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

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.

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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

A SOCIETY OF YOUNG WOMEN

Opportunities of Place, Power, and Reform in Saudi Arabia

AMÉLIE LE RENARD

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction

1. Riyadh, a City of Closed Spaces

2. Getting Around

3. Coming Together

4. Breaking the Rules

5. Consuming Femininities

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Notes

References

Index

Photographs follow Chapter 2

PREFACE

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 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 contention 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 stereotypes, 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 (one-third of the big cities’ inhabitants), and most Saudi households actually employ 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 denaturalize 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 imperialistic, 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 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.

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

EVERY 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, 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 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 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 state have taken up vogues such as privatization of public services