The Matrix of Gendered Islamophobia: Muslim Women’s Repression and Resistance

2020 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 648-678
Author(s):  
Sabrina Alimahomed-Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Women Activists ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Muslim Women ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Force ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
The Matrix ◽  
Women's Lives ◽  
Dialectical Relationship ◽  
Black Muslim

Drawing on 75 semi-structured qualitative interviews with Arab, South Asian, and Black Muslim women social justice activists, ages 18–30 years, organizing in the United States and the United Kingdom, I theorize their experiences as the basis of the matrix of gendered Islamophobia. Building upon Jasmine Zine’s concept of gendered Islamophobia, I synthesize this concept with Patricia Hill Collins’s theory of the matrix of domination to give a more in-depth and nuanced structure of how gendered Islamophobia operates and is resisted by Muslim women activists. This article identifies the overlapping configurations of power that affect Muslim women’s lives through structural, disciplinary, hegemonic, and interpersonal domains, countering reductionist accounts of Islamophobia as a universalized, unvariegated social force impacting all Muslims in similar ways (thereby privileging Muslim men’s experiences and subjectivities while contributing to the erasure of Muslim women’s agency). Instead, the matrix of gendered Islamophobia locates Islamophobia within shifting axes of oppression that are simultaneously structured along the lines of gender, race, class, sexuality, and citizenship. The findings of this research reveal a dialectical relationship between Muslim women’s oppression and simultaneous contestation of gendered Islamophobia via their collective remaking of alternative ideas, politics, discourses, and organizing practices.

scholarly journals Identifying a space for young Black Muslim women in contemporary Britain

Ethnicities ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 146879682110018
Author(s):  
Sheymaa Ali Nurein ◽  
Humera Iqbal
Keyword(s):  
Black Community ◽  
Muslim Women ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Negative Effects ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Different Dimensions ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Black Muslim ◽  
And Coping

Young Black Muslim Women (BMW) have complex, intersectional identities and exist at the margins of various identity groupings. Given this, members of the community can face societal relegation across, not only race and gender lines, but across religious ones, too. This paper explores the lived experiences of intragroup discrimination, identity and belonging in 11 young Black Muslim Women in the United Kingdom. In-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted with participants and thematically analysed through the lens of intersectionality. The use of an intersectional framework facilitated an understanding of the manner in which the sample was multiply marginalised. Two key themes emerged from the interviews: firstly, around experiences of intragroup and intersectional discrimination and, secondly, around the challenges of responding to and coping with the negative effects of such discrimination. Participants discussed the cross-cutting nature through which they faced discrimination: from within the Black community; from within the Muslim community; and as a result of their gender. The non-exclusivity of these three identities result in constant encounters of discrimination along different dimensions to their personal identity. They also developed diverse means of coping with this marginalisation including drawing from religious beliefs and mobile identifications, i.e. performing different aspects of their identities in different contexts. The present study contributes to existing knowledge in its focus on an under-researched group and emphasises the negative effects of intragroup discrimination. The paper importantly highlights the diversity within the Black community and considers the (in)visibility of Black Muslim Women within society.

Gender Equality at the Test of Sharia Councils in the UK

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-86
Author(s):  
Louisa Perreau
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
Muslim Women ◽  
The United States ◽  
State Policies ◽  
Religious Fundamentalism ◽  
British Government ◽  
Family Services ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Abortion Laws ◽  
The Uk

As the saying goes ‘good girls go to heaven, bad girls go everywhere!’, whose origin is uncertain, sometimes attributed to American actress and screenwriter Mae West, sometimes to editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan magazine, Helen Gurvey Brown, it was taken up as a slogan by feminists who denounce the sexual norm imposed on women by religions. At a time when the influence of religious fundamentalism on State policies seems to be gaining ground (retreat on abortion laws in the United States, in Poland; Sharia courts in Great Britain, etc.), the object of this research note will be to question the articulations between British Muslim women, State multiculturalism and legislation. In Britain, since the 1980s, a network of sharia councils has developed to resolve disputes between Muslims, including resolving family problems. Sharia councils thus reveal the place of Muslim women in the United Kingdom on the issue of divorce. Extremely patriarchal, rarely feminist, often undemocratic, the sharia councils appear as places of power. The latter are often compared to Islamic courts, so-called ‘counseling’ religious services or ‘Islamic family services’ to which Muslims wishing to respect divine law and their religious precepts go – especially women. What does this mean for British Muslim women who use these services? How is the British government responding?

