A critical technocultural discourse analysis of Muslim fashion bloggers in France: charting ‘restorative technoscapes’

Abstract

ABSTRACT Using critical technocultural discourse analysis with attention to netnography and the insights of visual rhetoric, this study evaluates the online productions of 4 hijabi (veiled) French Muslim fashion influencers: Zozoliina, Lady Zorro, Salima Aliani, and the Barchamammas. We assess whether the increasing visibility of French hijabi fashion bloggers like these is changing attitudes about the integration of Muslims in France. The media construction of French Muslim identity and its resulting Islamophobia have created an ‘imaginary Islam’ steeped in negativism and racialised stigma, according to some scholars, to which our surveyed influencers respond, manipulating Orientalist tropes to foster ambiguities about religion, sexuality, and race. In drawing attention to dynamic, consumption-based intersections of modest fashion marketing, ‘erasure,’ and processes of meaning-making, we argue that hijabi French Muslim fashion bloggers are increasingly positioning themselves as ‘cyberarbiters’ of social transformation and shifting attitudes about the intersections of Islam, the body, and female sexuality.