Muslim Female/Feminist Subjectivities: A Framework. An analysis of Muslim women's subject positioning in Facebook discussions about the burkini ban

Abstract

In this thesis I have aimed to understand different constructions of Muslim female and/or feminist subjectivities in online discussions on Dutch Facebook pages about the burkini ban imposed in France. Based on the comments I have gathered I applied a grounded theory methodology and chose to work with different theories and insights provided by Saba Mahmood, Alia Al-Saji and Rosi Braidotti. Mahmood elaborates on the conception of the self and moral agency among pious women; Al-Saji offers a unique philosophical analysis on the phenomenology of vision and the racialisation of the Muslim veil in Western representation; Braidotti expands on the relation and tension between female identity and feminist subjectivity, but also on the nature of political subjectivity. By bringing the perspectives of these three distinct feminist authors together I have aimed to provide a framework to analyze and understand female and feminist subjectivities, how they relate to each other and how we can think differently about subjectivity and identity on SNS. I hope that this analytical framework enables researchers to provide a more embodied and intersectional analysis of the experiences of Muslim women. Furthermore I hope that this framework offers a different perspective on the relationship between feminism and religious traditions. Finally by applying this framework on a dataset retrieved from discussions on SNS, I have aimed to understand how the digital sphere influences subject formation. This research provides new insights on the different ways in which gender, race and religion are present in the digital sphere and how Muslim women negotiate these spaces.