Getting comfortable to feel at home: clothing practices of black muslim women in Britain

This article explores the role of comfort as an affective encounter across bodies, objects (namely clothing) and spaces. I focus on how bodies that are marked as strange and a source of society’s discomfort negotiate this positioning through the presentation of one’s body. What does it mean for these bodies to be comfortable or uncomfortable? This question is answered through work done with Black Muslim women in Britain. By exploring how comfort is felt in relation to racially marked bodies, this article develops work on emotional geographies. Comfort is understood as both an emotional product and process that changes as bodies move across different spaces. In noting this movement, I also explore how boundaries around the body (enacted through e.g. the multi-dimensional hijab) presents a particular form of territorialisation that facilitates comfort as we present our bodies across different spaces. These boundaries can be both a source of comfort and discomfort through their positioning as deviant from social norms. In understanding the different roles of boundaries, I explore the social processes that construct comfort (or discomfort) as we move through different spaces. This is intertwined with furthering work on Muslim geographies by challenging the overwhelming focus placed on ‘public’ facing garments like the headscarf and abaya. Such a focus limits an understanding of the fluidity of Black Muslim women’s identities, and how these changes in our clothing practices affect and are affected by the relationships built across spaces.     

The morality police are coming! Muslims in Norway's media discourses (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

In early 2010, a series of reports appeared in the influential liberal‐conservative Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten drawing attention to what appeared to reporters to be a self‐appointed, de facto Muslim ‘morality police’ attempting to use harassment to exert social control over non‐hijab‐wearing women of immigrant background and gay men in the district of Grønland in the inner city of Oslo. What came to be known in Norway as the ‘morality‐police debate’ demonstrated the extent to which the figure of the Muslim male as an embodied threat to Norway's presumed relative gender equality and lack of homophobia had come to be embedded in the country's media and political discourse. This article suggests that the debate can tell us much about why certain tropes central to Norway's anti‐Muslim discourses have gained such currency across the Norwegian political board in recent years.     

Black male: Advertising and the cultural politics of masculinity

During the 1980s, men's bodies began to appear with increasing frequency in television, cinema and billboard advertising. The advertisers’ preferred image of masculinity has generally been young, white, able‐bodied and staunchly heterosexual. This paper explores a partial exception to these generalisations: Ogilvy & Mather's highly successful relaunch of the soft drink, Lucozade. By using selected images of black male bodies and their popular associations with sporting and sexual prowess, Lucozade was able to shake off its long‐established associations with sickness and convalescence, becoming a popular ‘in‐health’ drink with a revitalised and revitalising image. The paper places contemporary representations of black men in British advertising in relation to wider changes in attitudes towards gender, sexuality and ‘race’, arguing that the success of the Lucozade campaign depended not so much on general associations between sport and ‘race’, manliness and muscularity, as on the reader's (socially constructed) knowledge of the particular personalities represented. This assumed knowledge effectively suppresses the more threatening aspects of a stereotypically anonymous and rapacious black male sexuality, provoking desire without evoking dread.     

To be a true Muslim: online discussions on the headscarf among Moroccan-Dutch women

The headscarf (hijab) and its relation to Muslim identity and gender relations within Islam is a major topic of contention for Muslim women living in Western Europe. One aspect of this is that they have to present an acceptable religious identity vis-à-vis other Muslims. The present study uses membership categorization analysis to examine the membership categories and category-bound attributes used in Internet forum discussions on the headscarf among Moroccan-Dutch women. The analysis shows how the category of ‘true’ Muslim is linked to wearing the headscarf out of religious submission. Women who did not wear the headscarf produced accounts that emphasized personal conviction and religious engagement as additional defining attributes of a ‘true’ Muslim, or emphasized other activities or predicates as being critical for a Muslim female identity. With these accounts, these women negotiated the normative religious context on which categorization practices with fellow believers are based.     

Transnational abductions and transnational responsibilities? The politics of ‘protecting’ female Muslim refugees abducted from Spain

This article examines evolving gendered protection narratives surrounding four ‘abduction’ cases in which Sahrawi refugee girls and young women living in Spain were ‘abducted’ by their birth-families and forcibly returned to the Algerian-based Sahrawi refugee camps between 2002 and 2009. By exploring Spanish state and civil society responses to these girls' ‘abductions’, I argue that there has been a major shift in the ways in which legitimate responsibility and authority over Sahrawi refugee women as Muslim female forced migrants have been conceptualised and invoked by Spanish actors. I therefore assess the gendered nature of competing claims of responsibility to ‘protect’ Sahrawi refugee women both within and outside of the Algerian-based Sahrawi refugee camps, exploring the motivations and implications of different actors' in/actions towards these girls and women. With Polisario claiming to represent and act as a liberal ‘state’ committed to protecting the rights of its ‘refugee-citizens’ in some instances, while denying politico-legal responsibility in others, the question of ‘who’ or ‘what’ claims the legitimate authority to ‘protect’ Sahrawi refugee women and girls is thus accentuated by such cases. By exploring shifts in Spanish public and political discourses of responsibility over the past decade on the one hand, and the accentuation of competing discourses as presented by Spanish, Polisario and Algerian actors on the other, this article highlights the complex nature and implications of the ‘intimate’ Spanish civil society networks that ensure the physical and political survival of the Sahrawi refugee camps. Ultimately, I argue that Sahrawi girls and women have become hypervisible in Spain, being conceptualised as women who ‘belong’ to the Spanish nation that in turn has a responsibility to ‘protect’ ‘our’ Sahrawi women from ‘their’ culture.     

Unpacking the landscape of female sex tourism in Kenya: a film analysis of Paradise: Love

This article examines Paradise: Love (2012, Dir. Ulrich Seidl), a compelling filmic account of the problematics of race, ethnicity, gender, and nation that organize contemporary accounts of female sex tourism. The storyline and visual imagery of the film positions Kenya – and a Eurocentric, homogenized, and reductive (mis)understanding of parts of ‘Africa’ – as an imagined site of racial and sexual adventure for older white Western women seeking intimate relationships with a category of local black men, many of whom enter into these sexual relationships in order to supplement personal and family economic shortfalls. This economy of intimate exchange is positioned as a trade of these black Kenyan men’s desire for money, local status, and the potential to travel to the West, for white Western women’s desire for sexual fulfillment from young black men’s bodies and their assumed sexual prowess. Deconstructing the discourses of female sex tourism through Paradise: Love centres the visual and representational components of processes of racialization and sexualization, wherein beach boys and white Western women gaze upon and ‘Other’ each other through essentialist and fetishized understandings of racial and sexual difference. In focusing on the power dynamics of female sex tourism in particular, the film plays up the shock value of women sexually exploiting men, pushing viewers to question: who counts as a sex tourist? Ultimately, this article seeks to enrich and extend scholarship that troubles intersecting power structures that shape and inform transnational inter-racial intimacies within economies of eroticized exchange.     

Beyond ‘Culture’ as an explanation for intimate violence: the politics and possibilities of plural resistance

This article interrogates simplified culturalist explanations of gendered violence, which evoke timeless ‘tradition’ and religiosity to locate violence in racialized places and upon ‘othered’ bodies. I examine structural processes that shape women’s experiences of and vulnerability to intimate violence. My analysis complicates culturalist narratives, but engages critically with culture as one context within which violence is embedded. Drawing on field research within Muslim communities in Hyderabad, India, I discuss the complexities of interwoven experiences of structural, state, and intimate gender violence. I draw attention to how anti-violence organizations working in marginalized communities theorize these complexities, and practices of what I am calling ‘plural resistance,’ which these organizations enact through equally complex responses to such violences. Plural resistance describes community-based strategies that simultaneously reject both gender violence and other forms of systemic violence, such as poverty born of uneven development. Embodied resistance to gender violence provides a critical lens for understanding articulations between regional patriarchies, exclusionary state practices, uneven development, and Islamophobia.     

