Towards Becoming a Middle Eastern Alevi Muslim Woman


Esra Ari, Mount Royal University

The seeds of this paper were planted through a creative project titled “The Stories Project: Strangers to Ourselves” at CERC in Migration and Integration at the Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU). This paper will examine an identity construction process which includes intersections of different spatial experiences in Turkey, the U.S., and Canada. I will ask, “How did I become a Middle Eastern Alevi Muslim Woman?” When I lived in Turkey, I self-identified as a Turkish woman. My gender was most salient in defining my identity, and then my ethnic identity. However, during the years away from home, a new sense of self arose from my experiences (Sparks 1996). I came to identify myself as a “Middle Eastern Alevi Muslim woman.” This paper will discuss how this transformative process occurred, benefiting from whiteness, postcolonial literature and transnational feminist approaches. I will engage in an autoethnographic narrative inquiry to answer the question: “How did I become a Middle Eastern Alevi Muslim Woman?” In other words, I will examine my experiences analytically and use them as data (Ellis et al. 2011) to analyze my identity negotiation. I argue that the orientalist gaze and essentialized notions of Muslim and Middle Eastern women have transformed my identity.

This paper will be presented at the following session: