From Guardianship to Autonomy: Mobility, Freedom, and Gender Role Negotiation Among Saudi Women Sojourners in Canada

Abstract

In a period of rapid social and economic change in Saudi Arabia under Vision 2030, increasing numbers of Saudi women undertake international sojourns for study and professional development. This article examines how these temporary migrations serve as sites for renegotiating gender roles, autonomy, and mobility. Using feminist narrative inquiry, we conducted 13 in-depth biographical interviews with Saudi women sojourners (students and spouses) living in Ottawa, Canada, and analyzed data using reflexive thematic analysis. Participants described a liminal autonomy: the startling acquisition of everyday freedoms—driving, unchaperoned mobility, and mixed-gender interaction—contrasted with prior constraints under male guardianship. Yet these freedoms were constrained by two transnational forces: a digital leash of family/community surveillance from home and a racializing gaze in Canada, where Islamophobia and othering complicated daily life and identity work. Women critically assessed a “moving target” of reform in Saudi Arabia, celebrating new mobilities (e.g., driving) while expressing skepticism toward the 2022 Personal Status Law, perceived as codifying patriarchal authority. We argue that sojourner autonomy is fragile, intersectional, and perceived as reversible upon return. The study advances theory by articulating liminal autonomy, showing how polymedia reproduces control across borders and distinguishing lifestyle freedoms from structural autonomy. Implications include intersectional campus supports, culturally attuned counseling, and recognition of returning sojourners as agents of social change.

1. Introduction

The social and legal landscape for women in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) is a site of profound and public contestation. This transformation is characterized by a central paradox of “dual mobilities.” Internally, the state’s ambitious Vision 2030 framework has propelled a top-down modernization project primarily aimed at economic diversification (Al-Rasheed 2021). A key plank of this strategy has been the instrumentalization of women’s empowerment to achieve economic goals (Jamilah and Isnarti 2024), resulting in high-profile reforms: the lifting of the female driving ban in 2018, the promotion of women’s workforce participation, and the partial (though not total) dismantling of the male guardianship (wilayah) system (Amnesty International 2022).

Simultaneously, a second, geographic mobility has been occurring for decades, accelerated by state-sponsored initiatives like the King Abdullah Scholarship Program (KASP). This has enabled a generation of Saudi women to engage in international sojourns as students, professionals, and accompanying family members. These women are positioned as key agents in the nation’s development, yet their time abroad places them in direct, daily confrontation with social, legal, and gender norms vastly different from those at home.

This paper is situated at the intersection of these dual mobilities. It focuses on Saudi women as sojourners, a population distinct from permanent migrants, defined by their temporary status and a “return orientation”. Their experience is not a linear, one-way path toward assimilation or “liberation,” but a liminal, temporary state. We posit that the sojourn functions as a “laboratory of selfhood” and a “ritual passage” where normative constraints are temporarily suspended, allowing for an accelerated process of identity negotiation and the “reconstruction of selfhood” (Turner 1967; Aguilar 2018).

While a growing body of research has explored the experiences of Saudi women abroad (e.g., Lefdahl-Davis and Perrone-McGovern 2015; Mustafa and Troudi 2017), often focusing on “culture shock,” “adaptation,” or re-entry (Alkhalaf et al. 2024; Asiri 2025), it has largely been siloed from concurrent literature analyzing the impacts of Vision 2030 within Saudi Arabia. This study bridges that gap. It examines how Saudi women sojourners in Canada transnationally negotiate their autonomy, using their lived experiences in the diaspora as a critical lens to evaluate the “moving target” of reforms they observe from afar.

We argue that these women develop a liminal autonomy, an agency that is real, embodied, and transformative, yet remains fragile, intersectionally constrained, and perceived as potentially reversible upon their anticipated return. This paper is guided by three central research questions:

How do Saudi women sojourners narrate their experiences of physical, social, and symbolic autonomy in Canada, relative to their pre-migration lives under guardianship?

How do they negotiate these newfound freedoms in relation to ongoing transnational obligations (e.g., family, community) and the specific context of Canadian multiculturalism (e.g., Islamophobia, racialization)?

How do ongoing legal and social reforms in Saudi Arabia (e.g., Vision 2030 and the 2022 Personal Status Law) shape their reflections on their sojourn and their imagined futures upon return?

To answer these questions, the article first outlines the theoretical framework, connecting Saudi Arabia’s changing gender regime with theories of mobility and transnational feminism. It then details the feminist narrative inquiry methodology employed. The findings section presents an integrated thematic analysis in which empirical narratives are interpreted alongside relevant theoretical perspectives. The paper concludes by considering implications for scholarship, policy, and support services.