scholarly journals ‘Our task is to demystify fears’: Analysing newsroom management of automation in journalism

Journalism ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 146488491986159 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marko Milosavljević ◽  
Igor Vobič
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Innovation Process ◽  
The United States ◽  
Working Environment ◽  
Technological Innovations ◽  
Working Environments ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Human Labour ◽  
Corporate Goals ◽  
Algorithmic Techniques

The study explores uses of algorithmic techniques in journalists’ working environments and investigates newsroom managers’ negotiations of automation as innovation process aimed at ensuring partial or full replacement of human labour with technology. Drawing from 15 qualitative interviews with representatives of newsroom management from legacy news institutions in the United Kingdom, Germany and the United States, the study analyses their (cl)aims to maintain the newsroom as a stable, but dynamic working environment and reveals three dualist propositions when negotiating automation novelties – human journalistic agency stands in contrast to technology, skills are separated from newsworkers, and the creation of news contrasts with its presentation. The results show the interviewees re-articulate the dominance of human agency over technology, re-establish technological innovations as liberating newsworkers rather than subordinating them, and standardise news by re-evaluating the concept as both a civic bond and a commodity. Such considerations are detached from recent concerns about automation of human labour and closer to what we call algorithmic sublime, maintaining the newsroom management’s loyalty to both the professional values of journalism and the corporate goals of management.

September 11

Meridians ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (S1) ◽  
pp. 127-130
Author(s):  
Amrita Basu ◽  
Paula Giddings ◽  
Inderpal Grewal ◽  
Kamala Visweswaran
Keyword(s):  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Muslim Women ◽  
The United States ◽  
Just World ◽  
South West ◽  
Women's Lives ◽  
Feminist Perspectives ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The U.S

Abstract The links among feminism, race, and transnationalism, which are key to the Meridians project, are also crucial to understanding the events of 9/11 and the war on Afghanistan. Some pieces in this archive provide feminist perspectives on the impact of war and fundamentalism on women’s lives in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Other pieces analyze the ways in which racist representations of Muslim women and of Islam have come to play a key part in colonial and neocolonial “great games” being played in South, West, and Central Asia. Yet others link the U.S.-sponsored war in Afghanistan to the repression of the media and the attacks on civil liberties within the U.S. itself. In constructing an archive of these courageous testimonies, Meridians honors the courage and integrity of women in the United States and around the world who aspire to a better, more just world.

Moroccan Muslim Women and Identity Negotiation in Diasporic Spaces

2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-125 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sanae Elmoudden
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Young Women ◽  
Interdisciplinary Research ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
Identity Negotiation ◽  
Muslim Women ◽  
The United States ◽  
Moroccan Women ◽  
Diasporic Identities ◽  
Moroccan Muslim Women

The complexity of today’s heterogeneous world demands more than the dominant binary of Islam versus West established via the identity framework of critical communication and cultural studies, particularly when discussing diasporic spaces. Drawing on qualitative interviews with twenty Muslim Moroccan women, conducted in the United States and Morocco and informed by interdisciplinary research on space, this paper argues that attaining the diasporic space should be understood both in terms of physical migration and in terms of discursive migration that includes non-territorial movement. The paper starts by addressing the debate on diasporic spaces, the local or global spaces that can still be considered diasporic in an era of mediated communications. Second, the paper illustrates how the respondents negotiate diasporic identities in relation to both physical migration and discursive immigration. Finally, it considers how these young women are exploring possibilities for their gender identities by drawing on alternative diasporic identifications.

