Convertitis and the Struggle with Liminality for Female Converts to Islam in Australia

Abstract

Drawing on ethnography among female converts to Islam who attended lessons at their local mosque in Melbourne, Australia, this article explores how new female converts navigate tensions between the secular and the religious, as they become Muslim. Conversion, for these women, is a series of interactions between religion, culture, gender and ethnicity, which work through, on and in their bodies. Through a framework of embodiment, I explore their struggle with certain aspects of the faith, which manifests in a phenomenon they refer to, jokingly, as convertitis. Convertitis, I argue, is a kind of “radical awkwardness”: an embodied reaction to liminality between normative models of Muslim/non-Muslim and Islam/the West which are upheld by symbolic and institutional power relations. Thus, in an attempt to better understand these women’s experiences of conversion, I explore their relationship with eating pork, listening to music, drinking alcohol and having a pet dog, to detail how perceived threats to their fledgling identity are managed through the adoption of literal and rational interpretations of Islam. By doing so, I aim to delineate the encounter between and co-existence of different sensory regimes, bodily nuances and moral registers that characterise the experience of conversion.