Corporeal bodies, religious lives, and ‘women's rights’: Engaging Islamic body politics among Muslim women in South Africa

Abstract

abstractFeminist activists and theorists’ focus on body politics continues to be vital as we critically try to navigate through the enduring androcentrism and heterosexism, as well as the matrix of new bio-technological opportunities that mark our contemporary realities. The entanglements of these discourses with the classic dichotomies of nature/culture and public/private, so prevalent in a variety of cultural and religious contexts, call for feminist inventiveness and thorough reconceptualisation on the nature of being human. However, in feminist engagements with body politics, seemingly scant attention is paid to the influence of religious discourses on women's sexual and reproductive decision-making. Hence, in this Article, I unpack and foreground the functioning of an Islamic body politics that importantly inform Muslim women's understandings of sex, gender and reproductive bodies. Drawing on in-depth interviews with eight South African Muslim women, this Article explores constructions of biology and gender as expressed through these women's narratives on sexual and reproductive matters. The analysis and discussion of these themes are framed through broader geo-political debates over women's rights in Islam.