Resisting Fragmentation: An Exploration of South Asian Muslim Women’s Resistance as Resilience in the ‘War on Terror’ in Britain Under the Lens of Hegemony

Abstract

In Britain, the ‘war on terror’ exposes fissures, breaks and dislocations in the inter-relationship/inter-connection of South Asian Muslim women with dominant political and social systems. This paper uses Antonio Gramsci’s conception ‘hegemony’ to elucidate South Asian Muslim women’s struggle to retain, and extend identity formations in conditions of harm and political and social environs of hostility. It departs from conventional studies by using hegemony as struggle for domination as the theoretical frame to explore the psychological effects of political harm to self and identity. Gramsci’s notion of ‘the war of position’ locates the ‘war on terror’ as historic/temporal, a prolonged struggle for domination/hegemony in British/South Asian Muslim relations. This paper employs findings from ethnographic research to make the case that, in this hostile environment, South Asian Muslim women in Britain are engaged in counter-hegemonic resistance in the generation of hybrid identities. Securing new identities requires considerable psychological and cultural flexibility; it involves repositioning fragments of self to reformulate, to create, identity in a climate of hatred and fear.