Outside belonging: a discursive analysis of British South Asian (BSA) Muslim women’s experiences of being ‘Othered’ in local spaces

ABSTRACT

Drawing on empirical research with British South Asian (BSA) Muslim women in Oldham and focussing on the embodied intersectional nature of discrimination they face, this paper explores British Muslim women’s experiences of belonging in local spaces. Through a discursive analysis of place, belonging and identity, this paper argues that BSA Muslim women appear as a visible threat to the nation, occupying a contradictory position of both within the local and national but not part of it. Focused on the context of Oldham, a former mill town in the North of England, findings suggest wider hegemonic discourses of Muslim woman as “Other” are inflected by local dynamics and shape discordant everyday experiences. It is argued that Oldham presents a microcosm with which to view the nations complex relationship with its Muslim minority groups and resonates with the current political landscape of rising right-wing populism and Islamophobia.

KEYWORDS:

• Muslim
• gender
• place
• intersectionality
• racialised
• Islamophobia

Introduction

In this paper I explore concepts of (non)belonging for British South Asian Muslim women in local places, namely, the town of Oldham in the North of England. Oldham, and its ethnic minority British Muslim population has faced increased public and political scrutiny, more recently through discussions of Oldham as a town as “left behind”, a term used to describe post- industrial towns of white, working-class communities facing socio-economic exclusion, deindustrialization, and victims to both increased globalization and migration as well as successive recessions (Rhodes, Valluvan, and Ashe 2019). As one of the communities considered “left-behind”, Oldham has become a site through which racialised discourses of belonging and “other” are invoked and illustrates the extent to which national and local narratives of “left behind communities” situates whiteness as the dominant, “normative” position in relation to the “Other” and functions to create hierarchies of belonging (Garner 2012).

Drawing on concepts of embodied intersectionality, stigmatized and racialised places, the findings in this paper suggest hegemonic discourses of the Muslim woman as embodying concerns over national security, immigration, terrorism and national identity (Alam and Husband 2013) become prevalent in local spaces and impact upon BSA Muslim women’s experiences of belonging. As such, it is argued that key to understanding the nature of everyday lives is understanding the context within which they are lived. Analysis of BSA Muslim women’s experiences in these spaces gives an insight into the nature of contemporary Islamophobia in Britain, showing how pathologized understandings of Muslim communities in Britain, and Muslim women in particular, leads to them being both “ontologically and spatially displaced” (Lewis 2013). The use of embodied intersectionality draws on understanding of corporeal, racialised and gendered bodies and considerations of everyday non/belonging within racialised spaces illuminates ways in which everyday interactions in banal spaces shapes the marginalization and discrimination faced by Muslim women (Nayak 2017). Whilst these processes have been identified as transnational and translocal phenomenon, this paper argues that the complexity of Muslim women’s lives in the spaces they inhabit and traverse require a focus on their racialised, embodied and emplaced identities, as marginalisation is informed both by wider but critically local dynamics. It is argued that the broader developments of increased securitization, policing and regulations of Muslim women’s bodies is manifest in local spaces in ways which reflect nationalist concerns. Though local contexts are not disconnected from the national and global (Massey 1994), they are nonetheless imbued with their own local histories, spatial divisions and inequalities which all contribute to the ways in which space is understood and experienced; thus the use of an intersectional approach to spatial dynamics within local spaces highlights ways in which space is a resource created, distributed and accessed unevenly across different groups (Grzanka 2014).

It is pertinent here to note, that whilst the paper uses the acronym of BSA as a shorthand for British South Asian, I recognize the limitations of this term, not least in flattening identities and inadequately representing the breadth of experiences which falls under this term. The term BSA is used as it is widely understood and referenced in other literature. However, although this paper by no means seeks to generalize experiences of British South Asian Muslim women, participants voices in this paper are critical in understanding the cultural, political and social environment within which British South Asian Muslim women experience Othering. In the following sections I discuss the concepts of embodied intersectionality, racialization and local spaces as key to analysing the diversity of Muslim women’s experiences.

Gendered Islamophobia and embodied intersectionality

Since its early conception in Black Feminism, intersectionality has found much traction in studies across social sciences (Crenshaw 1989; Simien 2007; Collins and Bilge 2016). Located in experience-based epistemology, intersectionality emphasizes the simultaneity of discriminations, and the way in which identity categories of race, gender, ethnicity and class are constituted mutually and should be considered in this way (Simien 2007, 265). Additionally, intersectionality is vital in troubling social and political structures which contribute to the oppression and marginalisation of ethnic minority women. In analysing BSA Muslim women’s lives intersectionality provides an essential framework to discuss discriminations faced in the everyday, as well as marginalisation through hegemonic Islamophobic political and social discourses. There is history of rich, varied sociological research on British Muslim women which has sought to develop a more holistic and rounded understanding of Muslim women’s social, cultural, religious identities; from earlier work by Dwyer (1999) on challenging dominant representations of young British Muslim women, negotiating British and Muslim identities (Pheonix 2017); work from Cheruvallil-Contractor (2014) on demystifying the Muslimah. These are important work which adds much to understanding of British Muslim women’s lives; this research aims to add to this through a recognition of this complexity of Muslim women’s lives through an emphasis on embodied intersectionality and the everyday interactions within racialised local spaces.

