Young Urban Saudi Women's Transgressions of Official Rules and the Production of a New Social Group
This article deals with young urban Saudi women's transgressions of rules
regulating dress and public conduct in Riyadh. Many researchers on Middle
Eastern societies interpret as resistance the silent practices adopted by
subalterns such as women or youth. The existence of such social groupings is
scarcely questioned in these works, _place_holder;which focus mainly on
the interpretation of practices as political or subversive. In this article, I
emphasize the collective and public aspect of transgressions in order to show
how transgressive acts participate in shaping collective identifications and
in producing young urban Saudi women as a group. In the first section, I argue
that _place_holder;transgressions have a public aspect that makes them
transformative, as they are tacitly coordinated, reproduced among young women,
and repeated every day. The second section states that the transgressions'
impact does not imply that they should be interpreted as resistance. In fact,
transgressive acts are embedded in shifting power relations in the context of
reform. In the third section, I show how transgressions have long-term
implications for shaping groupings, identifications, and exclusions. Some
transgressive practices that involve specific consumerist self-presentations
have become norms among urban young women who conform to prevent rejection
from the group. This study draws on ten months of ethnographic fieldwork in
Riyadh between 2005 and 2009. I conducted interviews with young, urban Saudi
women who studied or worked in Riyadh.
ER - End of Reference
108-135
http://www.jmews.org/essay/young-urban-saudi-womens-transgressions-official-rules-production-social-group/
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2013-09-27 15:28:45
Journal of Middle East Women's Studies
Amélie
Le Renard