Negotiating Gendered Religious Space: The Particularities of Patriarchy in an African American Mosque

• In Event: 052 - Section on Sociology of Religion Paper Session. Beyond Anglo Christianity

Abstract

Drawing on five years of ethnographic fieldwork, this study analyzes how African American Muslim women use the mosque as a physical space to enact public performances of religious identity within three spaces of social interaction: 1) spaces of religious worship, 2) spaces of social engagement, and 3) spaces of community support. In looking at the informal and formal ways women exert power in all three spaces, the study argues that African American Muslim women’s religious participation is not a ‘paradox,’ as dominant frames in the sociology of religion may suggest, but instead a product of their everyday lives as gendered, racialized, pious social actors, working in concert and in competition with men.

Author

• Pamela Prickett, University of California-Los Angeles