#DearSister and #MosqueMeToo: adversarial Islamic feminism within the Western-Islamic public sphere

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the present paper I define Mona Eltahawy’s viral Twitter campaigns, #DearSister (2017) and #MosqueMeToo (2018), and her broad journalistic activism as a novel form of Islamic feminism, “adversarial Islamic feminism.” Provocative, angry, and highly performative, it is found on social media platforms, representing a new chapter in the articulations of the politics, ethics, and aesthetics of the Muslim female body, often caught between the Scylla of liberal and colonial fantasies of empowerment and emancipation, and the Charybdis of religiously ordained submission to patriarchy. I discuss adversarial Islamic feminism first as a novel intervention in academic and specialized debates within Islamic feminism, and second, I place it within the framework of a transnational, highly mediatized, feminist Western-Islamic public sphere, which is precarious, experimental and utopian. Eltahawy’s utopian project has its radical horizon: the concept of global feminist uprising, visible and orchestrated on social media, led by Muslim women and women of color but articulated in universal language relevant to women everywhere.