In this paper the discussion of embodied intersectionality of Muslim women is particularly useful in considering embodied “otherness” in racialised spaces. Embodied intersectionality places emphasis on the way in which differences are read on and “experienced within the body” (Mirza 2012, 5). The in/exclusion of belonging which both symbolically and practically shapes the nation, and hegemonic discourses which frame the Muslim woman as a contradictory figure as both victim in need of saving and complicit in a backward, dangerous religion are therefore read from and on the surfaces of racialised bodies (Ahmed 2004; Abu-Lughod 2002; Saeed 2016), The social, political and economic structures which have proscribed a narrow reading of Muslim women’s bodies, namely as framed within and formed by constraining discourses of patriarchy, extremism and self-isolation (Saeed 2016) impact particularly against Muslim women as they are considered the biological reproducers of an ethnic collective which is notably different to a socially constructed ideal of the nation and its citizens (Meer, Dwyer, and Modood 2010; Lutz 1997). Aldaraji (2021) articulates this as racialisation lived through embodiment, manifested in the ways in which nation making and the idealized body are interconnected, and materialized through everyday “bordering practices”.

The everyday and racialised local spaces

Embodied intersectionality, as Mirza (2013, 7) argues, does not only theorize the lived identities of race, gender, ethnicity and how this is mediated and lived through the body, but also how “external, material situatedness”- i.e. the social, political and economic structures which produce inequality- are reconfigured and imagined through the corporeal representation of the Muslim woman’s body (as oppressed or dangerous) and lends itself to othering and marginalisation. This corporeal and external situatedness are of key importance when seeking to understand BSA Muslim women’s everyday experience, and in this paper are used to understand the ways in which BSA Muslim women are essentially othered in local spaces. The everyday is categorized as being where spheres of social processes, economic, cultural, political and personal converge and overlap. Sets of practises and norms, detailing appropriate behaviour as well as creating imagined boundaries of those who belong and are “Other” operate within everyday processes. Therefore, everyday spaces are not neatly contained, and do not form merely the backdrop of individuals lives.

In the case of Muslim women, analysing everyday interactions within these spaces enables us to understand how inclusions and indeed exclusion are enacted through the seeming banality of everyday encounters. Additionally, in order to contextualize that socially constructed identities shift and are shaped according to the particular spaces in which they are situated, it is necessary to understand how these are related to the construction of space and spatial relations, and the ways in which these are linked (Holloway 2007). Studies (Delaney 2002; Neely and Samura 2011; Brann-Barrett 2014; Isakjee 2016; Miah, Sanderson, and Thomas 2020) have becoming increasingly invested in understanding the racialisation of spaces, and the presence of the “other” in spaces. A sociological understanding of spaces necessitates we move beyond thinking of spaces as neutral, or empty of meaning. On the contrary everyday spaces are manifest with racial, cultural, historical, social and political discourses which consequently implicitly or explicitly decide who belongs and whose presence must be constantly questioned (Kamaloni 2019). Just as the racial imagination relegates bodies to different hierarchies, so does the same imagination attribute a racial hierarchy to regulate space (Garner 2012; Lipsitz 2019); thus, if space is regulated according to racialized and cultural understandings of norms, then the Muslim women’s body entering into and accessing such space is seen as an anomaly.

Racialised spaces- Oldham

Shared ideas about a “type of place” and the type of people which may belong to it form an insidious aspect of the way in which spaces become racialised (Garner 2013). As one of the geographical places used in examples of the “failure of multiculturalism” (Jones 2013) and more recently as “left-behind”, Oldham has been positioned within popular media and political discourses within interconnected narratives, which reflect wider national concerns around migration, multiculturalism and acculturation of the “other”. These narratives include the historical context of Oldham as a former “white-working” class Northern mill town and as a segregated community typifying the problems of immigration and resulting in tensions and “race riots”. In the following section I discuss the ways in which these dominant narratives serve to racially construct spaces in Oldham, shaping not only the ways in which the town is discussed, but more particularly the ways in which these narratives serve to discursively displace the racialised “Other”.

