Fashioning hybrid Muslim women’s veiled embodied geographies in Hamilton, Aotearoa New Zealand: #hijabi spaces

Abstract

In this article, we foreground the intersection of hijab and fashion as multiple expressions of Muslim women’s gendered identities and geographies in Hamilton, Aotearoa New Zealand. Muslim women use their bodies to express adaptations of femininity, religion, and nationalities. Using an embodied geography lens, this article grapples with mutual intersecting identities, including gender, religion and nationality and wider relations of power. Drawing on interviews with 30 participants and their social media images, we show how participants trouble a modesty and fashion binary. They do this in – and through – the city of Hamilton in both online and offline spaces. There are three findings. First, we show the complex relationship between identities, hijab, fashion, gender and religious power relations in and around their bodies. Second, Muslim women have conflicting emotions when wearing a veil and engaging with fashionable clothing and accessories in Hamilton. Finally, we focus on the ways that Muslim women use Facebook and Instagram and an array of fashion hashtags to illustrate the intersection of hijab, clothes, place and Western fashion. In doing so they negotiate online and offline spaces to construct hybrid fashionable-Islamic bodies and places. In each of these findings, we highlight the ways participants understand their Muslim-Kiwi identities.