Constructing Female Agency in Rajaa Alsanea’s Girls of Riyadh: A Digital Humanities and Feminist Analysis

Abstract

This study examines how Rajaa Alsanea’s Girls of Riyadh constructs female agency through digital narrative form. It investigates how the novel’s formal lexical architecture, rather than thematic content alone, generates a feminist argument about mediated communication, patriarchal discipline, and women’s self-assertion in the Saudi context. Methodologically, the study adopts an interdisciplinary qualitative approach that integrates Digital Humanities with feminist literary criticism. The English translation of the novel was analyzed as a single corpus of 82,616 words using Voyant Tools. Attention was given to the distribution of the six terms: love, mail, phone, marriage, shame, and freedom. The study findings reveal three important patterns. First, love, the most frequent term in the corpus, is concentrated late in the narrative: Segments 9 and 10 hold 44% of its occurrences, which indicates delayed rather than absent affective fulfillment. Second, the shifting balance between mail and phone, with phone overtaking mail in the second half of the narrative, uncovers a shift in the mode of female digital agency. Third, shame, present at a low level throughout the first six segments, clusters in Segment 7, which suggests that patriarchal moral discipline, though constant, intensifies at moments of social rupture. The study concludes that the novel’s digital form is constitutive of its feminist logic and offers a replicable model for future corpus-based research on Saudi women’s fiction.