The Intimate Violence of Political and Economic Change in Southern Ethiopia

2012 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-64 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Ellison
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Muslim Women ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Other ◽  
Eastern Africa ◽  
Southern Ethiopia ◽  
Intimate Violence ◽  
Women's Lives ◽  
Genital Cutting

In 1960, women in southern Ethiopia's rural Konso district faced a violent campaign by local men to eradicate leather clothing following a ban imposed by the local governor, Tesfaye Hailu. Tesfaye, a man of the northern Amhara ethnic group, banned leather clothes along with bead necklaces and arm bracelets as part of imperial Ethiopia's “modernization,” which was influenced by disparate sources, including the United States. Tesfaye saw women's attire as “backward” and “unhygienic” and as obstructing modernization; its elimination was a means to improve Konso culture and help the empire join the community of modern nations. The “culture” of “the Other” has often been cast as impeding “modernity” and requiring elimination or change, particularly the practices of women, from genital cutting in eastern Africa to veiling among Muslim women in the Middle East and Europe (Hodgson 2009; Masquelier 2005; Merry 2009a). So it was with the widespread, politicized transition to cotton clothing in nineteenth- and twentieth-century eastern Africa. The target was clothing worn by all women in Konso and made by women in the low-status category of “Xauta,” sometimes referred to as a “caste.” Leather skirts signaled important stages in women's lives, and became extensions of individual women's tastes, experiences, and identities. Women today recall the violence and punishments of the campaign, including being chased, beaten, imprisoned, and fined, and even having their skirts forcibly removed at home and in public. They offer contradictory explanations of who initiated the ban and the reasons for it, but they remember clearly the local men involved in eradication efforts.

Prolonging the careers of older information technology workers: continuity, exit or retirement transitions?

2009 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 237-256 ◽  
Author(s):  
LIBBY BROOKE
Keyword(s):  
Information Technology ◽  
Older Workers ◽  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
The United States ◽  
Policy And Practice ◽  
It Industry ◽  
Information Technology Workers ◽  
Career Trajectories ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
It Workers

ABSTRACTThe article explores the ways in which older workers' career trajectories influenced their exit from or continuity of employment in the Australian information technology (IT) industry. The data were collected through qualitative interviews with 71 employees of 10 small and medium-sized IT firms as part of the cross-country Workforce Ageing in the New Economy project (WANE), which was conducted in Canada, the United States, Australia and several European Union countries (the United Kingdom, Germany and The Netherlands). The analysis revealed that older IT workers' capacity to envisage careers beyond their fifties was constrained by age-based ‘normative’ capability assumptions that resulted in truncated careers, dissuaded the ambition to continue in work, and induced early retirement. The workers' constricted, age-bound perspectives on their careers were reinforced by the rapid pace of technological and company transformations. A structural incompatibility was found between the exceptional dynamism and competitiveness of the IT industry and the conventional age-staged and extended career. The analysis showed that several drivers of occupational career trajectories besides the well-researched health and financial factors predisposed ‘default transitions’ to exit and retirement. The paper concludes with policy and practice recommendations for the prolongation of IT workers' careers and their improved alignment with the contemporary lifecourse.

scholarly journals The impact of COVID-19 on digital data practices in museums and art galleries in the UK and the US

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Lukas Noehrer ◽  
Abigail Gilmore ◽  
Caroline Jay ◽  
Yo Yehudi
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Interviews ◽  
The United States ◽  
Digital Data ◽  
Art Galleries ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Data Practices ◽  
Uncertain Future ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Digital Engagement ◽  
The Impact

AbstractThe first quarter of 2020 heralded the beginning of an uncertain future for museums and galleries as the COVID-19 pandemic hit and the only means to stay ‘open’ was to turn towards the digital. In this paper, we investigate how the physical closure of museum buildings due to lockdown restrictions caused shockwaves within their digital strategies and changed their data practices potentially for good. We review the impact of COVID-19 on the museum sector, based on literature and desk research, with a focus on the implications for three museums and art galleries in the United Kingdom and the United States, and their mission, objectives, and digital data practices. We then present an analysis of ten qualitative interviews with expert witnesses working in the sector, representing different roles and types of institutions, undertaken between April and October 2020. Our research finds that digital engagement with museum content and practices around data in institutions have changed and that digital methods for organising and accessing collections for both staff and the general public have become more important. We present evidence that strategic preparedness influenced how well institutions were able to transition during closure and that metrics data became pivotal in understanding this novel situation. Increased engagement online changed traditional audience profiles, challenging museums to find ways of accommodating new forms of engagement in order to survive and thrive in the post-pandemic environment.

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