In "Women & Words in Saudi Arabia: The Politics of Literary Discourse," Arebi employs the Foucauldian notion of discourse to analyze how Saudi women writers comprehend their position within larger contexts of power and perceive their work as creative or journalistic writers as a means of disturbing the "verbal machinery" in charge of theorizing women's roles and behavior. She details the various stylistic approaches adopted by Saudi women prose writers seeking to establish a dialect between opposition to certain aspects of society and affirmation of major cultural values and institutions. Arebi argues that appreciation of these approaches is critical to understanding how Saudi female writers gain access to the field of cultural politics and submit their own interpretations of Islam, gender relationships, and women's potential roles in society. She posits that: