Muslim women against FEMEN: Asserting agency in online spaces

ABSTRACT

This essay considers the activist group FEMEN and the online reactions to their “International Topless Jihad Day” protests. Specifically, I analyze the vernacular discourses present in the Facebook group Muslim Women Against FEMEN and their counter-protests as they articulate their dissatisfaction with FEMEN’s imperialist feminism. I argue that online spaces can provide meaningful sites for Muslim women to reassert their agency alongside of, rather than despite of, their Muslim identity. Tensions over the boundaries of feminist activism help us understand how digital spaces can aid in developing a more capacious understanding of agency that actively decolonizes imperialist feminist politics.

KEYWORDS:

• Muslim women
• agency
• feminist rhetorics
• imperialist feminism
• online activism

Notes

1 While the MWAF group often uses “Western” and “imperialist” interchangeably to refer to a problematic type of feminist ideology, I use “imperialist” in my analysis for clarity. There is a slipperiness here, wherein MWAF deems FEMEN’s politics as “Western” despite their Ukrainian origins.

2 Building on work outside of the discipline, several communication studies scholars have analyzed tropes of white saviordom and rescue targeted toward Muslim women. For example, Cloud interrogates post-9/11 media representations of Afghan women in “need” of “rescue” (2004), and Ghabra engages the consuming tropes of white saviors and rescue that obfuscate the narratives of Muslim women, especially in engagements by “Western feminism” (2018).