Dealing with Stigmatized Muslim Identities: Turning Prayer Spaces into Community Support Groups

• In Event: 1580 - Section on Sociology of Religion Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 02. Intersectional Identities and Islam: Race, Gender, and Nationality

Abstract

This paper looks at how racialized Muslim minorities encounter and deal with stigma. During a four-month period of ethnographic data collection, I used participant observation, shadowing and interview data in two Muslim prayer space settings in Toronto, Canada. I attended the Diversity Mosque and the Muslim Student Association (MSA). In this paper, I will demonstrate how Muslim prayer spaces turn into a forum to discuss how Muslims are implicated in current events, and how Muslims use their prayer spaces to find strategies to deal with stigma, and create networks of support. In other words, community members use their religious spaces to manage the stigma attached to their negative collective identities. More so, I show how Muslims find strategies to deal with stigma, and find ways on how to behaviourally respond, during a negative encounter with a non-Muslim. I extend the previous literature on stigma by highlighting how processes of stigma attachment and dealing with stigma are gendered and racialized. This means that the processes of how stigma is attached to the body is gendered and also show how individuals cope with stigma by engaging in gendered work.

Author

• Jessica Stallone, University of Toronto