pdf (accessed December 15, 2013). 59.  United Nations Development Program 2007: 217. 60.  In the fourth quarter of 2012, the unemployment rate was 36 percent for Saudi women and 6 percent for Saudi men. See “Unemployment and Gender in Saudi Arabia,” Arab News, May 12, 2013, http://arabnews.com/news/451262 (accessed November 6, 2013). 61.  Le Renard 2011: 137–139, 150. 62.  See chap. 2. 63. Altorki 1988, 56. 64.  Men can display their maximalist religious engagement by certain signs, e.g., by wearing a shorter thawb (stopping at the ankles), as do many “committed to Islam” and members of the CPVPV. 65. Thiollet 2010; Vora 2013. 66. Ahmed 1992. 67.  Bensa and Fassin 2008. 68.  Le Renard 2008a; 2012. 69.  See esp. Abu Lughod 1986. 70.  De Koning 2009: 17. 71.  La Soudière 1988. 72.  Saudi women’s maharim (sing. mahram) are those men with whom they are united by blood (brothers, father, and uncles, but not cousins), by contract (husband), or even by having the same “milk mother” (i.e., the same woman breast-fed them, making them “milk brothers and sisters,” and marriage between them is forbidden). Only one of them is a woman’s legal guardian. In general, for a girl, it’s her father. If the father dies, it becomes her brother. If she is married, it’s her husband. The authorization of the legal guardian is necessary for many procedures: travel, higher study, to hold a job, or even, until 2008, to reserve a hotel room. For non-Saudi female residents, it is their sponsor (kafil) who is responsible for that: either their employer, the institution that obtained the visa for them (which was my case), or the male relative whose working visa allowed them to enter Saudi Arabia as an “accompanier.” The term khalwa refers to the fact that a woman is alone in the presence of a man who is not mahram to her (in a car, a café, a restaurant, a hotel room, a domestic space, even in a shopping mall or a souk; interpretations differ). She and the man can be arrested for this and spend time in a detention center. Notable exceptions to this general rule include licensed male drivers of female passengers and female domestic employees who work and live with male strangers. 73.  This text is constructed on the constitutional model, but no institution guarantees that the laws conform to it.

Chapter 1: Riyadh, a City of Closed Spaces

Epigraph source: Al-Khamis 2006: 71. 1. Pichegru 2001. 2.  Creating sidewalks is also meant to combat obesity, which national institutions

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have recently identified as a problem more widespread among women. In April 2006, the organization Al-Nahda distributed leaflets encouraging women to walk. 3.  Cameras are forbidden in women-only spaces, since many young Saudi women do not want their faces to be seen by men outside of their own families. 4. Sassen 1996. 5.  A “theme park” here refers to any seemingly friendly closed space, such as Disneyland, shopping malls, etc., where interactions are monitored by private security. See Sorkin 1992: 15. 6. Vasil’ev, 2000: 310. 7. Article 155 of teaching policy stipulates: “Co-education is forbidden at every stage except in daycare and kindergarten.” Article 160 of the Labor Law passed in 1969 (and revised in 2006) forbids gender mixing in the workplace. 8.  Bakr al-Bakr 1998; Doumato 2003. 9.  See, e.g., Abdul ‘Aziz ibn Baz (former grand mufti of the kingdom), “Ahmiyyat al-ghita’ fi wijh al-mar’a” (The importance of covering a woman’s face); Muhammad ibn ‘Uthaymin (former member of the Council of Senior ‘Ulama), “Hukm kashf al-mar’a kafayha wa sa‘idayha li-l-rijal al-ajanib” (Ruling on women’s revealing their hands and forearms to unknown men). Al-Jiraysi 2002: 9–11, 46–47. 10. Al-Baadi 1982: 37–38. 11. Al-Harbi 2010; Al-Suwaygh 2002; Abu-Khalid 1999; Katakura 1977; Almana 1981; Yamani 2004; Altorki and Cole 1989. 12. Al-Zahrani 2004: 248–254; Almana 1981. 13.  Chatty and Rabo 1997: 14. 14.  Bourdieu and Sayad 1964: 132, 143. 15.  My translation of an interview cited by Al-Khatib 2008: 293. 16. Al-Khatib 2006: 263–288. 17. Al-Khatib 2008: 294. 18. Chaline 1989: 95. 19. Bonnenfant 1977. 20. Al-Dolaimi 1992. 21. Ibid. 22.  Houses in Riyadh often have numbers with four or five figures, in no apparent order. 23.  On the Islamic Awakening, see Fandy 1999; Al-Rasheed 2007; Ménoret 2008; Hegghamer 2010; Lacroix 2011. 24. Vasil’ev 2000: 465. 25.  Accounts of a Palestinian woman and an Egyptian woman living in Arabia since the 1970s, collected by the author in 2006–2007. 26.  Accounts of women living in Dammam, Al-Khobar, Qatif, collected by the author in 2007. 27. Vasil’ev 2000: 427–428, 458. 28.  For further details, see Le Renard 2008b. 29. Some 1.5 million women work as domestic employees in Saudi Arabia, often un-

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der very difficult conditions. Employers are not obliged to give them fixed hours or days off, and they are poorly protected against nonpayment of salary, sequestration, violence, and rape. Human Rights Watch 2008. 30.  Saudi drivers are increasingly numerous, but remain a minority. 31. Longva 1993: 443. 32. Arebi 1994. 33.  Interview, Jiddah, April 2005. 34.  Qawwama is a Qur’anic principle from verse 34 of the Women’s Sura. Régis Blachère notes that “the Arabic term includes the idea of protection [of women by men], of ability to take action on their behalf ” (Blachère 2005: 110). Interviewees often highlighted the sense of protection or even of responsibility, which includes financial support. 35. Arebi 1994: 202–203. 36. Doumato 2000: 169; Abu-Khalid 2001: 255–256. Also see www.lahaonline. com/static/laha_filecenter/WomenDay/index3.html (in Arabic), and Convention sur l’élimination de toutes les formes de discrimination à l’égard des femmes, www2.ohchr .org/english/bodies/cedaw/docs/CEDAW.C.SAU.CO.2_fr.pdf (accessed January 8, 2014). 37.  Author’s interview with three of the activists, Riyadh, 2005. 38. Al-Jiraysi 2002: 40. 39. Doumato 1991. 40. Arebi 1994. 41. The umma is the community of Muslims. 42.  The “perverted wolf ” here is the “progressive” or even “Westernized” man who urges women to go out and discover themselves in order to have more of every kind of contact with them. 43.  My translation. This poem is unpublished, but it was widely circulated by fax and I obtained a copy through an interviewee. 44.  A recent event was the initiative to drive on 26 October 2013 and its repression. See www.arabnews.com/news/468877 (accessed December 8, 2013). This is comparable to the politicization of the “woman question” for other Middle Eastern societies. For a summary, see, e.g., Abu Lughod 1998. 45. Cefaï 1996. 46.  For a recent and detailed analysis of controversies over Saudi women’s activities, see Al-Rasheed 2013. 47.  Many researchers have shown that this division did not influence Arab societies in the same way, because of different historical trajectories. See Nelson 1974: 551–563. Concerning Saudi Arabia, see Altorki 1986. 48. Vasil’ev 2000: 310. 49.  Bakr al-Bakr 1998: 20; Doumato 2003. 50. Abu-Khalid 2001: 155–156. 51.  Female campuses appeared following debates described in detail by Fowziyah Abu-Khalid in her doctoral dissertation. Abu-Khalid 2001. 52. Abu-Khalid 2001: 180.