This article contributes three advances. First, it theorizes liminal autonomy to capture the fragile, reversible, and context-dependent agency that emerges during a temporary sojourn. Second, it demonstrates how polymedia sustain a transnational “digital leash,” exporting social control across borders. Third, it analyzes a moving target of reform in Saudi Arabia, separating lifestyle freedoms (e.g., driving) from enduring structural constraints (e.g., the 2022 Personal Status Law).

2. Theoretical Framework

2.1. The Saudi Gender Regime in Transition

To understand the participants’ narratives, one must first grasp the patriarchal gender order from which they departed. Historically, this regime rested on two pillars: (1) strict, enforced gender segregation in public spaces, education, and work (Le Renard 2014); and (2) a comprehensive system of male guardianship (wilayah) that effectively rendered adult women “permanent legal minors,” requiring permission from a male guardian (wali—typically a father, husband, brother, or even son) for fundamental life decisions, including travel, marriage, healthcare, and exiting prison (Human Rights Watch 2016).

The ascent of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) and the launch of Vision 2030 in 2016 marked a dramatic state-led shift. Aiming to diversify the economy away from oil (Elbushra et al. 2025), the plan identified women’s economic participation as a critical, untapped resource. This economic imperative triggered a raft of top-down social reforms, including the right for women to drive (implemented in 2018), to attend public sporting events, and to obtain passports and travel abroad without a guardian’s permission (for women over 21). These reforms have significantly increased women’s labor force participation and mobility.

However, this liberalizing narrative is profoundly complicated by the 2022 passage of Saudi Arabia’s first codified Personal Status Law (PSL). While celebrated by the state as a “major qualitative leap,” the law has been heavily criticized by human rights observers and activists for codifying patriarchal control. Critics note that the PSL enshrines discrimination by:

Requiring a woman to have a male guardian’s permission to marry;

Institutionalizing wifely “obedience” (ta’a) in a “reasonable manner” as a condition for receiving financial support (nafaqa) from her husband;

Failing to adequately protect women from domestic violence or marital rape.

This creates a critical temporal context for our participants. They are not comparing their lives in Canada to a static, “traditional” Saudi Arabia. They are observing a moving target from afar, one that simultaneously grants them the mobility to drive to work while legally reinforcing their subordination in the home. This contradiction between liberalizing economic imperatives and conservative social controls is the central ambiguity the participants must navigate when imagining their return.

2.2. Theorizing the Sojourn: Mobility, Liminality, and Adaptation

We situate the sojourn within a “regimes of mobility” framework (Glick Schiller and Salazar 2013; Sheller and Urry 2006). This perspective rejects the notion of free movement, instead framing migration as a social field of differential power that is always regulated and unequal. The Saudi women in this study are privileged sojourners, often funded by the state and highly educated, yet their mobility is simultaneously controlled by scholarship rules, visa conditions, and the transnational expectations of family and community.

The sojourn itself creates a liminal space, a temporary state “betwixt and between” (Turner 1967) the normative structures of home and host societies. Drawing on Aguilar’s (2018) study of Filipino migrant workers, we view this liminal period as a “ritual passage,” a “laboratory of selfhood” where participants can experiment with new social roles and identities, leading to a “reconstruction of selfhood” (Aguilar 2018). Indeed, studies of female migrants commonly find increased autonomy, confidence, and agency as a result of migration.

To conceptualize the process of this transformation, we draw on theories of acculturation. We move beyond static typologies such as Berry’s (1997) four-part model, embracing more dynamic, process-oriented frameworks. First, Kim’s (2001, 2017) “stress–adaptation–growth” dynamic provides a narrative arc for the sojourn. This model posits that individuals experience stress (e.g., culture shock), which triggers a process of adaptation (learning new skills and norms), ultimately leading to growth (a more intercultural identity). Second, we employ Ward’s distinction between sociocultural adaptation (the functional, behavioral ability to “fit in” and navigate daily life) and psychological adaptation (emotional well-being and satisfaction) (Ward and Kennedy 1999). This distinction is crucial, as it allows for the possibility that a participant can be highly socioculturally adapted (e.g., fluent in English and succeeding academically) while still being psychologically distressed (e.g., feeling lonely or experiencing discrimination).

2.3. Transnational Feminism and Intersectionality

This study is grounded in a transnational feminist framework, which is essential for avoiding the neocolonial “savior” narratives that have long plagued Western scholarship on Muslim women. We explicitly reject the simplistic “oppressed vs. liberated” binary that frames Saudi women as passive victims at home and liberated agents in the West.

Following scholars like Mahmood (2005), we adopt a more complex understanding of agency. Agency is not only resistance to patriarchal norms; it can also be found in accommodation, negotiation, and the pious self-cultivation of virtues within a given religious or cultural framework. This lens allows us to analyze participants’ choices, such as the agentic decision to wear a niqab in a hostile environment or the agentic decision to remove a hijab and then navigate the resulting guilt with the nuance they deserve, rather than projecting a secular, liberal definition of freedom.