Discourses around social integration and the integration of racial and ethnic minorities in Britain were “reawakened” in light of the civil disturbances or “race riots” which hit Oldham in 2001 (Phillips 2006). Subsequent public and policy debates focused on “ethnic clustering”, the failure of multiculturalism, and lack of social mixing between groups as a key factor leading to the disturbances, with Oldham discussed as a community keenly divided along racial lines (Ritchie 2001). The shift towards embracing “community cohesion” as a way to foster opportunities for greater interaction and mixing across spatial divides has since been a fundamental government policy, which conveniently overlooks institutional and structural racism, discrimination and poverty, and lack of opportunity experienced by Oldham’s ethnic minority population (Kundnani 2001). Yet, as numerous researchers have argued (Ratcliffe 2012; Jones 2013; Rhodes, Valluvan, and Ashe 2019) cohesion policies have been historically racialised, through a focus on places with high ethnic or religious minority the problem of cohesion becomes the problem of ethnic minority groups who are considered as unwilling or unable to integrate (Phillips 2006). Within this, Muslim communities have been identified as a particularly significant “group”, and framed both within public and policy debates, as “inactive, non-participating communities” (McGhee 2005, 64); furthermore, post 9/11, 7/7 has seen the scope of cohesion policies widened to include concerns around domestic extremism, leading to increased scrutiny and securitisation of Muslims as a “suspect community” in the UK. The Casey Review (2016) commissioned to look at social integration in the UK, further focused on Oldham, noting the parallel lives experienced by ethnic and religious minorities, and a need to embrace “British values” and adopting the English language as key to a more cohesive community. Muslim women in Oldham, according to the report, were particularly impacted by self-segregation and insular communities, and “being held back by regressive cultural practices”. It is pertinent to note that discourses of “left-behind towns” and “Muslim” communities have further contributed to the racialisation of “brown Muslim bodies” and homogenisation of the communities they reside in (Mir 2007). The complex heterogeneity of the “Muslim community” in Oldham is often overlooked in public policy, yet is apparent through the range of languages spoken, through differing cultural and religious views, patterns of migration, dress and social mobility that the umbrella term of “Muslim community” used in policy and public discourse is often woefully inadequate in highlighting nuances within and between groups.

The history of Northern mill towns, and more specifically, the romanticization of this history as a white-working class history in the national imagination, contributes to the narrow understanding of those who could be considered as belonging to and in Oldham. More recently, the “plight” of Northern towns as “left-behind” communities was politicized in discussions leading up to and after Brexit through which economic, cultural and political marginalisation have been elided as particular concerns of the “white working class” voters (Bhambra 2017; Khan and Shaheen 2017; Valluvan 2019; Rhodes, Valluvan, and Ashe 2019). Furthermore, Black and ethnic minority (BAME) individuals are markedly absent from discussions of working-class or “left behind” communities, despite the fact that BAME groups are over-represented in lower and working-class demographics, and in Oldham, equally if not further disadvantaged on scales of multiple deprivation. In short, Oldham provides the microcosm within which to view the broader political landscape within the UK, that of increasing right-wing populism, Islamophobic public and media discourses which have contributed to the suspicion and fear of ethnic primarily Muslim ghettos, enclaves, and the fractious politics of resentment fuelled by and evident in the post Brexit fallout. Crucially, as Finney et al. (2019) have noted, community cohesion policies in emphasizing social mixing and adoption of core British values, have sought to assuage fears and growing resentment of the Muslim “other” amongst the established “white-working class” communities.

South Asians are amongst the earlier ethnic minority migrants to the UK, in Oldham they are also amongst the fastest growing and youngest ethnic minority groups (Oldham in Profile 2019). Second and third-generation South Asian Muslims have come to be seen as “the Muslim problem” and the gendered, racialised, corporeal bodies of brown Muslim women in Oldham have become codified through discourses of forced marriages, honour crimes and veiling. Increasingly South Asian Muslim women’s bodies are subject to cultural racism through which their “Muslimness” is viewed through a narrow framework which vacillates between victim/threat in need of saving or excising from the nation (Abu-Lughod 2002; Meeto and Mirza 2007). In the following sections of this paper, I discuss the ways in which Oldham’s continued social and spatial segregation, contemporary discourses of ethno-nationalism, resentment and gendered Islamophobia shape Muslim women’s experiences in local spaces. This is because, as a place which has been predominantly discussed through narratives of being “divided along racial lines” and “ethnic enclaves”, impacts upon the way British Muslim communities are considered as out of place in Oldham and outside belonging. This is because the connection between race and place is multifaceted; essentially places can also become raced, just as racialised places are socially constructed, they can also re-produce racialised identities through specific historical and geographical contexts (Bonilla-Silva 2004; Inwood and Yarbrough 2010).

Research context and methods

Immigration from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh to work in the cotton mills began predominately in the 1960s with mainly young males, who were later joined by wives and children. However, by the time these migrants arrived Oldham’s mill industries were already in rapid decline, due to rapid deindustrialisation and heightened global competition, the immigrant workforce already suffering from low wages, hostility and exploitation, now faced long-term unemployment and turned to employment as taxi drivers and in the restaurant trade (Kalra 2000). Second and third generations of BSA Muslims living in Oldham continue to experience multiple deprivation across factors of health, educational attainment, housing and employment. The ethnic minority population of Oldham according to the 2011 census grew from 13.9% in 2001 to 22.5% in 2011, the increase attributed in part to higher birth rates, a younger age demographic, as well as internal and international migration (Oldham in Profile 2019). Muslims accounted for over 1 in 5 of Oldham’s ethnic minority population, 10.1% of which are of Pakistani ethnic origin, whilst 7.3% are Bengali.

