Love, matrimony and sexuality: Saudi sensibilities and Muslim women's fiction

Abstract

All those desires, discriminations, success stories, and confrontations that otherwise might not have seeped into mainstream discourses are subtly said through the stories that mirror Arab women‟s lives. Girls of Riyadh is a postmodern cyber-fiction that delineates subjects we usually do not get to hear much about, i.e. the quest of heterosexual love and matrimony of young Arab women from the less women-friendly geography of Saudi Arabia. Though in the last two decades the scholarship on alternative discourses produced by Muslim women have been multitudinous, there is a scarcity of critical investigations dealing with creative constructions of postfeminist, empowered Muslim woman, not battling with patriarchal power structures, but negotiating aspects that matter most in real life: human associations and familial formations. This paper engages with the categories of love, marriage, and sexuality, drawing upon the lives of four educated, successful, „velvet class‟ Saudi women. The significance of this study is linked with carefully challenging some of the stereotypes about Arab women as victims of forced marriages and their commonly perceived discomfort with love at large. The study reveals that it is men who need to “man up” against cultural conventions since women are increasingly expressive in their choices and brave enough to face the consequences audaciously.