Commuting,exercise and sport: an ethnography of long-distance bike commuting

The uniqueness of this article is that it deals with long-distance bike commuting in pro-cycling Copenhagen and its environs. Informed by practice theory and sensuous studies of urban and sport practices, I discuss the ‘things and environments’, ‘meanings’ and ‘competences and biological bodies’ that typify long-distance commuter cycling. This article develops cycling literature and the ‘mobilities paradigm’ in the following ways: by outlining a practice approach to cycling; challenging the idea that commuter cycling is only for short distances; undermining the distinction between utility and sport cycling; and lastly by connecting the ‘mobilities paradigm’ with literature on active travel and sport studies.     

Tehran’s subway: gender,mobility, and the adaptation of the ‘proper’ Muslim woman

Tehran’s subway, the most affordable means of public transportation in the city, offers a useful context to study the relationship between women’s spatial mobility, the construction of self, and social production of space. This study focuses on Line 1 of Tehran’s subway that connects Tehran’s Bala Shahr (Northern Tehran) and Paeen Shahr (Southern Tehran) neighborhoods. This study draws upon 46 semi-structured interviews with women who were using subway Line 1 in the fall and winter of 2012. The average hour-long interviews examine how women’s emotional states as well as their perceptions of self and space vary as they traverse the city on Line 1. Representing a cultural as well as a spatial transect through the city, the perceptions of women on subway’s Line 1 convey the repudiation of the state’s attempt to promote a singular Muslim female identity. The findings suggest that similar to women’s perception of space, their gendered identities are constantly changing through the enhanced mobility that is facilitated by Tehran’s subway system. In contrast to what is presumed in the West, with a simple change in their hijab style or make-up, Iranian women innovatively negotiate contrasting spaces.     

‘Access to Women’: Securing Mormon Whiteness in the US Army's Regulation of Commercial Sex in Chihuahua, 1916

This article argues that Mormon colonists – once refugees who had sought freedom from persecution for their sexual practices – asserted a white middle-class respectability as they cooperated with the US Army and corresponded with officers on the management of the soldiers’ sexual conduct. Their success depended heavily on shared understandings of the race and gender of the people involved. That is, they leveraged prevailing assumptions about Black soldiers’ bodies as aggressive and in need of sex, about white Mormon women's bodies as vulnerable and about Mexican women's bodies as racially in-between and thus suitable for the sexual service-work of enlisted men, pliable and ready to be made ‘accessible’ to soldiers. John Pershing, when asked to explain his decision to build the brothel, justified his choice by saying he had all Black troops at the camp and that nearby Mormon colonists had complained of these Black men meeting women outside for sex. This article explains how, why, for whom and to what end Pershing's explanation worked.     

Gender Justice and (In)security in Pakistan and Afghanistan†

ABSTRACT

This article argues that gender justice becomes a politicised issue in counterproductive ways in conflict zones. Despite claims of following democratic principles, cultural norms have often taken precedence over ensuring gender-sensitive security practices on the ground. The rightness of the ‘war on terror’ justified by evoking fear and enforced through colonial methods of surveillance, torture, and repression in counter-terrorism measures, reproduces colonial strategies of governance. In the current context, the postcolonial sovereign state with its colonial memories and structures of violence attempts to control women’s identities. This article analyses some of these debates within the context of Pakistan’s and Afghanistan’s security dynamics. It begins with the premise that a deliberate focus on the exclusion and limitation of women in Muslim and traditional societies sustains and reinforces the stereotypes of women as silent and silenced actors only. However, while the control of women within and beyond the nexus of patriarchal family'society'state is central to extremist ideologies and institutionalisation practices, women’s vulnerabilities and insecurities increase in times of conflict not only because of the action of religious forces, but also because of ‘progressive’, ‘secular’, ‘humanitarian’ interventions.     

Emotional geographies of veiling: the meanings of the hijab for five Palestinian American Muslim women

This article explores experiential and emotional dimensions of veiling practices, the ‘emotional geographies of veiling,’ in relation to Muslim women's community activism. By approaching the hijab as a symbol with both discursive effects and personal meaning – a psycho-social space – this article offers important insights into the intertwined, complex processes of internal embodiments and public manifestations of Muslim female identities. Based on the analysis of life narratives of five Palestinian American Muslim women in Milwaukee, a medium-sized city in the American Midwest, this article comes to the conclusion that public visibility through veiling entails both socio-spatial and emotional/internal processes. The analysis of these women's narratives explores how veiling practices can guide personal piety and self-transformation, and contributes to the solidification of a politically and religiously identifiable community.     