Across the wards which make up Oldham, the most deprived wards are also those with highest ethnic minority populations and are centred around the town centre.

Spatial separation is built into the very physicality of Oldham, whilst the physical landscape lends itself to the separation between groups, institutional racism exercised through racist local authority housing policies ensured ethnic minority individuals were prevented from purchasing property in whiter residential areas and confined to areas of substandard housing in pockets around the centre of the town. Oldham’s wealthier wards are also situated around the outskirts, within areas of Shaw, Crompton, Saddleworth North and Saddleworth South, which are also primarily white. The markedly racialized geography of Oldham is noted as characterized by “outlying white estates built on windswept valley tops” which are “referred to as the ‘white highlands’ overseeing the older inner town and ethnicised valley bottoms” (Webster 2003, 102) and further contributing “to spatial symbolism of hierarchy and separation”. The spaces where groups interact are on the valley bottom, within Oldham’s town centre, public parks and other public spaces, such spaces are far from neutral and discursive framings of veiled BSA Muslim women ensures that interactions in such spaces are replete with anxieties, othering and exclusions of the Muslim body (Nayak 2017, 290).

The research project discussed here sought to draw out individual experiences of othering within local public spaces in order to discuss detailed accounts of BSA Muslim women’s everyday lives in Oldham. Valentine (2007, 91) has noted that close case study approaches to understanding places, which is intersectional in its approach in that it attends to the multiplicity of identities and politics of space, can potentially highlight “the intimate connections between the production of space and the systematic production of power”. The research objectives were to understand women’s sense and experiences across various spaces, and to understand how the intersectional categories of race, gender, ethnicity and religion shape interactions within these spaces. The study took place over a ten-month period from October 2015 to July 2016 and involved a number of different research methods including sit-down semi-structured interviews, diary extracts, photographs and walk-along interviews. The decision to use these methods was informed by the research focus of studying intersectional identities across a variety of spaces and focused on feelings of belonging, everyday interactions and identity. As Mahalingham (2007) has noted, intersectionality is concerned with the “interplay between person and social location, with particular emphasis on power relations among various social locations” (2007, 45), as such, the use of a range of methods in various conjunctions (Mason 2011) are able to shed light on different aspects of everyday lives, across different times, contexts and spaces.

Just as intersectionality is grounded in the lived experience, and critique of social structures which reproduce inequality, intersectional analysis which employs multi-methods which may be used to illuminate participants multiple social identities and differences, and the structural inequality which shapes social phenomena, whilst avoiding essentialisation or flattening of differences through an additive approach (Cole 2009). For example, in this paper analysis is primarily based on data derived from semi-structured interviews and diary extracts; whilst the sit-down interview provides insights into the ways in which individuals make sense or meaning out of their everyday lives, it can be complimented through the use of diary-elicitation interviews, which for this research enabled participants to reflect on events in their lives, as well as their responses, feeling and emotions within any given space or time (Bolger, Davis, and Rafaeli 2003). This research was conducted with 28 second and third generation BSA Muslim women. The women were aged between 25–40 years and came from a variety of socio-economic backgrounds, they were located across the different wards of Oldham; the women were both economically active/inactive, employed/self-employed/unemployed, mothers, married as well as single women, and both in or outside education. Interviews took an average of 90 minutes, and the focus here is on experiences and interactions within public spaces, such as public parks, supermarkets and town centre as these are often sites of discordance for Muslim women. Participants were recruited through purposive snowball sampling, and the use of Whatsapp groups, personal contacts and Facebook websites. Ethical clearance was received prior to fieldwork commencement from the School of Social Science Department at the University of Manchester, and informed consent was obtained both verbally and through signed consent forms. Whilst this study cannot claim to be representative of British South Asian Muslims, it recognizes the complexity of the brown racialised identity and the multiplicity and diversity of diasporic identities. This study includes views from women of Pakistani and Bangladeshi ethnic origin, and whilst there may be some commonality of experiences as gendered, racialised brown bodies, further research would benefit from in-depth studies on an individual level as the struggles of ethnic minority groups can be acutely different.

Interviews were recorded and transcribed, and a semi-inductive data analysis was conducted through NVivo. Analysis was multi-layered and included initially an exploration of the language used to discuss living in Oldham, further analysis focused on the meanings associated with belonging and place were identified, with further sub-themes and sub-nodes derived directly from the data through categorical analysis of participants interviews. Close interpretive, intersectional analysis of transcripts employed a strategy of consideration for individual aspects of social identities, the symbolic and cultural contexts through which these are seen, as well as social structures and inequalities which perpetuate unequal power relations and exclusion (Winker and Degele 2011). A thematic analysis was then applied to the transcripts, which involved pinpointing, drawing out and emphasising particular aspects of the data where participants described in their own words feelings or incidents within public spaces of Oldham which contributed to their sense of non/belonging. Close analysis revealed Muslim women’s negotiation of public spaces and contested belonging in public spaces was attributed to their identity as Muslim women. All quotes have been anonymised to protect the participants identities.