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53.  Map of campus at www.ksu.edu.sa/sites/KSUArabic/Students/FemaleStds/Ole shahCenter/Services/Pages/CenterMap.aspx (in Arabic; accessed November 7, 2013). 54. In 1973, 200,000 girls were in school (Vasil’ev 2000: 434). In 2004, there were over two million female Saudi students, in 15,800 primary, junior high, and high schools, which employed over 219,470 female teachers and 14,500 administrators. Saudi Press Agency, www.saudinf.com/main/y7491.htm (accessed November 7, 2013). 55.  Concerning France, e.g., see Sohn 2003: 91–109. 56. Abu-Khalid 2001: 160. 57.  Le Renard 2008b. 58. Almunajjed 1997. 59. Doumato 1999. 60.  Bakr al-Bakr 1998. 61.  Le Renard 2012. 62. Louer 2008. 63.  “Liberals” in Saudi Arabia is a “vague label, which generally lumps together former Arab and Marxist nationalists, today essentially defined by their opposition to the plan for society, considered ‘conservative,’ promoted by Islamists” (Louer 2005, author’s translation). Debates among Saudi intellectuals in the 1980s were analyzed in Arebi 1994; for more recent period, see Al-Rasheed 2013. 64. In 2004, 76,787 students, or less than 4 percent of the more than two million Saudi girls then in school, attended 677 female Qur’an memorization centers, staffed by 7,437 teachers (Saudi Press Agency, www.saudinf.com/main/y7491.htm [accessed November 7, 2013]). This appears to confirm my observation during my stay that only a small proportion of the younger generation of women were committed to Islam. 65.  Also see the sites of Asyeh and Laha Online: www.asyeh.com and www.lahaon line.com (in Arabic; accessed July 3, 2013). 66. Al-Ruwayshid 2007. 67. Hertog 2010; Champion 2003. 68.  Saudi Arabia, Ministry of Economy and Planning, The Eighth Development Plan (2005–2009), chap. 3, p. 65. 69. Hertog 2010. 70. http://mondediplo.com/2004/04/04world (accessed December 13, 2013). 71. Hertog 2004. The three other sessions were on the topics of “women and work,” “women and education,” and “women and society.” 72.  E.g., Faqandash 2006; Almunajjed 2006. 73. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4485308.stm accessed December 13, 2013) 74.  Four Seasons Hotel, Riyadh, April 16, 2006. 75.  InterContinental Hotel, Riyadh, November 16, 2006. 76.  E.g., the Al-Ikhbariyya TV channel’s program Sayyidat a‘mal (Businesswomen), the special supplement of the same name in the daily Arab News, the weekly supplement Al-mar’a al-‘amila (Active Women) in the daily Al-Iqtisadiyya, and the page devoted to women in the Saudi edition of the daily Al-Hayat, which addresses a greater variety of themes.

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77.  Particularly the Centennial Fund (Sunduq al-mi’awiyya) linked to Riyadh’s Chamber of Commerce, and the Abdul Latif Jameel Community Service Programs (­Abdul Latif Jameel Corporation). 78.  Saudi Arabia, Council of Ministries, decree no. 63, May 13, 2003. 79.  Saudi Council of Ministries, decree no. 120, June 14, 2004. 80.  “Work and Employment: Dialogue between Society and Work Related Institutions,” April 2008; www.kacnd.org (accessed October 24, 2013). 81.  Saudi Arabia, Ministry of Labor 2005. www.alriyadh.com/2006/03/02/article 134990.html (in Arabic; accessed December 18, 2013). 82.  For more details, see Le Renard 2013. 83. In 2007, officials of the Saudi Arabian Monetary Agency (SAMA) and the Ministry of Labor summoned bank directors to demand that they end gender mixing in banks’ headquarters (Reuters, June 24, 2007). This demand was taken into account in various ways, depending on the banks. 84.  Interviews with Munira al-Shunayfi, owner of several cafés on the women’s floor of the Mamlaka Mall, and Maha al-Malik, owner of a shopping complex for women, Riyadh, March 2007. 85. Hibou 1999. 86. Salamé 1980: 863; Haykel 2007; Le Renard 2008. 87. Malik 2004:133. The concept has been “arabized” by Daryl Champion who speaks of “‘asabiya capitalism” (Champion 2003). Gregory Gause (1994: 58) also highlights the extent to which the government controls national economies in the Gulf, “support from above” being a de facto prerequisite to doing business. 88.  These two malls were constructed in the early 2000s and belong respectively to the eponymous branch of the royal family, and to Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal. 89.  According to a young Saudi woman shop owner whom I met in December 2008 in Riyadh, a woman-only mall was opened in 2008 but was shut down after five months because the saleswomen smoked. 90. Yamani 2004; Field 1985. 91.  This is the goal of the Al-Waleed bin Talal Foundation, looking down on Riyadh from the sixty-sixth floor of the tower. 92. Khan 2006: 261. 93.  Bregtje van der Haak, documentary, Saudi Solutions (VPRO 2005), www.you tube.com/watch?v=FWD4KzSpj_g. 94.  Cultural Forum for Women in Business that I attended, organized by the ­Riyadh Chamber of Commerce, female section, at the Riyadh InterContinental Hotel, March 17 and 18, 2007. 95. Field 1989. 96.  Interview with the author, Riyadh. 97.  Salesmen were previously mostly foreign, but owing to recent nationalization policy, there are now many Saudi salesmen too. 98.  Nada al-Utaygi, interview with the author, Riyadh, 2007. 99.  See Sorkin 1992.

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100.  On the United States, see Cohen 1996. 101.  See, e.g., Houssay-Holszschuch and Teppo, 2009. 102. Sorkin 1992. 103.  The Arabic terms for “family” (‘a’ila, ahl) are polysemic. There are two main uses of “family” in daily life in Riyadh: 1. Family with patrilineal descent. Generally, when a married woman says “my family” (ahli), she is referring (according to the context) to her parents, siblings, aunts, and uncles. In speaking of her nuclear family, she will most often say “my husband,” or “my children.” Each spouse belongs to her/his group of origin. The wife never takes her husband’s name. The children take their father’s name and are attached to the father’s family. There is no pooling of assets linked to marriage: what belongs to the wife continues (in theory) to be hers. The term “family” only designates the nuclear family in three cases: (a) sometimes when children speak of their parents; (b) in official texts; (c) in the writings of journalists or sociologists who use the concepts of “nuclear family” and “extended family.” 2. Women, accompanied or not by men, as opposed to lone men. Restaurants, originally forbidden to women, now usually include “family sections” (qism al-‘a’ilat). In many of them, women cannot in theory enter unless accompanied by a man, who must—again in theory—be a mahram (see Introduction, n. 51, above). In 2005, placards in some coffee shops and restaurants’ family sections stated: “Entry is forbidden to women without mahram,” but these have since disappeared. Nowadays, women can go alone or with other women to these sections, which continue to be called family sections. In the same sense, a magazine addressing “families” is in reality a women’s magazine, and if a man tells someone on the telephone that he is with his “family,” he means with his wife, mother, and/or sisters. On gender and citizenship in Middle Eastern contexts, see Joseph 2000. 104. Al-Khatib 2008.

Chapter 2: Getting Around

First epigraph source: Ibrahim 2006: 20. Ibrahim’s novel Banat min al-Riyad (Girls from Riyadh; untranslated) was one of those published in response to Banat al-Riyad (2005; Girls of Riyadh) by Raja al-Sana‘. Author’s translation. 1.  The construction of a subway system in Riyadh began in 2009. 2.  Several condemnations for “harassment” have been pronounced since 2005. See Le Renard 2011. 3.  Contrary, e.g., to what has been observed in Casablanca by Françoise NavezBouchanine (1993). 4.  The CPVPV should be quite capable of preventing the “harassment of women,” I was told by Salman al-‘Awda, a very famous religious figure, in an interview I had with him in Riyadh in May 2007. 5.  Brooks Gardner 1995. 6.  Elsewhere, too, rumors and publicity are in themselves considered harmful to someone’s reputation (no matter whether the acts reported have actually happened or not). See, e.g., Latte Abdallah 2004: 34.

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7.  On this aspect in Cairo, see De Koning 2009. 8.  Saudi Arabia, GOSI 2007. 9.  Human Rights Watch 2008. 10. Thiollet 2007. 11.  West and Fenstermaker 2006. 12.  This functions similarly to other contexts wherein there is a strong national/ nonnational divide. See, e.g., Longva 1993, 1997. 13.  E.g., the easternmost areas of the city (Al-Nazim) or the run-down former center (Shumaysi). 14.  According to statistics from the 2004 census conducted by the Superior Commission for the Development of the City of Riyadh, 4.57 percent of Saudi families in Riyadh have no car, 48.21 percent have only one, and the remainder have two or more. A household in Riyadh includes seven individuals on average, and commutes are generally thirty kilometers or longer. 15. Coutras 1993; Adelkhah 2003. 16. Goffman 1966: 24. 17. Schwartz 1993: 282–283. 18.  Göle (1993) 1996 and Deeb 2006 describe this approach similarly for other contexts. 19.  See Le Renard (2010) 2012 and chap. 1. 20.  Although both work in “mixed” spaces, a doctor is more readily regarded as “respectable” than a nurse (El-Sanabary 1996). 21.  Saudi women who obtain a scholarship sometimes move abroad with a brother or their father in order to respect that legal condition, then the brother/father leaves after a few weeks. 22.  This theme is developed in other contexts by Adelkhah (1998) 1999 and Haenni 2005. 23. Illouz 2007. 24.  See Foucault (1984) 1990. 25.  Its complete name is the “Ibn Baz Project to help young people marry.” This foundation, created by relatives of Saudi Arabian Grand Mufti Abdul Aziz bin Abdullah bin Baz (1910–1999), offers advantageous loans, conjugal advice, lectures, etc. 26.  Poster announcing a workshop in personal development for young women in the Dar al-Sumu Qur’an memorization center. 27.  Title of a lecture held in Dar al-Sumu. 28. Al-Qarni 2004. 29.  See, e.g., ‘Udwan 2002. 30.  Workshops proposed during the third salon of the “modern woman” in 2008. 31.  Quoted in “Le Prince Nayef bientôt sur le trône?” (Prince Nayef Soon on the Throne?), Courrier International, no. 963 (April 16, 2009). 32.  One of the slogans repeated during the Self-Confidence Workshop, organized by Ibn Baz Project in 2006 (I attended). 33.  Another slogan during the Self-Confidence Workshop. 34. Al-Qarni 2004 and 2005.

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35.  See also Illouz 2007. 36.  Méron and Silvera 2006. 37. In 2005, a marriage of two people who already had two children was annulled, against the wish of the spouses, by the court following a complaint by the brother of the wife, according to which the husband did not have the tribal origins he had claimed during the marriage. This sparked controversy, since this rule is generally thought to stem from “customs and traditions” rather than Shari‘a, which is the normative ground for judgments. The couple was reunited in 2010. www.equalitynow.org/node/292; www .equalitynow.org/historic-decision-forced-divorce-case-saudi-arabia-reunites-couple -after-four-years-separation (accessed December 15, 2013). 38.  “How to choose a good husband” was one of the issues raised at a 2007 colloquium on the Alaysha campus entitled “Our Children: How to Prepare Them for Successful Marriage?” (see chap. 4).

Chapter 3: Coming Together 1. Barth 1969. 2. Bayat 1997. 3. Bayat 2007b: 65; 83. 4.  For a synthesis concerning ethnographic approach of urban sociabilities see, e.g., Hannerz 1980. 5.  I. Joseph 1999: 118; my translation. 6.  I. Joseph 2007: 450. 7. Hamidi 2010. 8.  Abu Lughod 1985. 9.  See, e.g., Fass 1977. 10.  No statistics are available on the proportion of married or divorced students. 11.  During my research, I spent time with three groups of young Saudi women who had first met one another on campus and went on to complete projects together after graduating. 12.  Some residents of Riyadh have such properties, and they can also be rented. 13.  Research on coeducation has shown how boys occupy the space of the schoolyard. See, e.g., Duru-Bellat et al. 2001. 14.  See, e.g., Al-‘Iraqi 2003: 113. 15.  For example, Su‘ad, a hospital employee, mentioned a weekly meeting organized by colleagues of the charitable organization in which she had previously worked, aiming to discuss “differences between religion and ‘customs and traditions.’” 16.  On the status of female preacher, see Le Renard 2012. 17.  The late Muhammad ibn ‘Uthaymin, a former member of the Council of Senior ‘Ulama, was one of the most famous Saudi religious authorities, along with Mufti ‘Abd Al-‘Aziz ibn Baz. 18.  In the desert, as elsewhere, many Saudi women choose to meet in a closed space, hidden from view, and for a price. 19. Clark 2004.

