Fabric of Identity: The Hijab’s Influence on Self-Perception and Social Interaction Among Muslim Women

• In Event: 40417 - Global Feminisms in Action: Resistance, Identity, and Solidarity Across Borders

Abstract

This research examines the daily experiences of Muslim American women who wear the headscarf full-time to understand how they navigate their identities of being a hijabi within a majority non-hijabi (and non-Muslim) society. Although the hijab is often represented in the West as a symbol of oppression and as an exclusively religious symbol, this study aims to provide a nuanced understanding of the hijab as a form of resistance to White Western standards of beauty, feminism, and social citizenship. Using qualitative research methods and drawing upon postcolonial feminist theory and Orientalism, the study aims to show how hijabis resist the oppressive nature of Western standards of social citizenship rather than the so-called oppression of their cultural and religious backgrounds. This study not only contributes to the discourse surrounding Muslim women’s experiences in the Global North but also challenges dominant Western paradigms of beauty, feminism, and social citizenship, centering the agency of these women through the amplification of their own voices in such discourses that are about them. This project adds Muslim women who live in the Global North to the postcolonial feminist discourse, which has traditionally focused on women of color who live in the Global South. It also adds to the literature on how Muslim hijabi women resist White Western standards of beauty and feminism, part of a larger discourse on how women of color and women from the Global South resist White Western understandings of beauty and feminism.


Keywords: hijab, Muslim women, White Western hegemony, postcolonialism, Orientalism

Author

• Asena Karipek, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign