Queer Muslim Piety: The Hijab Practices of LGBTQ Muslims in Boston

Abstract

Abstract: This article examines how queer Muslim pieties are constructed through sartorial practices, specifically, wearing hijab, and what these pious subjectivities suggest about gender, piety, authority, and identity more broadly in the American Muslim community. In Muslim communities, hijab is imbued with heteronormative assumptions and is often thought about in terms of modesty relating to hetero male desire. Yet people who fall outside heteronormative paradigms also choose to cover, suggesting there are alternative meanings to lift up. Based on interviews with three queer Muslim women in Boston, the author found that through donning hijab, queer Muslim women mark degrees of intimacy and privacy with others, protest and resist normative forces within Muslim and LGBTQ cultures, and secure for themselves a gendered and visible Muslim identity, while simultaneously subverting gender norms. This article shows the creative ways Muslim women have negotiated religious and secular authorities to imagine new, playfully pious possibilities for themselves and the Muslim community.