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20. Adelkhah 1991: 107–153; Kamalkhani 1998. 21. Adelkhah 1991: 147–148; 139–140. 22.  In general, as far as I could observe, distinctions between tribes are drawn only for Saudis or Gulf people; others are typified by their nationality, except if they belong to Arabian tribes. 23.  The ritual entrance of the bride into the women’s reception hall is called zaffa: in general, the (female) musicians stop playing, the light is turned off, and the bride arrives by way of a staircase, which she descends very slowly to recorded music. She crosses the room and goes on stage briefly, then leaves again. Otherwise, the bride does not appear, which an informant explained to me, giving several reasons: the bride is shy about being the center of attention, worried that she will not react properly, and fears negative comments from guests or the “evil eye” (that is, envious looks supposed to cause ill luck). But above all, in certain families, “it is not done.” 24.  For more details on this subject, see chap. 5. 25. Joseph 1999. 26.  Simmel (1903) 1971. 27. Hannerz 1980. 28.  I use the double sense of commitment as developed by Goffman: commitment in a situation (involvement) and in a relation (attachment). See Cefaï 2007: 632. 29. In 2005, 64 percent of Riyadh’s Saudi households had Internet access; more recent statistics indicate that 49 percent of the total population had Internet access in 2012 (www.internetworldstats.com/middle.htm#sa [accessed October 28, 2013]). In the 2000s, some Saudi sites were among the most popular in Arabic, e.g., al-Saha al-‘arabiyya (“The Arabic Scene,” political discussion forums that were closed in 2012); ‘Alam hawa’ (Eve’s World), http://forum.hawaaworld.com; and ‘Alam al-rumansiyya (The World of Romanticism), www.roro44.com (both accessed July 2, 2013). See also Hofheinz 2007. 30.  The reflections that follow are mainly based on practices described during interviews, and this has evolved a lot since the end of this research, notably with the spread of smartphones and massive use of Twitter. 31. Nouraie-Simone 2005; Wheeler 2006: 134. 32.  A list of popular blogs written by Saudis or in Saudi Arabia: http://saudijeans. org/2007/04/12/10-must-read-saudi-blogs (accessed December 15, 2013). 33.  www.cksu.com/vb (in Arabic; accessed November 8, 2013). 34.  I mention this only in relation to Internet use, since this mostly invisible aspect of young women’s lives was not the focus of my research. 35.  Among the most famous are ‘Alam hawa’ (Eve’s World; cited n. 29 above); Alfarasha (The Butterfly), http://alfrasha.maktoob.com); Laha Online, www.lahaonline. com; and Asyeh, www.asyeh.net (all in Arabic; accessed July 2, 2013). 36.  The campaign is described on a site mentioned earlier, ‘Alam al-rumansiyya (The World of Romanticism, cited n. 29 above). 37. In 2011, the leading Women2Drive activist was jailed for ten days. Only a small number of women drove and posted their videos, according to the young women I asked in Riyadh and from what I saw on the Internet.

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Chapter 4: Breaking The Rules

First epigraph source: Informal conversation with the author, 2007. The teacher was living and teaching in Al-Shifa, a poor neighborhood in the south of the city. Second epigraph source: Al-Herz 2006: 59. This is from a novel, Al-Akharun (The Others). Author’s translation from Arabic. 1.  See Goffman 1974 on frame analysis. 2. Göle 2005: 23. Also see Secor 2002; Çinar 2005. 3. Bayat 2007a and b. 4.  See, e.g., Khosravi 2008; Mahdavi 2009. 5.  See Al-Jiraysi 2002: 106–107 and 109, fatwas, Muhammad ibn ‘Uthaymin, “Hukm libs al-bantalun” (Ruling on the Wearing of Pants); Permanent Committee, “Hukm libs al-mar’a li-l-bantalun” (Ruling on the Wearing of Pants by Women). The Permanent Committee is composed of several members of the Council of Senior ‘Ulama who are responsible with researching and issuing fatwas. 6. In 2008, “parade” territory on campus shifted after its entrance No. 5, which gave its name to the promenade, was closed and fashionable cafés were opened elsewhere. 7. Goffman 1977. 8.  Becker (1963) 1991. 9.  Brochure entitled Man hum al-su‘ada’? (Who Are the Happy Ones [i.e., Who are those who will go to Heaven]?). 10. CPVPV mutawi‘a can arrest women in cars, ordering the driver to sit in the passenger’s seat, for example, while one of them gets behind the wheel. 11.  On this, see Altorki 2000. 12. For latest developments, see www.arabnews.com/saudi-arabia/shoura-says -women-must-unveil-security-reasons (accessed December 18, 2013). 13. Bayat 1997. 14. Scott 1990. 15.  Scott’s thought makes it into a binary. In contrast, my research does not think young urban women as dominated in every type of hierarchy and interaction. 16. Farge 1997: 125. 17.  Foucault (1974) 1977; Goffman 1961; De Certeau (1980) 1984. 18.  On characteristics defining collective action, see Neveu (1996) 2005: 9. 19.  Becker (1963) 1991: 182. 20.  Demonstrations have nonetheless marked Saudi Arabia’s contemporary history, such as those of Aramco workers in the 1950s, those of the Shi‘ites in the Eastern Province in 1979, and, beginning in 2011, those against the imprisonment without trial of supposed opponents. 21. http://saudijeans.org/2012/03/07/saudi-female-university-students-protest-inabha (accessed December 9, 2013); www.alwatan.com.sa/Local/News_Detail.aspx?Arti cleID=90151&CategoryID=5 (in Arabic; accessed December 9, 2013). 22.  I did not witness this myself, but many acquaintances told me about it. Many filmings of the scene could be seen on YouTube and online forums but have been removed since then, as can be seen at http://shabab.yanasoo.com/t129240.html (in Arabic; accessed December 9, 2013).

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23.  On such spaces, see Sorkin 1992. 24. Cefaï 2007: 657ff.; Joseph 2007: 178 and 450. 25.  See Gresh 2003. 26. http://carnegieendowment.org/2008/08/19/saudi-morality-police-under -pressure/6by0 (accessed December 18, 2013). 27. http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB100014240529702034006045780743024198 83098 (accessed December 18, 2013). 28.  Bennani-Chraïbi and Fillieule 2002: 45. 29. Mathieu 2006. 30. MacLeod 1991: 130–131. 31.  Mahmood (2005) 2012. 32.  See, here, the broad definition of politicization in writings by Luc Boltanski and Nina Eliasoph developed in Hamidi 2010. 33.  Many of my acquaintances mentioned that the CPVPV hires men recently released from prison. 34. http://forum.lahaonline.com/showthread.php?t=49797 (in Arabic; accessed November 8, 2013). 35.  Some women used this same rhetoric when faced with their parents: see chap. 3. 36.  Regarding this gap in other contexts in the region, see esp. Abu Lughod 2005; Latte Abdallah 2006. 37.  Le Renard 2008a. 38.  This may be likened to “regimes of veiling” identified in Secor 2002. 39. Hannerz 1980. 40. Goffman 1959. 41. Turner 1992: 102; Centre universitaire de recherches administratives et politiques de Picardie 1998. 42.  On the diffusion of transgressive practices and their progressive transformation into fashion, see Gelder and Thornton 1997. 43.  Several members of the Council of Senior ‘Ulama have called for women to cover their eyes. See, e.g., Al-Jiraysi 2002: 48, Muhammad ibn ‘Uthaymin, fatwa, “‘Ala libs al-niqab wa-l-burga‘ wa-l-litham” (Ruling on the Wearing of the Niqab, Burqa‘, and litham). 44.  Although I recorded it, this conversation in May 2007 was in fact more of a chat than a formal interview. I had met these young women because they were planning to form a cultural club. 45. By shadhdhat, Ghadir means women who have intimate, sensual or sexual practices with other women. 46.  This pejorative dialect word, sa’i‘a, is difficult to translate. It designates girls who seek to be noticed, who provoke, who look for trouble. 47.  Among young urban women, those who have committed to Islam are a minority, and it is not certain whether all of them are convinced of the merits of the CPVPV. 48. Fass 1977.

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Chapter 5: Consuming Femininities

Second epigraph source: Al-Mustaqbal, May 2004, 26. This magazine has an Islamist political orientation. 1.  Bourdieu (1979) 1984: 200–202. 2.  It would be impossible to analyze women’s self-presentation in homosocial gatherings within Bourdieu’s framework of class distinction, since he viewed women as objects, sources of symbolic capital for their male relatives, and not subjects accumulating capital (Bourdieu [1979] 1984; 1990). See Lovell 2001. 3.  Publications on the subject include Zirinski 2005 and Assad 2007. 4. Almana 1981. 5.  In the 1980s, Saudi women used little makeup and there were not many beauty parlors. Saudi Arabia, Direction des industries et services 1986. 6.  On the historicization of the formation of national consumer cultures, see Garon and Maclachlan 2006: 1–15. 7. Appadurai 1988. 8.  Hebdige (1979) 2011. 9. Al-Khatib 2006: 278. 10.  Such “popular souks” are still found in many Riyadh neighborhoods, including the north-central district (Suq al-‘Uways, Suq al-tayyiba). They sell abayas, long “traditional” dresses, and clothing and goods of all kinds imported from Pakistan and China at prices much lower than the brands on sale in malls. 11.  There are many halls devoted to wedding celebrations in Riyadh. Their prestige depends essentially on the rental price, which everyone knows. 12.  They showed me these images, shot in studios by female photographers, on their cell phones. 13. Goffman 1976. 14.  Butler (1990) 1999: 188. 15. Foucault 1988: 244. Warnier 1999: 89; Bayart (2004) 2007. 16.  Many informants considered the transformation of the face’s appearance as forbidden in Islam. The practice of cosmetic surgery remains marginal, but it is rapidly increasing. The first clinic, Obagi, whose male owner is American, was opened in 1996. Since then, three other clinics specializing in cosmetic surgery have been opened, and many general clinics and private hospitals offer cosmetic surgery. 17. Rofel 2007: 118. 18. Douglas 2000. 19. The 2008 Forum of the Modern Woman took place in one of Riyadh’s most prestigious venues, reserved for women on this occasion. 20. “Harakat!” is addressed on the poster, seen on the Alaysha campus in December 2008, to someone well dressed, who is fashionable, has a “style.” 21.  Kilicbay and Binark 2002; Navaro-Yashin 2002; Moors 2007, 2009. 22.  See the epigraph to the Introduction, for example. 23.  “Inn allahu jamil yuhibbu al-jamal”; I often heard this during conversations. See

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also, e.g., a fatwa by the late senior cleric Abdullah ibn Jibreen on the subject of a woman who devotes a lot of care to her appearance cited in Al-Jiraysi 2002: 120. 24.  Hayat, no.109 (December 2008): 38-39. 25.  Hayat, no. 105 (January 2009): 48–49. 26.  Majallat al-mutamayyiza, no.39 (2006): 33. 27.  Majallat al-usra 14, no.156 (2006): 70. 28.  West and Fenstermaker 1995. 29.  Fatwas by members of Council of Senior ‘Ulama have condemned jeans, even more than pants, as a “Western,” “masculine” garment, “making female forms apparent,” which offends even in women-only spaces. The only circumstance in which jeans are permitted is when one is alone with one’s husband, according to the ‘alim Abdullah ibn Jibreen in his fatwa “Judgment on the Wearing of Jeans.” See Al-Jiraysi 2002: 108–109. 30.  This way of calling beneficiaries by the name of the handicapped child educated by the organization does not correspond to the usual form of address (kunya), which uses the eldest son’s name, or if there are no sons, the eldest daughter. 31.  Pronunciations and some terms may vary according to village and region of origin; it is difficult to speak of one bedouin dialect. 32.  Women not only must work professionally in the “West,” but their salaries are “taken” from them, some Sahwist women claim. See, e.g., ‘Udwan 2002. 33. www.fatwaislam.com/fis/index.cfm?scn=fd&ID=633 (accessed December 15, 2013). 34.  Singerman and Amar 2006: 30. 35.  De Certeau (1980) 1984. 36. Miller 1997: 266. 37.  De Certeau (1980) 1984. 38.  For criticism of interpretations in terms of local modes of appropriation, insofar as they tend to silence economic inequalities, see Ferguson 2006. 39.  Abu Lughod 1990. 40.  Buya may also arise from English words that signify ambiguous gender identities, such as “tomboy.” On these see Halberstam (1998) 2003. The circulation of these words has been made possible by the Internet, where young Saudi women find information, films, and TV shows about worlds that are remote from their experience. 41.  The word buya also exists and is used in a similar way in the United Arab Emirates and in Kuwait, and perhaps also in other Gulf countries. 42.  The term istirjal can also designate women who are devoted to their jobs, earn a salary, and take on household responsibilities. See, e.g., www.alriyadh.com/2008/10/30/ article384317.html (in Arabic; accessed November 4, 2013). 43. Al-Sana‘ 2005: 57. Author’s translation. 44.  This leads one to think that this self-presentation has become widespread, and that the view of buyat has changed relative to the period described in the novel (around 2002–2003). Of course, a literary work does not necessarily aim at describing reality, but in this case there is an attempt at realism and getting as close as possible to a certain reality. This was confirmed by several women who had attended the university at the same time as the author of Girls of Riyadh.

