Send message to Author

Paper short abstract

This paper moves beyond discourse-based explanations of shifts in women’s daily movement, modesty, and privacy. It centres geography in towns, where kinship extends beyond blood and is embedded in the material. Trusted relations enable movement, while urbanisation to cities of strangers restricts it

Paper long abstract

This paper moves beyond discourse-based explanations of shifts in women’s daily movement, modesty, and spatial. It centres geography in Saudi Arabian towns, where kinship extends beyond blood and is embedded in mud architecture. Trusted relations enable movement, while urbanisation to cities restricts it.

Drawing on six years of fieldwork with elders who lived through the transition from mud villages to Riyadh in the twentieth century, the ethnography foregrounds geographic kinship: a form of mutual trust and intimacy not based on blood ties but on coexistence within proximity. Trust and care were cultivated through daily cohabitation that enabled safe movement for women and children, supported by spatial designs rooted in architectural principles such as connected rooftops and semi-public courtyards. These forms fostered constant social encounters and spontaneous women’s gatherings. Fellow villagers were labelled as ‘not strangers’ and trusted to protect women’s honour, shaping relaxed modesty and gender boundaries within this moral spatial order.

This ecological setting was disrupted by urbanisation to Riyadh. They entered unfamiliar neighbourhoods and homes with Western-style layouts, surrounded by stranger men. Long before the influence of discourse in the 1980’s, women had already begun to restrict their movement and social presence in this new ecological setting.

By centring geographic kinship and the loss of such architectural forms, this paper argues that shifts in mobility cannot be reduced to discourse. They must also be understood as material consequences of environmental transformation and the erasure of spatial arrangements once rooted in local values.