Abstract
For almost two decades, the public debate about Islam in Western Europe has been dominated by concerns about the lack of gender equality in the racialized Muslim population. There has been a tendency to victimize “the Muslim woman” rather than to encourage Muslim women’s participation in the public debate about their lives. This contribution to the study of discourses on Muslim women is an analysis of arguments written by Muslims about women’s rights. The data consists of 239 texts written by self-defined Muslims in major Norwegian newspapers about women’s rights. I will discuss two findings from the study. The first is an appeal to be personal when discussing issues of domestic violence and racism is combined with an implicit and explicit demand to represent all Muslims in order to get published in newspapers—which creates an ethno-religious threshold for participation in the public debate. The second finding is that, across different positions and different religious affiliations, from conservative to nearly secular, and across the timeline, from 2000 to 2012, there is a dominant understanding of women’s rights as individual autonomy. These findings will be discussed from different theoretical perspectives to explore how arguments for individual autonomy can both challenge and amplify neoliberal agendas.
Highlights
For almost two decades, the public debate about Islam in Western Europe has been dominated by concerns about the lack of gender equality in the racialized Muslim population
What is more surprising is that, across different positions and religious affiliations, from conservative to nearly secular, and across the timeline, from 2000 to 2012, there is a dominant understanding of gender equality as individual autonomy
The first finding is that an ethno-religious threshold is created in the debate by the demand that Muslims have to both be personal and at the same time represent a collective, and the second finding is that the dominant foundation of the arguments for women’s rights is individual autonomy
Summary
“It is at this point a political action to tell it like it is, to say what I really believe about my life instead of what I’ve always been told to say”, writes Carol Hanich (1970, p. 24) in her essay with the iconic title The Personal is Political. It is not surprising that the present analysis of Muslims’ arguments for women’s rights in the Norwegian media sphere show that “I” was frequently used and the use of personal anecdotes and narratives was a dominant rhetorical strategy to address racism and women’s oppression. For two decades the western public debate about Islam has been dominated by concerns about the lack of gender equality in the racialized Muslim population. The main aim is not to cover all arguments and topics concerning women’s right in the text archive, but to discuss the rhetorical use of the personal narrative when arguing for women’s rights and the topos of individual autonomy. I discuss how the tendencies towards individualization of the public debate and the topos of personal autonomy can both challenge and amplify the neoliberal agenda.
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