Finally, we employ an intersectional analysis (Crenshaw 1991). In Canada, participants are not experienced simply as “women.” Their identities are multiply constituted by gender, nationality (Saudi), ethnicity (Arab), and religion (Muslim). This intersectional identity is particularly salient in a Canadian context characterized by official multiculturalism alongside pervasive Islamophobia. This creates a central paradox of freedom: participants may escape the patriarchal gaze of their home community only to enter the Orientalist, racializing gaze of the host society. Their newfound freedom of movement may be paradoxically constrained by a new fear for their safety, not simply as women, but as visibly Muslim women. Figure 1 summarizes the conceptual model linking structural contexts to mediating sojourn practices and the paradoxical outcomes we term liminal autonomy.

3. Methods

3.1. Epistemological Stance: Feminist Narrative Inquiry

This study employs a qualitative, feminist narrative inquiry approach. This epistemological stance asserts that individuals construct and make sense of their lives through the stories they tell (Mishler 1986; Polkinghorne 1988). Narrative inquiry is therefore an ideal methodology for exploring biographical trajectories, life “turning points,” and identity shifts across time (pre-migration, sojourn, future) and space (Saudi Arabia vs. Canada).

The feminist component of this approach is a political and ethical commitment to centering participants’ voices as expert knowledge. It guided the research to represent their lives holistically, beyond pathological “culture shock” tropes, and to remain critically attentive to the power dynamics inherent in the research process. The primary researcher’s own positionality as a non-Saudi, non-Muslim woman was continually reflected upon to mitigate othering biases. This “insider–outsider” positionality (Merton 1972) afforded both advantages (e.g., a shared language of academic and feminist discourse) and potential limitations (participants might withhold culturally specific details or assume misunderstanding). Throughout the analysis, a reflexive journal was maintained to question assumptions, avoid projecting Western feminist notions onto the data, and stay true to the transnational feminist framework that centers participants’ own complex, sometimes contradictory meanings.

3.2. Participant Recruitment and Sample

Following approval from the university’s Research Ethics Board, participants were recruited in Ottawa, Canada, using purposeful and snowball sampling. Initial contact was made through advertisements and postings with university international student offices, Saudi student associations, and community-based social media groups. The final sample comprises 13 adult women who self-identified as Saudi nationals in Canada on a temporary basis (e.g., student visas or temporary work permits). As detailed in

Table 1. Participant Demographics (anonymized).

Pseudonym	Age (Range)	Marital Status	Sojourner Status	Time in Canada	Identifier	Field of Study/Work
Lina	25–30	Single	Master’s Student	1.5 years	Hijab	Engineering
Fatima	30–35	Married (with children)	Spouse of Professional	4 years	Hijab	Homemaker
Reem	20–25	Single	Undergraduate Student	3 years	None	Political Science
Hessa	25–30	Married	PhD Student	2 years	Niqab	Islamic Studies
Mariam	40–45	Divorced (with children)	PhD Student	5 years	Hijab	Education
Aisha	25–30	Single	Master’s Student	2 years	None (formerly Hijab)	Public Health
Noura	30–35	Married (with children)	Spouse of Student	3 years	Hijab	Homemaker
Salma	20–25	Single	Undergraduate Student	2.5 years	None	Biology
Yasmin	25–30	Married (no children)	Master’s Student	1 year	Hijab	Business Administration
Dana	35–40	Married (with children)	PhD Student	3 years	Hijab	Computer Science
Lojain	20–25	Single	Undergraduate Student	4 years	None	Communications
Amara	30–35	Divorced	Professional (Temporary)	6 years	None	Finance
Safiya	20–25	Married (no children)	Spouse of Student	8 months	Niqab	Homemaker

Age ranges, marital status, sojourner status, time in Canada, religious/cultural identifiers, and field of study/work.

, we sought diversity across key characteristics, including age (ranging from early 20 s to mid 40 s), marital status (single, married, divorced), sojourner role (undergraduate, graduate, and doctoral students, as well as spouses of students or professionals), and modes of religious or cultural expression (some participants wore hijab or niqab, others did not). All participant names used in this manuscript are pseudonyms to protect anonymity.

It is important to note that participants occupied a relatively privileged social position by virtue of their access to state-sponsored scholarships, higher education, and the ability to negotiate international mobility with their families. While levels of familial conservatism varied, all participants entered the sojourn with resources unavailable to many Saudi women. The findings should therefore be read as an analysis of differentiated autonomy within an already selective mobility pathway, rather than a universal account of Saudi women’s experiences.

