Based on a study of the use of mobile phones by Saudi women in Riyad, this article calls into question the positioning, position and characteristics (both social and biological) of the ethnographer in a sensitive area and seeks to understand how they could have affected her. This is the tale of an ethnographic study in Riyad, Saudi Arabia, where society is hemmed in by powerful gender, religious and social norms. In this place, the fact that I am a typical white Westerner, my epistemological feminist position and my biological or identifying traits such as my age, sex or gender all marked me as an outsider. This « assignment » was sometimes a privilege, sometimes an epistemic discomfort, and it produced research relationships of variable geometry. The relationships of power that made up the research played against me as a feminist Western observer. I was trapped by my Western hegemony that made my fieldwork an exotic subject and I sinned by naïveté, if not by ethnocentrism, especially through scientific reductionism.