Everyday considerations of belonging

The everyday is categorised as an aspect where spheres of social processes, economic, cultural, political and personal converge and overlap. Sets of practises and norms, detailing appropriate behaviour as well as creating imagined boundaries of those who belong and are “other” operate within everyday processes. Therefore, everyday spaces are not neatly contained, and do not form merely the backdrop of individuals’ lives. Analysing the local context of at these spaces and everyday interactions within them enables us to understand how inclusions and indeed exclusion are enacted through the seeming banality of everyday encounters. This is because lives are locally lived, for the majority of these women their everyday routines and practices included interactions across “everyday banal spaces”. These include within and between wards and public and private spaces, including local parks, transport, supermarkets or shopping centres, and an understanding of the history and racialised discourse of everyday places.

Excluding the other-outside history

Oldham’s history of industrialization marks the town in ways which are both symbolic and literal. The town’s rich history is illustrated not only in the derelict mills which still scar the landscape, but also in the way this history forms as part of the exclusion keenly felt by BSA Muslim women. In discussing Oldham, 25-year-old Rana spoke of the town’s heritage, and more particularly how the Asian community is rejected from this history:

… if I was to talk about Oldham town there’s a lot of heritage and history. Oldham town had one of the best cotton industries in the world, all the mills, there’s so much history that’s being neglected. I think the Asian community is rejected from that history, like they’re not allowed to be part of it … 

Given the pivotal ways in which Oldham’s South Asian population shaped and contributed to the mill’s continued survival (Kalra 2019), the rejection from this history felt by women like Rana is all the more poignant. Indeed, it demonstrates the ways in which histories- such as that of Oldham- become racialised, and which have become deeply essentialised. Such racialisation has much currency, as discussed earlier, particularly in discussions of immigration, segregation and narratives of “left-behind” communities. Oldham’s “local history” as a cotton mill town cannot be extricated from its global connections, yet the explicit internalist construction of local “left-behind” spaces is characterised by a denial of “interconnectedness to elsewhere” (Massey 1995). This history thus acts as a form of exclusion, it shapes the spaces of Oldham, and manifests itself in the cultural life, the social interactions and everyday experiences within these spaces.

Noreen, a 32-year-old school teacher also noted that Oldham’s history “fixed” the town within a period of history:

Oldham could be described as a town that is stuck in time … The saying comes to mind “let go or be dragged” … can’t remember who said it now. The buildings are old and worn out, kind of like how parts of Oldham are stuck back in the 60’s.

The notion of a town “stuck in time” is a profound one and illustrates the extent to which narratives of place and its material conditions shape understandings of that space. In the spatial imaginary Oldham exists and appears differently to majority and ethnic minority groups. The growth and decline of post-industrial towns is posited in the national imagination as both connected with colonial dominance, the decline of the nation and subsequent dangers of “unchecked immigration”-however, this is a privileged aspect of history which is socially constructed into a “singular” reading or understanding of the town. As Grossberg (2000, 154) notes, in linking historical events and material objects within the narrative, culture and language of a place, a “singular text” emerges through which place and, by extension, people residing in that place become “always known in advance”. The history of industrialisation and derelict mills are subsumed into the singular historical narrative of Oldham and those perceived to be “Oldhamers”, so that both the place and people are known in advance. Whiteness becomes emplaced in places such as Oldham and processes of racialisation (Garner 2013) ascribe a singular, imagined identity onto a group of people. Further the inscription of race onto “space” (Durrheim and Dixon 2001) categorizes groups of people as either in/outside belonging. The link between racialised spaces and the effects these can have on individual experiences is complex and shifting, given racialised places also structure, construct and re-produce racialised identities’ who are then deemed to be in/outside belonging (Inwood and Yarbrough 2010, 300).

It is necessary therefore to deconstruct these imaginings of place, to see its history as lived and lived through those considered as outside belonging. Being “stuck in time” symbolizes for Noreen a town that is fixed, unmovable and which is being “dragged” by its history. Understanding how this history is etched into the landscape of a place through its buildings, and how this in turn shapes Muslim women’s experiences of Oldham demonstrates the extent to which the past is always present. Therefore, in order to move beyond socially constructed notions of a “fixed past” it is necessary to uncover different ways of belonging (Grossberg 2000). For BSA Muslim women in Oldham, whilst the history of the town is one which marks and fixes the place within a particular narrative, it is a history which excludes Muslim women and through which they must negotiate and navigate their everyday experiences. It is precisely because these spaces are sites of everyday experience that there is such a fundamental effect on the sense of identity and belonging for BSA Muslim women. As Hall (1987, 44) noted, “every identity is placed, positioned, in a culture, a language, a history” and therefore it is the placing within a wider discourse of the historical narrative that BSA Muslim women must navigate as the history of local places forms an important part in shaping feelings of belonging or exclusion, the extent then to which individuals feel dis/connected from their local space can inform the ways in which they see themselves (Brann-Barrett 2014).

Contested belonging- stigmatised places

Institutional racism has historically restrained the areas where BSA Muslims have settled in Oldham, contributing to a noticeable separation noted in the different wards and areas where ethnic minority and white majority residents reside. This separation is contributed also in part by avoidance of areas, BSA Muslim women in Oldham have an understanding of areas which are considered “safe” and through real or perceived racisms noted “white areas” they would avoid as being potentially unwelcoming or unsafe. Ethnic and racial segregation in Oldham has long remained a source of much political and academic discussion. The implication has long remained that self-segregation amongst Oldham’s ethnic minority communities is inherent to the “cultural preferences” and “otherness” of its Muslim communities (Kalra and Kapoor 2009; Bassel 2016; Jones 2013). Just as whiteness is historically emplaced within Oldham through white working-class narratives, Muslims in Oldham are emplaced within narratives of “ethnic enclaves” and racialised discourses of “ghettos” (Phillips 2008, 180). These perceptions of the “Asian community” were remarked upon by participants such as Nagina, a 33-year-old nurse living in a ward with a significant ethnic minority. Following the “race riots” in Oldham, Nagina noted that conversations with white colleagues highlighted the extent to which ethnic minority areas of Oldham had been deemed unsafe, or no-go zones for the white majority:

It’s very safe, it’s homely, it’s like … one of the ladies I worked with said after the riots, she was from Hathershaw and her friends used to say to her “oh my God you’re going to Glodwick”, she always said, “every time I go to Waterloo St everyone always shout me, says hello, all the lads know me”. It was this preconception that people had of the place, now I see many more white people walk through Glodwick, and I think there’s more people coming from outside, there’s more rehousing of non-Muslims, and non-Asians into the area, which is good.

Muslim women such as Nagina are not only aware of the stigmatised spaces through which they must navigate their everyday lives, but they actively seek to dispel such perceptions. Nagina’s understanding of the ward she lives in is one she describes as homely and safe and reiterates this point through anecdotes from her white colleagues which support her point. The fact that the point “white people, non-Asians and non-Muslims” are able to walk through these spaces needs to be emphasis points to anxieties around the loss of white spaces which has long permeated public and policy discourse in relation to migration, race and nation. Through the designation of so called “no-go zones”, associated with violence, criminality and poverty, such spaces have often been utilized in far-right discussions as both the loss of white autonomy over these areas and by extent parts of the nation. For example, in the lead up to the Brexit campaign, divisive politicians and far right figures both used Oldham as an example of the dangers of unchecked multiculturalism and lack of assimilation in the town (Pidd 2019).

Following the 2001 riots, spaces in Oldham have become stigmatised through racializing tropes emphasising racial separation, and Muslim “otherness”, whilst overlooking the social and economic inequality faced by ethnic minority communities. In exploring what could be considered “place-based stigma” (Besbris et al. 2018) it is necessary to critique “where stigma is produced, by whom and for what purposes” (Tyler and Slater 2018) as well as to understand how that stigma affects the stigmatised. If, as Goffman (1963), noted stigma is both historically specific in the form it takes as well as a form of social control, then stigmatizing of British Muslim communities in Oldham, serves to reinforce how and in which spaces BSA Muslims belong. In other words, in situating Muslims outside narratives of the working-class history of Oldham and within discourses of “race riots”, poverty and lack of integration, Muslims are emplaced within “Asian areas”, spaces which are widely denigrated as failing, ethnic enclaves or urban ghettos. It is within these racialised spaces that, as Nagina’s colleagues discuss, white bodies may feel unsafe. Crucially, stigmatised places are also symbolic, understandings of these places operate on multiple levels, including the local and national, additionally, as well being racialised, stigmatised places are seen to represent a threat to social, cultural and moral fabric of the nation (Loyd and Bonds 2018, 902).

Excluding the other- everyday bordering

Though the notion of boundaries and ethno-national belonging are enacted on a national scale through for example immigration legislation, the policing, marking and monitoring of such imaginary boundaries are present in interactions on local levels, and interactions in the everyday. Given the construction of Muslim as potential terrorist and suspect, the rejection of bodies which do not conform, and which are not deemed innocuous, (namely white and male bodies), is made all the more salient particularly after terrorist incidents. In embodied encounters or interactions in the everyday race is written and read on bodies. In such encounters, it is the body of the Muslim woman, as “Other” which becomes the focus and indeed target of hate. Importantly, Nayak (2017, 290) contends that such encounters on a local scale are reflective of the “national” scale- the abject body of the Muslim woman is at odds with the imagined “whiteness” of contemporary Britain, “the micro-politics’ of race hate that occurs in everyday encounters at a local scale can perform as a means of purging the nation” and further, “ridding the nation of abject bodies”. Jamila, a 30-year-old niqab wearing woman here describes an encounter at her local bus stop in a diary entry:

I was waiting for the bus when an elderly white male told me to move my fucking pram and how people like me assumed we owned the country. I wanted to laugh but felt rather intimidated.