Masculine Old Women or Feminine Old Men? Rethinking Gender and the Ageing Body in Early Modern English Medicine

This article challenges the almost universal historiographical claim that women's bodies were thought to become increasingly masculine as they aged in early modern English medicine, especially after menopause. It is not surprising that this ‘masculinisation hypothesis’ has endured with very little critical appraisal, as there have been few in-depth studies into medical conceptions of ageing womanhood. Drawing on c.140 English vernacular medical and popular health texts published between 1570 and 1730, this article interrogates and refutes key claims for the corporeal ‘manliness’ of old women. Instead, it argues that while medicine undoubtedly depicted old women and men as growing closer in bodily constitution as they aged, this generic ageing constitution had more ‘feminine’ corporeal attributes than ‘masculine’. Exploring references to ‘effeminated’ old men within medical books, it then questions the impact of these medical gender associations within wider cultural contexts.     

Uncovering the ‘Virginity Testing’ Controversy in the National Archives: The Intersectionality of Discrimination in British Immigration History

This article explores the practice of ‘virginity testing’ by British immigration officers in the late 1970s through the internal documents of the Home Office held at the National Archives in London. By analysing these documents, we argue that the ‘virginity testing’ controversy demonstrates the intersectionality of discrimination faced by migrant women from the Indian subcontinent attempting to enter Britain in the 1970s. Previous discussions of the practice have focused on either the dimension of ‘race’ or gender as the determining factor behind this invasive procedure, but this article shows that both dimensions are of equal importance in explaining why immigration officers undertook ‘testing’ for virginity during border control investigations. The emphasis within the immigration control system on preventing ‘bogus’ migration informed how immigration officers processed potential migrants and this framework of suspicion allowed the practice of ‘virginity testing’ to occur.     

The Curse of Civilised Woman: Race,Gender and the Pain of Childbirth in Nineteenth‐Century American Medicine

Accounts of the easy, painless childbearing of ‘primitive’ non‐white women in comparison to their ‘civilised’ white counterparts were ubiquitous in early modern travel literature. In the nineteenth‐century United States, such narratives were increasingly taken up in medical and scientific literature, catalysing the production of new forms of knowledge about race and bodies. This article analyses several key medico‐scientific theories produced to explain racialised parturient pain and argues that this knowledge dynamically interrelated with both racial ideas and racial practice in nineteenth‐century society. The shifting character of this knowledge implicated changing ways of defining race, including the anchoring of racial identity in the physical body; the role of the physician as an arbiter of racial truth; and the imbrication of gender in racial classifications. Moreover, knowledge produced to explain racialised parturient pain – for instance, about race‐specific sensory physiology, muscular mechanics and skeletal anatomy – circulated within numerous social institutions, among them slavery; gynaecologic and obstetric care; medical experimentation; anti‐abortion crusades invoking the spectre of ‘race suicide’; and eugenic projects. In this way, medical discourse on the gendered body of the parturient was enrolled in the changing articulation of race across the nineteenth century.     

Situating middle class identities: American college women of South Asian descent

This article explores the ways in which American college women of South Asian descent discuss their positioning as middle class. The article analyses participants' talk around class as evidence of embeddedness in American class discourses and a complex and contradictory scheme of identification that implicates other identities like gender, race and culture. Respondents often articulated class using the American Dream, where the social capital their parents immigrated with is left unexamined in favour of a narrative of ‘rags to riches’. Young women also used other constructs like ‘stability’, ‘race’ and ‘resources’ to make reference to class, but also to participate in an American discursive silence around it. Finally, the notion of a drive towards professionalism as an immigrant goal is examined, and it is suggested that this serves to further deflect discussions of class. This article synthesises theories of diaspora, ‘translocational positioning’ and habitus, and examines the production of American class discourse as a performance of an American middle class habitus.     

