Embodying the Veil: Muslim Women and Gendered Islamophobia in ‘New Times’

Abstract

In this chapter, I explore the intersectional dynamics of race, gender and religion by looking at the relationship between gendered Islamophobic discourses that circulate in the ‘West’ and the embodied identity of professional Muslim women working in universities in Britain. Framing the analysis is the macro discourse of anti-Islamic hostility in Britain and its production of the raced and gendered Muslim female body. In-depth interviews with three Muslim professional women of Turkish, Pakistani and Indian heritage give us an insight into their subjecthood and inner ‘sense of self’ as they negotiate the ‘postcolonial disjunctures’ of racism and Islamophobia which frame their everyday lives as professional women in educational spaces. Developing the concept of ‘embodied intersectionality’ enables an analysis of race, gender and religion through embodied practices such as choosing, or not, to wear the veil (hijab). This chapter concludes that while gendered and raced representation is powerfully written on and experienced within the Muslim female body, Muslim women continually challenge and transform the affective hegemonic discourses of Islamophobia that circulate in the ‘West’.