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45.  Butler (1990) 1999. See also Halberstam 2006. 46.  This analysis is inspired by many works that have shed light on the plurality of forms of sexual subjectivity, their singularity, and the ways they are thought of and questioned (or neither thought of nor questioned): all these are relative to historical and national context. 47.  On this term, see Massad 2002. 48. Brickell 2005: 35. 49.  “Unuthatuki masdaru fakhruki: ‘afwan, al-istirjal la yaliq biki. Kulluna didd ma yushawwih fitrataki.” The last verb could also be translated as “makes uglier,” “deforms,” “falsifies,” or “distorts”; “confuses” is the weakest sense. 50. Dorlin 2003, 2008: 152. 51.  An article entitled “Fid al-mahabba” (The Effusion of Love), published in spring 2006 in a students’ magazine at the Teacher’s College in Jiddah, examines “homosexuality and troubles of sexual identity [al-jinsiyya al-mithliyya wa idtirab al-huwiyya aljinsiyya]” (33–34). In the letters to the editor of the Islamic magazine Hayat, a reader “committed to Islam” asked for advice about the “love” and “affection” that she felt for a female friend. The answer identified this attraction as “deviance” against religion, then recommended that she seek the causes in her childhood (e.g. sexual abuse) and undergo psychological therapy. See “Ana wa sadiqati sa’iratan fi tariq al-shudhudh!!” (My friend and I are on the path to deviance!!), Hayat, no. 100 (August 2008): 58. Also see “Woman to Woman Relationships at Some Schools,” Arab News, 21 February 2007, www.arab news.com/node/294751 (accessed December 15, 2015). 52. Najmabadi 2005. 53. Wynn 1997: 31. Also see Beng-Huat 2000; Khosravi 2008. 54. Thornton 1997. 55. Thornton 1997; McRobbie 2000.

Conclusion

1.  This change does not, however, apply to independent restaurants and cafés. 2.  For instance, it is now impossible to recharge a mobile phone without giving one’s ID number. In practice, this means that the mobile phone holder is known by the company, which collaborates with state security. See, e.g., “A Saudi Arabia Telecom’s Surveillance Pitch,” May 13, 2013, www.thoughtcrime.org/blog/saudi-surveillance (accessed November 5, 2013). 3. www.arabnews.com/saudi-arabia/shoura-says-women-must-unveil-security -reasons (accessed December 18, 2013). 4.  I do not deny here that consumerist lifestyles also involve nonnational residents, as Neha Vora (2013) has argued in the case of Indians in Dubai. I noted this myself in interviews with Filipino nurses. However, as far as I could see, only young urban Saudi women participated in the type of emulation I explored in homosocial public spaces.

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Magazines

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INDEX

Abaya, 30, 98, 109–11, 122, 126, 148, 164–65; definition, 173n8 Abdullah b. Abdulaziz Al-Saud (king), 3, 123, 174n6 Abu-Khalid, Fowziyah, 37 Abu Lughod, Lila, 9, 87, 174n5, 179n44 Adelkhah, Fariba, 94 Al-Herz, Seba, 107 Al-Khamis, Umayma, 27 Al-Khatib, Salwa, 30–31, 133–34 Almana, ‘A’isha, 175n36, 178nn11,12, 188n4 Al-Musa‘id, Juhayir, 34 Al-Nahda (charitable organization), 38 Al-Rasheed, Madawi, 173n1, 179n46 Al-Ruwayshid, Asma, 39–40 Al-Sa‘ad, Nura, 39 Altorki, Soraya, 18–19 Al-Waleed bin Talal Al-Saud (prince), 44–45 Amar, Paul, 144 Anonymity, 53, 100–104 Arab Spring, 162 Arebi, Saddeka, 179nn32,35,40 Asir, 30, 115 Autonomy, 4, 23, 31, 37, 59, 61, 72, 101, 162, 167 Bakr al-Bakr, Fawziyya, 178n8, 179n48, 180n60 Ban on driving, viii, 35–36 Bayat, Asef, 86–87, 113 Beauty, 135–37 Becker, Howard, 114 Bedouin, 12, 30–31, 57, 89, 97–98, 139–40, 176n49

Belonging, 11–12, 57, 87, 105–106, 126, 154, 162. See also Exclusion Black (as a social category), 98–99, 154, 176n49 Blackmail, 102–4 Body, 135–37 Bourdieu, Pierre, 132 Burqa‘, 30, 82–83, 126, 139; definition, 173n3 Butler, Judith, 7, 188n14, 190n45 Buyat, 146–56, 165 Cafés, 48, 59, 91, 110, 144 Campus, 14, 36–38, 83, 87–92, 107–29, 136, 144, 146–56, 180n53 Capitalism, ix, 4, 44, 159, 181n87 Car-driving controversy, 35–36 Categorization, 8, 11, 21, 33, 146–56 Cefaï, Daniel, 185n28, 187n24 Certeau, Michel de, 144 Çinar, Alev, 9 Circulation of goods, 134. See also Liberalization Charities, 14, 38, 91–93, 138–43 Chauffeurs, 33, 52–58 Checkpoint, 20, 22, 27, 112–13, 165 Class, 11–12, 55–58, 88–92, 131–57 Collective identification, 85–106, 117–21, 128–29 Committed to Islam. See Multazimat Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice (CPVPV), 5, 32, 43–44, 53–54, 107–29; definition, 174n18 Consultative Council, 41 Consumerist femininities, 131–57

