CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2017
| Author | Izin, Zuleyha |
|---|---|
| Title | Negotiating Subjectivity Through the Civic Participation of Muslim Women in Spain |
| Summary | Muslim women’s involvement in the Islamic revival/dawa movements in Muslim as well as non-Muslim contexts has been a critical issue hotly debated within the feminist circles. In most cases, it is either claimed that women involved in Islamic movements are victims of ‘false consciousness,’ or, alternately, they are ‘‘pawns in a great patriarchal plan.’’ Inspired by Saba Mahmood’s seminal work, Politics of Piety, which deconstructs the concept of agency, and thus subjectivity, by drifting away from a binary model of subordination and resistance, I conducted an ethnographic field research amongst Muslim women who engage in the activities of Muslim youth and women’s organizations in Madrid Spain. Relying on the data gathered from the field and the Foucauldian concept of subject formation, the goal of this work is identifying the main actors and the processes through which active Muslim women negotiate their subjectivities and come into being as subjects. Therefore, I examine the main actors and the processes that are influential to the concepts and processes by which my interlocutors understand gender equality and performing dawa (Islamic missionary activity), such as family, civic engagement, secular structure of the Spanish state and the narratives of Muslim women dominant in Europe. Furthermore, I investigate to what extend the dawa practices among active Muslim women fit under the frame of European dawa movement, and the ways in which civic engagement becomes a tool of performing a religious duty, dawa. The ultimate goal of this work is filling the gap in the lack of literature on Muslim women’s activism and subjectivities broadly, but especially in the case of Spain on which no other studies of this kind have been conducted to the date. |
| Supervisor | Jones-Gailani, Nadia |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2017/izin_zuleyha.pdf |
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