The body is an “inscriptive surface” (Grosz 1994) onto which differences are projected and read and can inform the way we are seen in public space. For BSA Muslim women intersectional differences can make negation of public spaces fraught with tension, hostility or microaggressions. In the racialisation of religion (Garner and Selod 2015) groups become racialised not only based on phenotypical differences, such as skin colour, or any other physical characteristic, but also cultural differences, including language or dress. As previously discussed, racialisation is also embodied, so that the surface of racialised bodies become subject to the visceral effects of othering and bordering within everyday encounters. This is because, as (Aldaraji 2021, 8) notes the body acts as a “politicised site of knowledge”, and it is against the “ideal national body” that the British Muslim woman’s belonging is measured.

Social interactions in local spaces are shaped by cultural and national differences which determine those who are seen as in/outside belonging. BSA Muslim women, through cultural, ethnic or religious differences seemingly embody an “Other” which is out of place and thus informs the sort of interactions experienced by Jamila. In contemporary political and public discourses of immigration and nationalism, Muslim women’s belonging in the national collective is seen as always ambiguous. Muslim women in public spaces appear at the forefront of anxieties of the “other” and within the European imagination “the Muslim female body has become a battlefield in the symbolic war against Islam, the barbaric ‘other’ and the Muslim enemy ‘within’” (Mirza 2013, 100). Furthermore, in the renewed nationalism of post-Brexit, constructing local areas such as Oldham, as towns under threat from unchecked migration, Jamila, and more significantly the pram represent a threat to the national ideal. As nation and race are conflated as homogenous, with Britishness associated with “whiteness” Jamila, as the potential reproducer of an “Other” threatens the mythical sameness of Britain (Alexander 1998), thus “taking over the country”- words and sentiments which reflect the moral panic of the growing number of “foreign” nationals. In the demonization of immigration which has long dominated political discourses, and which found renewed vigour in the lead up the EU referendum election, anti-migrant performances of government are re-interpreted and enacted through anti-migrant and indeed anti-“other” sentiments in everyday life. Discourses of “unchecked migration” as contributing to the discontent felt by Britain’s “left-behind” white working-class communities, have swept up women like Jamila, a second-generation British Muslim, who’s foreign otherness is read from her embodied differences of race, gender and religion. Race, and in particularly raced bodies matter in everyday interactions, because race can be understood as “a technology that locates and sorts human differences” which emphasize race not only as a social and biological construct, but as “emergent and constantly morphing” (Swanton 2010, 2334). As such, in social interactions this sorting of human differences is more than just discourses of brown bodies but demonstrates the relationship between bodies and bordering of the spaces which they are allowed to belong.

In public spaces of Oldham Muslim women are mindful of their bodies, and consequently of their positioning within unequal social hierarchies. Space socially reproduces hierarchies of power, including some whilst excluding others. Sorting raced bodies, space becomes configured as a medium through which belonging and exclusion are measured and meted out, “differentiation becomes at least as much about relations between bodies, things and spaces as it is about discourses” Swanton (2010, 2334). Consider the comments below on the way she navigates the public space of a shopping centre from 28-year-old Farah, a niqab wearing mother of one:

… sometimes if I’m going out especially with the little one in the pram, if we’re in Primark or whatever, we’re waiting for the lift, you’ll see like some white, young mums with their kids in tow, I hate to be stereotypical, but they just really look down at us. It’s that impression they give, like as if to say, we’ve got more rights here than you, so I just wander round until the lifts clear or whatever, or if the space is empty, so I’ll think yeah, now we can go, but there’s times where I’ve actually given way to people …

In the interaction Farah describes, the differences of race and ethnicity translate into a feeling of a lack of power or the same rights to both inhabit and use everyday spaces.

Spaces operate as sites through which racial processes, histories, oppression and resistance, (which encompasses both the past and present), become manifest in racialised everyday encounters and illustrates the way in which experiences within local spaces can shape understandings of self (Brand 2018). Elsewhere I have discussed the way in which BSA Muslim women’s interactions within everyday spaces is shaped by a self-awareness or double-consciousness (Du Bois 1994) which ensures that BSA Muslim women actively negotiate with and reflect upon racialised discourses of spaces which shape hierarchies of belonging (Bibi 2020). In contemporary Islamophobic discourse the brown body is one that is inherently suspicious, as outside belonging to the nation, and as such has unequal claims to rights and space. Because public spaces do not exist in a void and are indeed ontologically and spatially constructed through symbolic and cultural meanings, it is important to consider the dialectical relation between spaces and the meanings attached to them (Richard and Jensen 2003; McGregor 2004). Furthermore, it is crucial to understand how ethnic minority individuals interpret the relation between spaces which are “for” them and spaces within which they are made aware of their “otherness” and indeed, non-belonging. Public spaces can be sites where social interactions and spatial relations are unequal and ambiguous, they become “exclusionary spaces in which social distrust, anxiety and senses of vulnerability” are the dominant features.

