A Society of Young Women: Opportunities of Place, Power, and Reform in Saudi Arabia by Amelie Le Renard (review)

TLDR: In this paper, Amelie Le Renard employed post-colonial analysis in conducting ethnographic fieldwork on Saudi women in the capital city of Riyadh to study women in Saudi Arabia.

Abstract: It is extremely challenging to study women in Muslim societies due to the manner in which forces of patriarchy and Orientalism often intersect, leading to the frequent portrayal of women as inherently obedient, docile, and oppressed. Undertaking such a study becomes even more insurmountable in the case of the country considered most radical in terms of its gender relations, namely Saudi Arabia. Yet in this book, the French sociologist Amelie Le Renard undertakes an excellent analysis of young urban women in Saudi society without falling into any such pitfalls. She does so by employing postcolonial analysis in conducting ethnographic fieldwork on Saudi women in the capital city of Riyadh. As such, Le Renard’s book is a most welcome addition to the slowly growing literature on critical sociological analyses of non-Western women. Le Renard’s combination of critical self-reflexivity with ethnographical fieldwork leads to a nuanced interpretation of the social location of young urban Saudi women in their own terms. Especially helpful in this context is the analytical concept of “archipelago of public spaces” that Le Renard coins to capture these women’s access to closed, securitized spaces that “involve unprecedented sociabilities with unknown women” (2). Unlike Western societies where the processes of modernity engendered throughout the world become visible through the public mixing of men and women, what takes place in Saudi Arabia is instead the emergence of public mixing of women with other women they do not know. And such a change is made possible by the reform project of King Abdullah, one that “shapes the possibilities, opportunities, and spaces accessible to Saudi women ... [and defines] young urban Saudi women as a central group in the reform project” (3, 4). As such, the king’s reforms have a similar impact on society to that of Western modernity in that both projects publicly highlight women, moving them to the forefront of change. The book is divided into five chapters. Chapter 1 aptly analyzes how rapid Saudi economic development through the discovery of oil maps onto the boundaries between men and women, creating in the process a specific economy of Book Review 1