Muslim Women and Gender at the Margins

Dear Colleagues,

This Special Issue seeks to focus on the heterogeneity and multiply gendered ways of being Muslim by drawing attention to the subjectivities, performativity and experiences of those women who tend to be marginalized even within critical feminist scholarship on women and Islam.

We acknowledge the invaluable and substantial work of postcolonial and antiracist scholars who, from a variety of disciplinary locations, have interrogated and, to a great degree, successfully unsettled colonial and Orientalist representations of the "Muslim women." In the last thirty years feminist scholarship by and about Muslim women has offered complex analyses of the interrelationship of gender, culture, Islam and modernity in modern Muslim states that emerged after successful anti-colonial nationalist movements. There is also substantial literature that examines the multi-generational experiences of Muslim women in Western societies where Muslim populations continue to be racialized through colonial and modernist tropes. Indeed, it is now unsurprising to see papers on Muslim women in major feminist scholarly journals and courses on women and Islam in prestigious academic institutions. Contemporary themes in scholarship by and about Muslim women reflects strong postcolonial and antiracist concerns related to reflexivity, strategic location and discursive formations, as well as poststructuralist insights about gendered subjectivity, gender identity and sexuality. In a post-9/11 world, Muslim feminist scholarship has focused on challenging Islamophobia by affirming Muslim women’s piety or religious agency in a new global order where the binary notions of Islam and secularism serve to differentiate Muslims as “good” or “bad” for Western interests (Mamdani).

It is our contention that these necessary attempts to speak "Muslim women’s Truth” to the discursive and material power of Eurocentric and Enlightenment knowledge are not yet sufficiently diverse to constitute a satisfactory inclusion of heterogeneity of Muslim women nor equitably representational in its samples, examples, regional distribution and cultural foci. Indeed we are concerned that existing feminist scholarship on Muslim women may perhaps unwittingly limit and restrict the performative possibilities for Muslim women to those who are Middle Eastern or South Asian, brown, Sunni, hijab-wearing, cis-heterosexual, and gender normative.

There is an urgent need to de-center certain embodiments and performances of Muslim woman-ness  that threaten to reproduce intra-Muslim racism, patriarchal orthodoxies and oppressive notions of gender that depend on religious purity, lingusitic authenticity, cultural precedence and patriachal orthodoxies about origin and history.

We especially invite and encourage submissions from a variety of disciplinary locations and cultures, genders, races, regions, varying abilities, and relationships to Islam and Muslim identities. In particular, we would like to receive submissions from:

• Trans, queer, and non-binary Muslims; 
• Muslim women who are located outside of Middle Eastern and South Asian regions and culture contexts;
• Ahmadiyya, Ismaili and Shia women;
• Black Muslim women;
• Black African women living on the African continent;
• Latina Muslim women of any race;
• Muslim women in/from East Asian contexts ;
• Rohingya and other refugee women and those in conflict zones;
• Muslim converts/reverts.

Dr. Amina Jamal
Dr. Kayla Renée Wheeler
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All papers will be peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Religions is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

• women and gender
• gender theory
• Transnationalism
• Anti-Black racism
• refugee women
• Muslim heterogeneity
• Islamic feminism and womanism
• Intersectionality