The local context is also important in analysing Farah’s comments about rights and use of space. As a geographical area with high rates of unemployment and poverty, Oldham has long been used to highlight the dangers of unchecked immigration leading to what have been termed as “ghetto towns” (Simpson and Finney 2010) In an increasingly anti-immigrant, Islamophobic and xenophobic atmosphere, the concept of rights, as attributed to all citizens, is restricted to those who are deemed native to the nation. In short, the right to enjoy the same access to spaces is restricted to those deemed deserving or having an inherent right to such space, a right that is often determined by identities or bodies which fit (Puwar 2004) within the imagined ethnic makeup of the nation. These discourses both shape and determines social hierarchies and thus access to and behaviour within public space; the white, female body is above that of the ethnic, racial “other” in the social order, thus structuring the type of interactions Farah experiences. In considering the embodied dimensions of belonging, Tyler (2013) notes that political and public discourses produce “abject subjects” those individuals that are deemed outside belonging, so that others can be deemed as inside. These distinctions, between those who have more or less rights, operate along gendered, ethnic or racial lines, and in discourses of belonging, shaped by public and popular policy, the demonization and exclusion of the “other” is central to belonging (Anderson, Cumings, and Gatwiri 2019). It is in these everyday spaces that nationalist discourses which shape perceptions of the Other, operate within local spaces and become imbued with complex intersections of race, gender, ethnicity and religion. It is through paying particular attention to local spaces that the extent to which these exclusionary discourses can be analysed.

Conclusion

In contemporary Islamophobia the marginalisation of Muslims progresses through complex, interwoven and overlapping discourses and practices, which include national identity, immigration, ethnicity and religion. For BSA Muslim women embodied differences often shape negative, or discriminatory encounters in public spaces. Crucially, as has been discussed in this paper, Muslim women’s presence in public spaces, is identified and scrutinized (driven partly by the moral panic over the “Muslim other” across Europe), and the embodied intersectional identities of Muslim women. Muslim women’s bodies become the site for anxiety representing a perceived threat to an “idealised nation” evident through punitive measures to control women’s bodies in the banning of public wearing of the veil, as well political commentary which casts Muslim women as a threat to social integration due to the inherent separateness of “Muslim communities” (Mason and Sherwood 2016; Casey 2016). As a group that possess formal citizenship rights but are subject to particular scrutiny as citizens, Muslim women, through the representation of embodied difference in public and political discourse, makes palpable the constantly fluctuating nature of nation, belonging and integrating the “Other”.

As this paper has argued, belonging to the national ideal, and therefore being considered part of the public polity operates along gendered and racialised lines. The ability to access and pass through spaces depends on the extent to which the body is deemed to fit the national ideal, and the mythical sameness (Alexander 1998) of the nation. The embodied intersectionality of BSA Muslim women are thus deemed as outside of but also threatening to this national ideal, and as potential re/producer of the racial, ethnic other further positions them as the unwelcome “other”. This paper has utilised the concepts of embodied intersectionality, space and the everyday bordering to illustrate the way in which hegemonic discourses of BSA Muslim women as “Other” fundamentally shapes experiences in the banal, seemingly ordinary aspect of everyday encounters in local places.

The encounters discussed in this paper exemplified the extent to which the continuing discourse of Muslims as a suspect community translates into experiences in local spaces which justify exclusion from the polity, mark boundaries of same/other and structure interactions. Additionally, a particular focus on the specific history, geography and socio-economics of a locality illustrates the extent to which the processes of othering is shaped by emplacement in local contexts with their own specific histories and dynamics. Oldham, with its history of race-related disturbances, and subsequent positioning within popular discourse as a Muslim ghetto, isolationist or left behind form a fraught local setting. The use of black feminist framework of embodied intersectionality (Mirza 2012) allows for a more holistic understanding of hegemonic social structures which frame Islamophobic discourses and its impacts on Muslim women on micro scales of everyday encounters. Further, taking into account spatial dynamics of a local space allows for an understanding of how/why of territory marking shapes interactions for BSA Muslim women which serve to reinforce their “otherness”, and the necessity of seeing everyday as context-bound, place and time specific (Nayak 2017). Additionally, whilst acknowledging the international and national impact of events such as 9/11 and 7/7, a focus on the minutiae of daily practices and routines demonstrates the insidiousness of Islamophobia and the impact of these on the intersecting identities of race, gender, religion and culture for BSA Muslim women. It is through adequately accounting for the context of local experiences through concepts of embodied intersectionality and racialised spaces that contested belonging for Muslim women can be fully explored.

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Professor Vanessa May and Dr James Rhodes for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).