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Consumption and consumerism in Saudi society, 131–57 Coordination, coordinated action, 114–15 Cosmetic surgery, 188n16 Cosmetics, 131–37 Council of Senior ‘Ulama, 5, 35, 108, 135–36 Criticism, 117–21 Customs, and traditions, 2, 29–30, 34, 61–63, 96, 122–23, 160, 184n37 Dangers, in the city, 51–58 De Certeau, Michel, 144 De Koning, Anouk, 175nn25,35, 177n70 Demonstrations, 2, 12, 115–16, 186n20 Developmentalism, ix, 32, 49 “Deviant” girls, 8, 67, 101, 127, 129, 154 Discipline, 6, 25, 114, 137 Discrimination, 89, 95–99, 105 Distinction: class, 55–58, 131–57, 163–65; national, 24, 29–33, 43, 49, 73, 163–65. See also Class; “Doing difference” Divorce, 10, 70–71 "Doing difference," 11, 57, 138–39, 165 Domestic employees, 33, 56, 177n72, 178–79n29 Domestic spaces, 85–86 Doumato, Eleanor A., 174n2, 178n8, 179nn36,39,49, 180n59 Dress, 31–33, 56, 131–57 Eastern Province, 32, 39, 46, 115, 186n20 Education, 10, 29, 32, 37–38, 49, 61, 88, 161 Employment, 5, 17, 41–42, 49, 52, 68, 72–73, 118 Entrepreneurs, 43–46 Exclusion, 4, 7, 140–45, 156, 165–66 Extended family. See Family, extended Family: definition, 182n103; extended, 23, 50, 58, 69, 100, 182n103; family sections, 182n103; family and state, 23, 49–50, 113, 161–65; nuclear, 23, 49, 97, 161, 182n103; women’s relations with their relatives, 61–64, 89–90, 99–100, 113. See also Mahram; Legal guardian; Reputation Fatwas, definition, 5 Faysal b. Abdelaziz Al-Saud (king), 3

Femininity, definition, 3–8 Feminism, in Saudi Arabia, 20, 34, 62, 66, 68; as an epistemological approach, vii– xii, 7, 14, 117 Fenstermaker, Sarah, 11. See also “Doing difference” Foucault, Michel, 3, 9. See also Governmentality; Subjectivation Friendship, 85–106 Fundamental Statute, 41 Gathering, definition, 87 Gender mixing, 46, 50, 104, 122, 136; definition, 174n1 Gender norms, definition, 4. See also Femininity; Model of femininity Gender segregation, definition, 6 Generation, 10, 59–60, 85–86, 126 Globalization, 2, 134, 144, 152, 156, 159 Goffman, Erving, 7, 59, 110, 151 Göle, Nilüfer, 108 Governmentality, 3, 159 Group of girls (shillat banat), 87–92 Grouping, definition, 87 Habermas, Jürgen, 6 Harassment, 53–54 Hegemony (Western), vii–xii, 12, 19–21, 34–35, 160, 164 Hertog, Steffen, 174n8, 180n67 Heterosexuality, 126, 150 Heterosociality, 70, 126, 150, 155 Homosexual relations. See Intimate relations Homosociality, 85–106, 132, 155 Honor, 55. See also Reputation Hibou, Béatrice, 174n14, 181n85 Hijab, 111, 173–174n8. See also Veiling Hijaz, 13, 19, 30, 39, 41–42, 46 Ibn Baz, Abdul ‘Aziz, 35, 178n9 Ibn ‘Uthaymin, Muhammad, 93, 178n9, 184n17, 186n5, 187n43 Ibrahim, Fa’iza, 51 ID for women, 113, 162–63 Illouz, Eva, 184n35 Imperialism, vii–xii, 19–21, 34–35, 45. See also Western hegemony

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Income: earning one’s, 52–59, 64, 68, 73, 140–42; levels of, 14–17 Individualism, 66–68 Insecurity, 7, 52–56 Intellectuals, 18, 33–35, 39, 41, 62, 66, 122 Internet, 71–72, 101–5, 185n29 Intimate relations, 18, 99, 105; between girls/ women, 127, 149–52, 190n51 Islamic Awakening, 31–34, 62, 128, 140, 164 Islamic model of femininity, 5, 29–36, 156. See also National distinction Islamic personal development, 64–68 Islamic (official) rules, 107–29; definition, 108 Islamism. See Islamic Awakening; Multazimat (committed to Islam); Rigorism Jeans, 189n29 Jiddah, 13, 19, 39, 41–42, 46 Joseph, Isaac, 7, 87 Joseph, Suad, 182n103 Kafala (sponsorship), 163, 177n72 Khalwa, 104, 177n72 King Saud University, 14, 36–38, 83, 87–92, 107–29, 136, 144, 146–56, 180n53 Labor law, 43, 178n7 Latte Abdallah, Stéphanie, 182n6, 187n36 Legal guardian, 23, 61, 113, 161–63; definition, 177n72. See also Family; Mahram Liberal: intellectuals in Saudi Arabia, 35–36, 39, 62, 122–23, 180n63; liberal feminist ideas, 3, 68, 123 Liberalization, 5, 24, 28, 41, 156 Lifestyles, definition, 8 Literature, 173n1 Longva, Anh Nga, 33, 183n12 Luxury, 46–47, 134–44 Mahmood, Saba, 117 Mahram, 23, 48, 112, 163; definition, 177n72. See also Family; Legal guardian Makeup, 94, 109–10, 112, 118, 131–57 Marriage, 10, 68–72, 96–99, 126, 176n49, 177n72, 182n1. See also Divorce

Masculinity, 73, 146–56 "Masculinization," 146–56 Memory, 33–36. See also Traditions Men, 15, 36, 73. See also Legal guardian; Mahram Ménoret, Pascal, 176n56 Miller, Daniel, 144 Ministry of Labor, 29. See also Labor law; Nationalization of jobs Mobility, in the city, 52–60, 85–86 Model of femininity, 3; consumerist, 131– 157; Islamic, 5, 29–36, 156; professional, 5, 17, 41–42, 49, 52, 68, 72–73 Modernity (as a category to qualify people), 13, 62, 64, 134, 139, 144, 155 Modernization (ideology), 3, 30 Mothers, 10, 17, 29, 31, 59–60, 85, 90, 126, 138–40 Multazimat (committed to Islam), 12, 40, 62, 92–95, 105, 124–25, 136–37 Najd, 30 Najmabadi, Afsaneh, 155 Naseef, Fatma, 39 Nation (national narratives and imaginings), 5, 9, 163–65 National distinction, 24, 29–33, 43, 49, 73, 163–65; national/nonnational hierarchy, ix–x, 4–5, 24, 29–33, 43, 49, 55–58, 73, 163–65 Nationalization of jobs, 3–5, 41, 46, 73, 143 Neoliberalism, 4. See also Liberalization; Privatization Niqab, viii, 8, 83, 122, 126, 136, 159; definition, 173n3 Nomadic life, 29–30 Nonnational residents, ix–x, 4–5, 24, 29–33, 43, 49, 55–58, 73, 163–65 Oil boom, 30–32, 57, 133 Official Islamic rules, 107–29; definition, 108 Openness, 1, 143–44 Organization A, 14, 138–43 Orientalism, 20, 173n1 Othering, 99, 140 Paid work, 5, 17, 41–42, 49, 52, 68, 72–73