3.3. Data Generation

Data were generated through 13 in-depth, semi-structured narrative interviews, each lasting between 60 and 120 min. Participants were given the choice of interview language; ten interviews were conducted in Arabic and three in English. All interviews were audio-recorded with consent and transcribed verbatim. The Arabic-language transcripts were professionally translated into English, and the primary researcher (fluent in both Arabic and English) reviewed all translations against the original audio to ensure conceptual equivalence and preserve cultural nuances in the narratives.

The interview guide was designed to be flexible and narrative-driven, focusing on life histories and personal trajectories. Prompts included:

“Tell me the story of your life in Saudi Arabia before you decided to come here.”

“What do you remember about your first few weeks in Canada?”

“Can you tell me about a time here when you felt you could do something you couldn’t do at home?”

“When you think about returning, what do you imagine your life will be like?”

3.4. Ethical Considerations and Researcher Reflexivity

This study was conducted under full ethical approval. Participants provided written informed consent and were explicitly informed of their right to skip any question or withdraw from the study at any time. The sensitive nature of some topics, such as family conflict, religious doubts, or critiques of state policy, was handled with care to minimize distress. All identifying information was removed or disguised (e.g., use of pseudonyms, omission of specific locations or names), and data were stored securely on encrypted devices accessible only to the research team.

The researcher’s positionality required ongoing reflexivity. The lead researcher is a female sociologist with regional expertise but is neither Saudi nor Muslim. She conducted interviews in both Arabic and English, allowing participants to choose their preferred language to improve comfort and disclosure. Being an outsider to the Saudi context meant participants occasionally felt the need to explain cultural nuances, but being a fellow woman and feminist academic created a certain rapport. Reflexive memoing throughout the research process helped the researcher remain aware of power imbalances and to continuously interrogate her interpretations, ensuring that she did not impose her own cultural assumptions on participants’ narratives.

3.5. Analytic Strategy

We employed a reflexive thematic analysis (RTA) as articulated by Braun and Clarke (2019, 2021). RTA was chosen for its alignment with our feminist narrative epistemology. Unlike more positivist, codebook-driven methods, RTA is an interpretive approach that views the researcher’s subjectivity not as a “bias” to be eliminated but as an analytic resource to be actively and reflexively managed (Braun and Clarke 2019). The analysis followed the six recursive phases outlined by Braun and Clarke (2021):

• Familiarization: Deep immersion in the transcripts and audio recordings, reading and re-reading the data while noting initial observations and reflections.
• Coding: Systematic, line-by-line coding of the entire dataset to identify meaningful features and segments related to our research questions (e.g., instances of autonomy, conflict, coping).
• Generating Initial Themes: Clustering codes into preliminary themes. Here, a theme is understood as an interpretive pattern or story that captures something significant about the data in relation to our questions.
• Reviewing Themes: Refining the themes by checking them against the coded data and the full dataset to ensure each theme was coherent internally and distinct from others, and that together they provided a compelling narrative of the data.
• Defining and Naming Themes: Articulating the essence of each theme by defining its scope and focus and assigning it a descriptive name (often using a striking quote from participants, as in our Section 4).
• Writing: Weaving together the analytical narrative and illustrative quotes for each theme to produce the final report (the findings and discussion of this article).

Figure 2 depicts the study workflow and aligned quality/ethics procedures across design, recruitment, data generation, and reflexive thematic analysis. This iterative process enabled the development of the five core themes presented in the next section.

4. Findings and Theoretical Analysis

Rather than presenting participants’ narratives and their interpretation as separate analytic moments, this section integrates empirical findings with relevant theoretical perspectives. Doing so enables the women’s accounts of mobility, autonomy, and constraint to be read not only as lived experience but as situated interventions into broader debates on liminality, gendered mobility regimes, and transnational feminist agency.

The participants’ narratives wove a complex tapestry of gain, loss, negotiation, and adaptation. Their stories of autonomy are presented here across five central themes, illustrating how these women negotiated autonomy across borders during their sojourn. Figure 3 provides a thematic map of the five interrelated themes and their links to gains and constraints.

Collectively, the five themes demonstrate that autonomy during a temporary sojourn is best understood as liminal: it is embodied and meaningful, yet context-dependent and potentially reversible. The analysis also shows how participants assess a “moving target” of reform under Vision 2030 while navigating two constraints that travel with them: transnational digital surveillance and the racializing gaze in Canada.

4.1. “My Whole Life Was ‘Wait’”: Pre-Migration Life Under Guardianship

All narratives of the Canadian sojourn were grounded in the “baseline” of life before departure. Participants universally described their pre-migration lives as defined by constrained mobility and a relational dependence on male guardians, aligning with long-standing critiques of the wilayah (guardianship) system. Autonomy was not depicted as an inherent right but rather as a concession to be requested from others.

