Asian Muslim women's struggle to gain value: The labour behind performative visibility as everyday politics in Britain

Abstract

Historical and contemporary discourses around Muslim women represent them through gendered cultural tropes of victims of their own patriarchal community, racial tropes of victims of islamophobia, the sexualised and fetishized ‘other’ or complicit in ‘terrorist’ activity. However, Muslim women's investment in race relations is evident in their performative visibility in everyday spaces (e.g., work, education, shops, streets etc.), where they know that participatory parity is an uninhabitable category for them as minority women. Shifting focus from activism to struggle, this research demonstrates that Muslim women's struggle against stereotypical classifications is a form of politics, a struggle to be recognised as ‘doing politics’ in different ways, in different arenas of social life, disrupting relations between Muslims and majority British society. The paper also shows participants use of different strategies, reframing, challenging and ambivalence, as ways of doing politics explaining how power-relations are active in different spaces in these women's everyday lives.