(AIS4b) Gendered Islamophobia Theory & Resistance II: Gender, Muslimhoods & Intersectionalities

In this session, panelists will critically reflect on the gendered impacts of systemic Islamophobia through scholarship, research, and community organizing. Panelists will also explore how gendered Islamophobia is resisted through social movements and community organizing, collectively and individually. Participants in this session will have an opportunity to learn about a range of innovative methodologies and theorizing that reflect the diverse critical interventions being conducted in the field of gendered Islamophobia and critical Muslim studies.

Organizers: Ayesha Mian Akram, University of Calgary, Nadiya Ali, Trent University, Nooreen Hussain, York University, Rashmee Karnad-Jani, Public Scholar; Chair: Nadiya Ali, Trent University

Presentations

Ayesha Mian Akram, University of Calgary

Politics of Resistance: On Muslim Women Advancing a Collective Critical Faith-Based Epistemic

This paper summarizes my dissertation project and contributes to the nuanced and intersectional body of scholarship examining the complexities of the Muslim experience in Canada today by analyzing the creation and power of a group of Muslim women engaged in impactful resistances as they seek to create change within and for their communities. This was a community-based project in which I invited four Muslim women activists in Windsor-Essex to together plan, implement, and evaluate a social action to address anti-Muslim racism. Component One comprised of the community project, where the women decided to create a wellness-centered space for Muslim women to unburden the challenges in their lives, compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic, global racist and antiracist movements, and their various intersecting responsibilities. This group, Circles of Wisdom, was to be a safe space of support, care, and feminist community. Component Two comprised of the research project, in which, as a researcher, I thematically analyzed secondary data from Component One in addition to scheduling follow-up individual interviews with the community members who participated in Component One. This research component explored the following research question: How do Muslim women activists in Windsor-Essex develop a collective political consciousness to resist the challenges they face as gendered religious subjects in Canada? In this dissertation, I theorize that Circles of Wisdom constitutes a collective critical faith-based epistemic resistance (Zine, 2004), a novel strategy for engaging in resistance founded on shared faith, shared social justice values, and shared longing for community, created by and for Muslim women. Through the women’s simultaneous embrace and refusal of various power relations that externally sought to construct their subjectivities, I theorize how the participants navigate and strategize to create a new collective subjectivity that reclaims their sense of self and more authentically reflects who they are and who they want to be as Muslim women. This resistance was characterized by three primary components: (1) constructing an alternative collective subjectivity based on a new set of social relations rooted in wellness; (2) meeting in a transcendental digital space; and, (3) demonstrating responsibility to community. Circles of Wisdom demonstrates that prioritization of community and reclamation of Self are foundational for Muslim women as they navigate a world dominated by neoliberal anti-Muslim racism.

Nuzhat Khurshid, York University

Love as Theory: Expanding Religious Feminist Agency

Academic work on religious agency highlights the unique aspects of women’s religious agency that can push back against liberal feminist assumptions of countering tradition. Authors such as Mahmood (2005) argue that pious agency need not always be feminist, in the sense of opposing patriarchy, and that this kind of performative agency is as valid as other kinds of more typical feminist agency in the West. While Mahmood’s foundational work highlights a primarily negative view of religious agency that challenges liberal assumptions of agency, it misses the important positive characteristics of religious agency. In this presentation, I argue that there are also important commonalities between Islamic feminism and Western feminism, and both can work towards common goals. Through an examination of the work of Avicenna, Jalaluddin Rumi, and Ibn Arabi, all eminent Islamic thinkers and philosophers, I highlight elements of love, beauty and sexuality that are portrayed from within Islamic literature. This is important because academic binaries created by ideologies such as liberalism and secularism, emerge out of trajectories of Western knowledge production, and serve to ostracize and exclude. Said (1978) showcases the impact of Orientalist discourse as a hegemonic system of political, economic and epistemological domination. While there is much research on the inherent oppression of Muslim women, or their unique kinds of performative agency, I want to focus on foundational aspects of love that are part of both Islamic and Western understandings of women and humanism. By highlighting Muslim works that speak to universal concerns such as love and feminism, we can push back against current literature that addresses Muslim women’s pious agency as submissive and passive. A glance through Islamic thought, from the early Islamic era to modern times, highlights how modern epistemological constructions and academic discourse can circumvent broader understandings and historical applications of religion. Sekyi-Otu presents a strong argument for the use of universalist ideas as a tool in the hands of non-Western cultures to bring out organic and generative theoretical ideals that lead to progressive social and political change (2019). Universalism has (rightfully) been deemed suspect in projects of Western cultural and political domination. However, Sekyi-Otu points out that condemning universalism as an imposition ultimately prevents non-Westerners peoples from reclaiming parts of their tradition that overlap with Western values. Sekyi-Otu presents the question of the human as the basis for a transcendental understanding of universal values. This has radical implications for progressive political and ethical projects that are situated in non-Western traditions. I believe this work of finding commonalities across religious divides is a rigorous way to build solidarities against Islamophobia, as well as inter-community harm. Jamal (2015) and Zia (2017) present examples of how the current literature on religious agency can ignore the multifaceted and complex dynamics of Muslim women’s lives and, through reifying the secular bias in society, can indirectly harm them. Jamal describes the notions of piety that aligns Muslim women’s agency with religious virtue. Analyses of victims of honour-related violence also contain implicit references to religious ideas of piety, thus constituting it as the norm. Jamal notes how modern constructions of secularism can create an artificial binary between individualism/freedom and communitarianism/religion, thus inadvertently blaming victims of honour-based violence for their perceived transgressions against Islam. Afiya Zia agrees that simplistic understandings of religious agency can be detrimental to women’s rights. In her view, essentialized notions of piety fail to take into account other layers of religious agency which can be oppositional. She is concerned that the current popularity of the concept of performative religious piety has created an intellectual atmosphere where different expressions of religion, such as socialist and feminist strands, are automatically aligned with liberal colonial legacies and are delegitimized. As Zia works with Muslim women in Pakistan in an activist role, she is wary of academic discourse that can take away from the struggles of Muslim women for their rights in patriarchal, authoritarian political environments. An examination of love and women from within the Islamic tradition can push back against literature that portrays Muslim women as always oppositional or always submissive. Emphasizing the humanity of these women can align then with other women in their common struggle against patriarchy and Islamophobia.