“In Riyadh, I couldn’t even go to the supermarket alone. My driver, my husband, my father. My whole life was ‘wait.’ Waiting for a man to take me somewhere. Waiting for a man to finish his coffee so we could leave. Waiting for permission. Here… I just go. The going is… it’s everything. I didn’t realize how much of my life was just… waiting.”

(Fatima, 35, sojourner spouse)

Fatima’s powerful metaphor of “waiting” captures the sense of suspended agency inherent in the traditional gender regime. This waiting was not always experienced as overt oppression, but it was pervasive. Lina, a 27-year-old engineering student, spoke to the absurdity of the system when its rules governing a woman’s movements trumped any consideration of her competence or age:

“Before, my brother, who is five years younger than me, had to… ‘give permission’ on the [Absher government] app if I wanted to travel. I have a PhD scholarship. He failed high school. It’s… it was… humiliating. It’s not about him—he is a good kid—but… the system. It makes you feel… not like an adult. Not real.”

(Lina, 27, master’s student)

Reem, a 22-year-old who came to Canada at 19 for undergraduate studies, articulated how these norms were internalized to the point that the absence of freedom felt “normal” before she left Saudi Arabia:

“It wasn’t… bad, you know? It’s just normal. My family is not so strict, but of course you cannot just meet a friend for coffee. You plan. You ask. You are… driven. You don’t just… walk. The idea of just walking out the door… it didn’t exist.”

(Reem, 22, undergraduate student)

Lina’s narrative highlights the structural humiliation of a system that invalidated her adult agency and achievements in favor of a younger male relative’s authority. Fatima’s metaphor of “waiting” illustrates the everyday suspension of women’s independence. Together, these stories establish the backdrop against which the shock of Canadian autonomy would later be experienced.

Analytically, these accounts situate participants’ pre-migration lives within what feminist scholars have described as structurally enforced relational autonomy, where agency is exercised primarily through negotiation rather than independent decision-making. The language of “waiting” and “permission” reflects not only the legal architecture of the wilayah system (Human Rights Watch 2016) but also its internalization as a temporal condition shaping women’s sense of adulthood and selfhood. In this respect, the sojourn does not begin from a neutral baseline but from a subject position already marked by suspended agency, against which subsequent experiences of autonomy acquire their intensity.

4.2. The Shock of “Simple” Freedoms: Embodied Autonomy in Canada

The transition to Canada was universally described as a “shock,” but one centered on the sudden, overwhelming, and often terrifying acquisition of what participants called “simple” or “basic” freedoms. These narratives of first-time experiences—“firsts”—were deeply somatic and emotional, aligning with Kim’s (2001) stress–adaptation model in which the new environment initially acts as a stressor that, when overcome, precipitates profound personal growth.

“The first time I took the bus. Alone. At night. My heart was… thumping. I was terrified. I was holding my pepper spray. I was sure I was doing something wrong, that I would be… I don’t know. But I was also… I felt so powerful. I got home and I just… cried? It was just a bus! [laughs] But it wasn’t. It was the first time in my life I moved my own body from A to B without a man’s permission or a man’s car.”

(Reem, 22)

These early encounters with mobility exemplify what Kim (2001) conceptualizes as the stress–adaptation–growth dynamic, but with a distinctly gendered inflection. The stress described here is not cultural unfamiliarity per se, but the sudden withdrawal of external regulation over women’s bodies and movement. Mastery of mundane practices such as public transport or classroom participation thus operates as embodied proof of autonomy, transforming routine acts into rites of passage that recalibrate participants’ sense of personal capacity.

For Mariam, a 41-year-old PhD student and divorced mother, the mundane act of driving in Canada was inextricably linked to a political struggle she had participated in back home:

“Driving. I have an Ontario license. In Saudi, I campaigned for years [for the right to drive]. I was one of the women… well, I was quiet, but I was there. Now… I drive my son to school. I go to the grocery. It feels… normal. But I know it is not. I know what this ‘normal’ cost us. Every time I turn the key, I remember.”

(Mariam, 41)

This new autonomy was not just physical, but also social and intellectual. Lina, the engineering student, described the challenge of Canada’s mixed-gender academic spaces:

“Mixed classes. The first time the professor (male) asked me a question, I… I froze. I was so used to being invisible. In my Saudi university [women’s campus], I was the top of my class. I was… loud! But here… I am not used to a man I am not related to… asking my opinion. Here, I have to have an opinion. It took a year for my voice to… come back.”

(Lina, 27)

These “firsts”—the bus ride, the turn of the ignition key, the act of speaking up in class—function as rites of passage in the participants’ narratives. The palpable fear and tears (as Reem described) accompanying these ostensibly simple acts illustrate how deeply the pre-migration norms of constraint had been embodied. Mastering these tasks became symbolic milestones in the women’s self-development, marking the shedding of one layer of constraint and the tentative claiming of a new, self-directed identity.

4.3. The “Digital Leash”: Transnational Surveillance and Relational Autonomy

Participants’ autonomy in Canada was not absolute. Their stories revealed a constant, transnational negotiation with family and community at home, mediated by digital technology. While participants were geographically free, they remained bound by what one called a “digital leash,” which limited their social and relational autonomy.

Aisha, a 25-year-old master’s student, described the “heavy love” of her family, expressed through persistent online surveillance:

“My family trusts me. But my mother… she calls on WhatsApp video. ‘Show me the room, yalla.’ She wants to see I am alone. She wants to see what I am wearing. She will say, ‘Why is it dark? Are you outside?’ It’s… not trust. It’s… love, but it’s a heavy love. I cannot just… be.”

(Aisha, 25)

To manage this, participants developed sophisticated “agency maneuvers” and strategic self-presentation tactics (what one participant laughingly called “social media gymnastics”). Reem, the undergraduate, explained her strategy of effectively living two lives online:

“My social life? I have two. My Snapchat for my cousins… I am studying in the library, very boring. My ‘close friends’ story on Instagram… maybe I am at a café, music, friends… boys and girls. I am not doing anything haram [forbidden], but… it’s just… easier to be two people. Why make them worry? Why make them talk?”

(Reem, 22)

Importantly, this surveillance was not limited to direct family. Several participants described a “transnational panopticon” in which the judgmental gaze of their home community was effectively transplanted into the diaspora, often enforced by other Saudis abroad. This finding echoes other qualitative studies of Saudi students overseas. Lina explained:

“We call it the ‘Saudi CIA’ [laughs]. The other Saudi students. Who is watching who? Who will report back to whose family? ‘Oh, I saw Lina at a coffee shop with a man.’ ‘Oh, I saw Reem’s hair.’ I felt this more in my first year. This judgment… it followed us here.”

(Lina, 27)

These narratives demonstrate the limits of physical mobility. Participants are geographically “free” but remain relationally bound. Reem’s “two people” strategy is a clear act of agency aimed at managing this cross-border scrutiny—carving out a private sphere of autonomy while performing a public, digital self that conforms to home-community expectations. In this way, the sojourners practice autonomy within constraint, carefully negotiating how much of their new freedom is visible to those back home.

Conceptually, the digital leash illustrates how regimes of mobility operate beyond physical borders. While geographic movement enables partial escape from direct guardianship, polymedia infrastructures reproduce relational surveillance across distance, effectively reterritorializing control (Glick Schiller and Salazar 2013). Participants’ strategic self-presentation practices do not signal false consciousness or duplicity, but rather represent agentic adaptations within constraint, aligning with transnational feminist understandings of agency as negotiated rather than oppositional. This extends the findings beyond ‘homesickness’ framings by showing how digital intimacy can function as a governance mechanism that structures everyday decision-making abroad.

4.4. “Am I Canadian or Am I Saudi?”: Symbolic Autonomy, Hijab, and Islamophobia

Participants’ negotiations of dress, visibility, and religious expression reveal symbolic autonomy as a particularly charged site of liminal agency, where gender, religion, and racialization intersect.

Symbolic autonomy—the freedom of expression, dress, and religious practice—emerged as a central site of identity work for participants. However, it was precisely at this juncture that the “freedom” of Canada met the constraints of an intersectional identity. Here, the “oppressed vs. liberated” binary most clearly collapsed.

For Hessa, a 29-year-old PhD student, wearing the niqab (face veil) in Canada was a profound act of agentic piety, consistent with Mahmood’s (2005) framework. It was a choice she made against the expectations of both her family and her new host society:

“In Riyadh, I wear niqab. Here, I wear niqab. My family… they thought I would take it off. ‘It will be hard for you,’ they said. But here, I feel it is… my choice. It is my jihad [struggle]. It is my identity. But people… they look. They are afraid. Or they are angry. One man yelled at me, ‘Go back to Saudi Arabia!’ I… I was raised in Canada [as a child], but… they see this [gestures to niqab] and I am not Canadian. It is… tiring.”

(Hessa, 29)

Conversely, for Aisha—who had worn the hijab since childhood—the agentic choice was to remove it. This act did not bring simple liberation, but rather a complex mix of freedom and guilt:

“I took off my hijab. I started… second year. My family does not know. I feel… guilty. 100%. But I also… I just wanted to feel the wind in my hair. I just wanted to… blend in. And then I feel guilty for wanting to blend in! [laughs] It’s… complex. Am I a bad Muslim? Am I… ‘West-toxified’? Or am I just… me?”

(Aisha, 25)

Participants found that in Canada, they had, in a sense, traded the patriarchal gaze of their home community for the Orientalist/racializing gaze of the host society. Fatima, who wears hijab, described being reduced to a stereotype in her daily interactions:

“Here, I am ‘free’ to be a Muslim. But I am also… a ‘problem’ for being a Muslim. In Saudi, I am just… a woman. Here, I am a Muslim woman. A ‘Middle Eastern woman.’ I am a stereotype. People ask me… ‘Oh, you can talk? You are so… articulate.’ It is… racist. I gain the freedom to drive, but I get… this. It’s a trade.”

(Fatima, 35)

Fatima’s account illustrates how symbolic autonomy in the host society can trigger new forms of constraint. Participants described being read through a presumptive script in which visible Muslim identity signaled oppression or lack of agency, producing everyday encounters that ranged from microaggressions to overt hostility. The result was a double bind in which exercising choice, whether veiling or unveiling, invited judgment from different directions.

These divergent practices underscore Mahmood’s (2005) argument that agency cannot be reduced to resistance against norms. Whether through veiling or unveiling, participants exercised choice within overlapping systems of power, encountering new constraints even as they escaped others. Intersectionality is therefore not an abstract framework here, but a lived condition: autonomy is expanded along one axis while curtailed along another, destabilizing any linear narrative of liberation through migration.

Participants’ accounts also complicate any simple “Canada equals freedom” narrative. Several described trading the patriarchal gaze of home for the racializing gaze of the host society, where visible Muslim identity could attract suspicion, hostility, or microaggressions. This produced a double bind in which symbolic autonomy, whether expressed through veiling or unveiling, invited scrutiny from different directions. Autonomy therefore emerged not as a destination reached through migration but as an ongoing negotiation within intersecting systems of power.

4.5. “Will I Have to Shrink Again?”: Imagining Return and Vision 2030

As sojourners, all participants’ narratives were oriented toward an eventual return to Saudi Arabia. This anticipated future was viewed with profound ambivalence, blending hope in the Kingdom’s new reforms with a deep-seated fear of personal regression—essentially, a fear of reverse culture shock.

Mariam, the 41-year-old PhD student, articulated this fear using a striking physical metaphor of “shrinking,” echoing themes in re-entry shock literature:

“My biggest fear… is that I will go back and… I will shrink. That all this… bigness… I feel here… this voice I have found… will just get… quiet. Because it’s easier to be quiet there. That is what I am afraid of. Will I have to shrink again?”

(Mariam, 41)

This fear of shrinking was complicated by the “moving target” of the home society they were set to re-enter. Participants were keenly aware—and deeply analytical—of the Vision 2030 reforms unfolding in their absence. Lina, the engineering student, captured this ambiguity:

“It’s… strange. My friends in Riyadh are going to concerts, they are driving… my life there now would be so different. Maybe… maybe I didn’t need to leave to be free? But… I read about the new law… It feels like… one step forward, five steps back. They give you the car, but they… still own you in the house.”

(Lina, 27)

Hessa, the PhD student, offered the most trenchant structural critique. Like others, she distinguished between surface-level reforms and an underlying, unchanged mentality:

“The [Vision 2030] reforms are for… they are economic. They want women to work… so they let them drive. It is not… a change of mentality. It is… strategy. Here, the freedom… it is in the mentality. Even with the racism… the idea is that I am equal. At home, the idea is still that I am… ‘protected’.”

(Hessa, 29)

Several participants framed their anticipated return through an explicitly economic lens, linking employability and income to their ability to preserve aspects of the autonomy developed abroad. This aligns with scholarship on gendered development regimes in the Gulf, which has shown that women’s empowerment under Vision 2030 is primarily framed through market participation rather than through dismantling patriarchal authority in private and legal domains (Al-Rasheed 2021; Jamilah and Isnarti 2024). Economic participation was therefore imagined not as sufficient for social autonomy, but as a necessary—if fragile—precondition. As feminist political economy scholars have noted, such forms of instrumentalized empowerment can expand women’s public presence while leaving underlying gender hierarchies intact, rendering autonomy contingent rather than secured.

Participants’ fears of “shrinking” upon return resonate strongly with literature on re-entry and reverse culture shock, which emphasizes that return migration can be psychologically destabilizing when transformed identities encounter unchanged—or only superficially altered—structures at home (Alkhalaf et al. 2024; Asiri 2025). Unlike classic models of reverse culture shock that focus on readjustment stress, however, participants here articulated a more profound concern: the possibility that the agentic dispositions cultivated abroad would become socially illegible or actively discouraged upon return. Their anticipatory anxiety centered less on cultural mismatch than on the sustainability of selfhood within a legal and familial regime that continues to prioritize women’s protection and obedience over autonomy.

While Vision 2030 was acknowledged as enabling women’s labor market entry, participants remained skeptical that economic inclusion alone could sustain their expanded sense of self without parallel shifts in familial authority and legal practice.

Observing from a liminal position in Canada, participants functioned as critical interpreters of state-led reform rather than passive recipients of it. They acknowledged tangible lifestyle freedoms enabled under Vision 2030 (mobility, public life, labor market participation), yet repeatedly distinguished these changes from structural autonomy in private and legal domains. Lina’s formulation that reforms “give you the car, but still own you in the house” captured this distinction succinctly, while Hessa’s contrast between an economic “strategy” and a genuine “change of mentality” articulated skepticism toward liberalization framed primarily through market imperatives. In this way, participants differentiated modernization from liberation and treated the 2022 Personal Status Law as evidence that patriarchal authority remained legally codified despite expanded public mobilities.

The findings demonstrate that the autonomy gained by sojourners is not a permanent acquisition but a process: a form of liminal autonomy lived in the interim, structurally enabled yet socially precarious. As theorized in migration and mobility studies, autonomy acquired through temporary mobility remains conditional when return is governed by enduring legal frameworks and relational obligations (Aguilar 2018; Glick Schiller and Salazar 2013). Participants’ fear of “shrinking” therefore reflects not personal insecurity but a realistic assessment of structural constraints. Their narratives foreground autonomy as reversible, contingent on context, and unevenly distributed across public, private, and legal spheres. In this sense, 4.5 completes the analytic arc of the paper by showing how liminal autonomy is temporally bounded, politically situated, and continuously negotiated rather than progressively accumulated.

5. Conclusions

This section synthesizes the integrated findings and theoretical analysis presented above and then outlines implications, limitations, and directions for future research.

5.1. Core Contributions

This article has provided a rich narrative account of autonomy and mobility among Saudi women sojourners, yielding three core contributions. First, it offers empirical insight into the lived experiences of sojourners—a distinct and sociologically significant group whose return orientation fundamentally shapes their negotiation of selfhood. Second, it develops the concept of “liminal autonomy” to theorize the fragile, transformative, yet context-dependent agency cultivated during a temporary sojourn. This concept moves beyond static models of acculturation and adaptation toward a more dynamic understanding of identity work in transience. Third, it demonstrates the importance of simultaneously analyzing internal domestic reforms (Vision 2030, including the 2022 PSL) and external migration experiences. The participants are not evaluating a static home society, but a moving target; their liminal position in Canada provides a unique critical vantage point from which to deconstruct state-led reform narratives.

5.2. Implications for Future Practice

The findings have several implications. For sociological scholarship, this study urges a move beyond both static acculturation models and simplistic “liberation” narratives. Future research on gender and migration should account for transnational digital ties as mechanisms of social control and analyze “home” and “host” societies as mutually constitutive fields of power. For universities and sojourner support services, our results suggest that programming must go beyond generic “culture shock” orientation. Support should be intersectional, with dedicated resources to address Islamophobia, racism, and othering on campuses, as well as culturally attuned counseling that recognizes the unique psychological pressures of the “digital leash” (family expectations and surveillance via social media), which simple adjustment workshops cannot adequately address. For Saudi policymakers, the message is clear: the thousands of women returning from sojourns are not blank slates. They return with an embodied taste of structural autonomy and a sophisticated, critical analysis of domestic reforms. They will likely be key agents in pushing for the change of mentality required to make the promises of Vision 2030 a lived social reality, rather than merely an economic initiative.

5.3. Limitations and Future Research

This study, like all small-scale qualitative research, has limitations. The narratives of 13 women in one Canadian city are not statistically generalizable; rather, our aim has been analytic generalization, providing conceptual insights that may resonate beyond this sample. The data rely on participants’ self-reported (and storied) experiences, which are inherently subjective and reflective. However, this is also a strength, given our focus on personal meaning-making.

Future research would benefit from a longitudinal design. Following these women (and others) through their return to Saudi Arabia would empirically test their fears of “shrinking” and document how they navigate their “bigger” selves within the evolving context of the new Saudi Arabia. Comparative studies could also illuminate the role of host society context—for instance, comparing Saudi sojourners in a non-Western country (e.g., Malaysia) or in a more securitized Western context (e.g., post-9/11 United States) to see how experiences differ. Finally, research should explore the perspectives of the men in these transnational scenarios (the guardians, husbands, brothers, and fellow students who accompany or await these women). These men are also negotiating and co-constructing new gender roles and expectations through the sojourn process, and understanding their experiences would complement the insights from this study, painting a fuller picture of gender role negotiation in the context of Saudi transnational mobility.