206   I N D E X

Party: “DJ parties,” 91; wedding, 97–98, 134, 185n23 Performance, 6–7, 32, 56, 131–57 Personal development, 64–68 Police, 5, 22–23, 32, 43–44, 53–54, 107–29, 174n18 Political rights. See Rights Politicization, 20, 117, 179n44 Poor, 12, 44, 56–59, 88, 109, 138–39, 145, 165–66, 176n46. See also Class Postcolonial, vii–xii, 4, 20. See also Orientalism Power, definition, 3 Preachers, 39–40, 66, 92, 119, 136, 155 Privacy, 31, 47 Private sector: employment in, 5, 17, 41–42, 49, 52, 68, 72–73, 118; entrepreneurs, 43–46 Privatization, 44 Professional activity, 5, 17, 41–42, 49, 52, 68, 72–73 Protest, 107–29, 157 Psychology (discourse), 64–68 Public arena: debates, sphere, 20, 33–36, 160. See also Intellectuals Public/private divide, 6, 36, 44. See also Domestic spaces Public order, 108, 121–23, 128, 159–62 Public problem, definition, 36 Public spaces, definition, 6 Qawwama, 34–35, 140, 179n34 Queer, x, 7 Qur‘an memorization centers, 39, 66, 92–93, 124–25, 180n64 Race, racism, 96–99, 105, 154. See also Bedouin; Black; Discrimination Reform discourse, 2–5, 40–49; appropriation of, 116, 162 Relations between women: friendship, 85–106; intimate, 127, 149–52, 190n51 Religious police, 5, 32, 43–44, 53–54, 107–29; definition, 174n18 Religious spaces, 14–15, 39–40, 65–68, 92–95 Religious meetings at homes, 92–95 Repression, 12, 115

Reputation, 54–64, 97–101, 104, 113–14, 154, 161 Reserve, 99–101, 104 Resistance, 107–30, 152, 160 Respectability, 6, 7, 25, 55–59, 63, 72–73, 123, 127, 155. See also Class; Distinction Revenue, 52–59, 64, 68, 73, 140–42 Rights, women’s: to drive, 28–29; in Islam, 34, 39–41, 61–62, 67, 121, 160–62; to vote, 41 Rigorism, rigorists, 5, 33–34, 110, 116, 122–23, 127–28, 160–64 Riyadh, 13, 28, 31 Rofel, Lisa, 4, 135 Royal family, 44–45 Rural life, 29–30, 60 Rural exodus, 30 Sahwa. See Islamic Awakening Said, Edward, 20 Salary, 52–59, 64, 68, 73, 140–42 Scott, James C., 113 Security and securitization, 47–48, 163, 166. See also Surveillance Sedentarization, 30 Sedentary, definition, 176n49 Self, 7, 135. See also Subjectivities Self-help discourse, 64–68 Self-presentation, 7–9, 124–28, 131–57, 164–65 Settlement (hijra), 30 Sexuality. See Intimate relations Shabab (young males), 11, 53, 60 Shame, 114, 143 Shi‘ites, 39, 186n20 Shopping malls, 46–49, 59, 75, 90, 110–17, 134, 143–44, 165–67. See also Consumption Singerman, Diane, 144 Slavery, 176n49 Sociability: heterosocial, 70, 126, 150, 155; homosocial, 85–106, 132, 155 Solidarity, 85–106 Spatial economy of gender, 6, 49, 159 Sponsorship. See Kafala Subsidiarity, 113 Suppression, 12, 115

I N D E X   207

State, 12, 29, 30–31, 49, 162–63 Stereotypes: about Saudi women, vii–xii; among young women, 89, 96–99, 105 Styles, 8, 131–57 Stylization of self, 7–8, 132, 135, 143 Subculture, 108, 133, 156–57 Subjectivation, 4, 26, 72, 104–5, 123, 137, 149, 161 Subjectivities, 4, 26, 72, 104–5, 123, 137, 149, 161 Subversion, 8, 73, 123, 133, 146–56 Supermarket, 27–28, 46, 133 Surveillance, 27, 32, 49, 165 Taggagat, 91, 154 Thawb, 19, 32–33, 174nn18,64 Theme-park model, 28, 49, 178n5 Thiollet, Hélène, 177n65, 183n10 Trade liberalization, 4–5, 28, 134. See also Liberalization Traditions, 2, 29–30, 34, 61–63, 96, 122–23, 160, 184n37 Transgression, 8, 107–30, 144, 146–56, 160–64 Transportation, 51–59, 88–90, 183n14 Travel (abroad), 16, 46, 134 Tribal/nontribal (qabili/khadiri), 71, 96, 176n49, 184n37 Typification, 11. See also Categorization Unemployment, 10, 17, 64, 78, 163 United States, 2, 20–21, 34–36 University, 14, 36–38, 83, 87–92, 107–29, 136, 144, 146–56, 180n53 Urbanity, 64, 144

Urbanization, 13, 23, 30–31, 50 Veiling: practices and justifications, 110, 112–13, 124–25, 128, 136, 148–49, 155; status in Saudi Arabia, 32; Western discourse on, vii–viii Visibility and invisibility, 3, 18, 59, 102–4, 114, 150, 159–63 Vitalis, Robert, 176n48 Vora, Neha, 177n65, 190n4 Vulnerability, 54, 86 World Association of Muslim Youth (WAMY), 34, 39 West, Candace, 11. See also “Doing difference” Western hegemony, vii–xii, 12, 19–21, 34–35, 160, 164; denunciation of, and “westernization” in Saudi Arabia, 34–35, 66, 121–22, 140 “Westerners” in Saudi Arabia, 19–22, 28, 166 Women2Drive campaign, 2, 104, 185n37 Work: history of women’s, 29–30; professional, 5, 17, 41–42, 49, 52, 68, 72–73 Workforce (statistics), 17. See also Employment; Unemployment Workplaces, 43–46, 138–43 World Trade Organization (WTO), 4 Yamani, Mai, 175n36, 178n11 Young males. See shabab Youth, 10–11. See also Generation Zayn al-‘Abidin Hammad, Suhayla, 3