Genderism and the Bathroom Problem: (re)materialising sexed sites, (re)creating sexed bodies

This article introduces the possibilities of a new term, ‘genderism’, to describe the hostile readings of, and reactions to, gender ambiguous bodies. Genderism is used here to articulate instances of discrimination that are based on the discontinuities between the sex with which an individual identifies and how others, in a variety of spaces, read their sex. The article suggests that intersections between queer theories, that destabilise the dichotomy of man/woman, and performative geographies, that recognise the (re)formation of space, could facilitate, and indeed necessitate, a consideration of how the illusion of dichotomous sexes is (re)formed at the site of the body (re)constituting men and women in context. Nine women, who participated in a wider research project about non‐heterosexual women's lives, spoke of being mistaken for men yet understanding themselves and living as women. Using these narratives the ‘bathroom problem’, where women are read as men in toilets and as a result subjected to abusive and even violent reactions, is examined. These policing behaviours demonstrate the instability of sexed norms as well as how sites can be (re)made ‘woman only’ and simultaneously ‘women's’ bodies (re)produced. The article then examines how women negotiate the policing of sexed spaces such that bodies, sexed sites (toilets) and the location of these sites (nightclubs, service stations) are mutually constituted within sexed regimes of power. In this way the article aims to explore how sexed power relations (re)form the mundane ‘stuff’ of everyday life by examining moments where boundaries of gender difference are overtly (en)forced.     

Managing the gendered dynamics of parenting during the UK New Labour government years

This article considers what a ‘structure of feeling’ approach can reveal about the gendered dynamics of parenting during the ‘New Labour’ years of the UK government. It explores some of the ways in which contestations about gender roles were evident in policy and in popular cultural discourses and demonstrates how these discourses both contained their own internal tensions and contradicted each other. It then reflects on the strategies that parents engaged in need to make sense of and manage these contestations and makes clear some of the pressures that had come to bear through policy and popular culture on parents' personal lives.     

The Weaponising of Women's Bodies in the Wars of Reform and French Intervention in Mexico, 1857–67

Acts of violence in war not only have individual effects on bodies, but they also have a social, collective impact on the social body. While recent works have recovered the participation of women in the War for Independence and the 1910 Revolution in Mexico, the role their bodies played in wartime has not been examined. Focusing on the decade of war between 1857 and 1867, which influenced the consolidation of national sovereignty and identity, this article explores how, while women's bodies can be targets themselves, they also can be transformed into weapons aimed at other targets. Consequently, their bodies were ‘weaponised’ and aimed at: women as individuals punished for transgressions, real or imagined, of traditional gender roles; at men, to damage or destroy their masculine honour, their failure to protect their women and the integrity of their families; and last, the survival of their vision of the nation (either Liberal or Conservative), or even the honour and survival of the nation itself in the case of a foreign intervention. However, which bodies were targeted, and how, depended on the intersection of gender, class, race, ethnicity, political identity and nationality.     

The Book of Marriage: Histories of Muslim Women in Twentieth‐Century Australia

From 1860 to the 1920s, Muslim merchants and workers from across British India and Afghanistan travelled to Australian shores to work in the extensive camel transportation network that underpinned the growth of capitalism in the Australian interior. Through marriage, South Asian women in addition to white women and Aboriginal women became part of families spanning the Indian Ocean. Yet, the life‐worlds of these women are absent from Australian historiography and the field of Indian Ocean studies alike. When women do appear in Australian histories of Muslim communities, the orientalist accounts work to condemn Muslim men rather than shed light on women's lives. Leading scholars of Indian Ocean mobilities on the other hand, have tended to equate masculinity with motion and femininity with stasis, omitting analyses of women's life‐trajectories across the Indian Ocean arena. In this article, I rethink the definitions of ‘motion’ that underpin Indian Ocean histories by reading marriage records as an archive of women's motion. Using family archives spanning from Australia to South Asia, this article examines five women's marriages to South Asian men in Australia. Challenging the racist accounts of gender relations that currently structure histories of Muslims in Australia, I turn to the intellectual traditions of colonised peoples in search of alternatives to orientalist narratives. Redeploying the Muslim narrative tradition of Kitab al‐Nikah (Book of Marriage) to write feminist history, this article proposes a new framework to house histories of Muslim women.