Troublesome Threesome: Feminism, Anthropology and Muslim Women's Piety

Abstract

This article critically addresses recent anthropological and feminist efforts to theorize and analyse Muslim women's participation in and support for the Islamic revival in its various manifestations. Drawing on ethnographic material from research on young Muslims engaged in Islamic youth and student-organizations in Norway, I investigate some of the challenges that researching religious subjectivities and practices pose to feminist theory. In particular, I deal with how to understand women's religious piety in relation to questions of self, agency and resistance. Engaging with Saba Mahmood's work on The Politics of Piety, this article suggests ways of understanding the young women's religious engagement that move beyond the confines of a binary model of subordination and resistance, coercion and choice. Grounding the discussion in ethnographic analysis of how young Muslim women in Norway speak about the ‘self’, I argue that critically revisiting feminist notions of agency, autonomy and desire, is necessary in order to understand the kinds of self-realization that these women aspire to. However, the article argues against positing Muslim conceptions and techniques of the self as ‘the other’ of liberal-secular traditions. Rather, I show how configurations of personhood, ethics and self-realization drawn from Islamic and liberal-secular discursive formations inhabit not only the same cultural and historical space, but also shape individual subjectivities and modes of agency.

Feminist dilemmas and the agency of veiled Muslim women: Analysing identities and social representations

“…Analysis of discursive dynamics shows that, while reasons of religious obligation and modesty are significant across my respondents' accounts of veiling, religiosity does not stand alone as a certain or uncontested grounding of reasoning and identity. In line with other studies of identity and belief among Muslim women in northern European contexts (for example Dwyer, 2000;Jacobsen, 2011), most of my respondents discuss the veil in ways that exhibit diverse and often apparently contradictory modes of reasoning, reflecting negotiations of intersecting socio-cultural contexts and competing representations relating to gender, Islam and the veil.…”

Mosques as Gendered Spaces: The Complexity of Women’s Compliance with, And Resistance to, Dominant Gender Norms, And the Importance of Male Allies

“…According to these participants, such conservative views are rooted in "cultural traditions" that have emerged as a result of patriarchal and false interpretations of Islam. These women are engaging in a discursive "politics of authenticity" (Jouili and Amir-Moazami 2006, p. 637); see also (Jacobsen 2011b), where practices that subordinate women are challenged via appeals to a "true", "original" or "authentic" Islam that is seen to afford women's rights and gender equality. Such critical views were expressed by Sunni and Shia women alike in both Oslo and Leicestershire.…”

Veil as Stigma: Exploring the Role of Representations in Muslim Women's Management of Threatened Social Identity

“…There are many existing studies that, while not addressing the context of stigma directly, explore the experiences and identity work of Muslim minority women. Researchers have examined both women's engagement in revivalist movements (Bracke, ; Jacobsen, ; Jouili, ) and the construction of diasporic identities at the intersections of socio‐cultural contexts (Dwyer, ; Tarlo, ). Addressing the significance of veiling, researchers have highlighted its negotiated meaning for women living ‘in a nexus between two cultures’ (Williams & Vashi, , p. 285) and elaborated the veil as a performative practice that communicates and manages different aspects of social identity (Hopkins & Greenwood, ).…”