Jessica Stallone, University of Toronto

'I would have given them a piece of my mind': Spatialized Feelings and Emotion Work Among Racialized Muslim Women in Quebec

On September 10, 2013, the Quebec provincial government, le Parti Quebecois, proposed legislation to prevent religious minorities from wearing ‘ostentatious’ religious symbols when working in government institutions. The proposed legislation, the Charter of Values, was part of an ongoing attempt to restrict religious practice in response to immigrant and religious diversity (Laxer 2019; Zine 2009). As in France (Bowen 2007; Laxer 2019), justification of the legislation emphasized laicité (state secularism) and gender equality. The gendered effects of secular politics have been researched in Western Europe (Bowen 2007; Kassir and Reitz 2016; Korteweg and Yurkadul 2014), including work on the effects of headscarf bans on women who wear it (Abdelgadir and Fouka 2020), paying attention to the ways women respond to discrimination and social exclusion (Kassir and Reitz 2016; Laxer et al. 2023). Others have noted the importance of the state in solidifying social boundaries between national majority and Muslim minority groups (Korteweg and Yurkadul 2014; Laxer et al. 2023). Feminist scholars highlight colonial tropes in the discourse of secularism (Parvez 2017; Scott 2017), pointing to assumptions that Muslim women must be saved from ‘backward’ Islam (Farris 2017). While some scholarship has recognized the significant emotional toll headscarf bans may have (Laxer et al. 2023), the emotion work that racialized Muslim women do to manage their feelings about their sense of self and belonging (i.e., their subjectivities) in a hostile context is underexplored. Therefore, I ask to what extent such policies impact Muslim women’s identities, feelings about themselves, and their sense of belonging in Canada. More specifically, I examine how university-educated Muslim women in Quebec feel about themselves, their Muslimness and the headscarf, when their belonging to the nation is politically questioned. I develop a concept I call ‘spatialized feelings’, referring to how feelings—relationally accomplished in intersectional hierarchies (race, class, gender)—are contingent on the spaces that social actors occupy. I show that feelings women have about their Muslim identity change as they interact with people in different spaces, such as the workplace, school, and Mosque. Importantly, the spaces they occupy mediate how they feel about national belonging. Data were collected in 2014, after the Quebec government proposed the Charter of Values, when respondents became viscerally aware that the state was questioning the belonging of Muslim Quebecers because of their religion. I attended Friday prayer services at a Montreal university for nine months to build rapport and recruit participants. Through snowball sampling techniques, I conducted in-depth interviews with 22 university-educated women who identified as Muslim. I conducted a focus group to validate preliminary data, leading to a total of 23 respondents for the study. I also attended two Halaqa sessions—a women’s-only group that discusses religious materials. The emotional effects of secular policies for headscarf-wearing Muslim women are arguably more pronounced nearly a decade later with the implementation of Bill 21, making this research implicated in contemporary Quebec politics. This presentation will describe the scholarship on headscarf bans to situate the Quebec context. Then, I will outline my concept of ‘spatialized feelings’. After explaining my methodology, I will examine the data to determine the ways emotions were spatialized by my participants. I will show that participants felt alienated in primarily white spaces where interactions with non-Muslims reinforced the notion of their ‘difference’. In spaces with other Muslims, they felt connected, but belonging was complicated by racial, ethnic, and gender hierarchies. Using a relational-spatial approach to emotion, I examine how they engaged in emotion work to navigate their social exclusion in Quebec, drawing on insights from gender scholars to denote the ways emotion work is racialized and gendered (Ipsa-Landa and Thomas 2019; Kang 2003; Wingfield 2010, 2021).

Esra Ari, Mount Royal University

Towards Becoming a Middle Eastern Alevi Muslim Woman

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.