Negotiating digital femininity and generational identity in Saudi Arabia through the lens of influencer culture

This forum article advances a conceptual analysis of how Saudi women across generations negotiate femininity, agency, and social legitimacy amid the cultural transformations associated with Vision 2030 and the expansion of digital media. Rather than treating empowerment as a linear outcome of reform or digital participation, the article argues that femininity in the Saudi context is constituted through ongoing symbolic negotiation among moral expectations, affective practices, and mediated visibility. Drawing on feminist political economy, theories of emotional capitalism, and postcolonial feminist critique, the analysis examines how generational differences shape women’s engagements with public space, professional aspiration, family obligation, and online self-presentation. Older women tend to ground femininity in communal ethics, religious literacy, and respectability, while younger women increasingly articulate selfhood through global aesthetic repertoires, digital self-branding, and entrepreneurial orientations. The article further analyzes the rise of female digital mentors and informal life coaches as new figures of gendered authority, showing how advice and care circulate through platform-based economies of attention and monetization. Through the analytic lens of symbolic negotiation, the study demonstrates how legitimacy functions as a central currency through which Saudi women reconcile reformist discourses, cultural continuity, and digital modernity. In doing so, it offers a contextually grounded framework for understanding gendered agency beyond celebratory or oppositional narratives of social change.