Being ‘religious and cultural rebels’ or being ‘cultural hybrids’? The role of identity capital in Muslim female university students’ self-construction

ABSTRACT

Research on university-educated Muslim women in different cultural contexts has displayed an intricate and paradoxical connection between experiences of higher education and identity mediation. A traditional model conceptualizes Muslim female university students as ‘rebels’ against their heritage religion and culture. Recent developments in the context of poststructural feminism highlight the configuration of a hybrid self-image embracing the target and heritage cultures in an additive and empowering manner. To enhance our understanding of the potential impact of higher education on identity negotiation, this study employs the notion of identity capital in an analysis of two South Asian Muslim female university students in Hong Kong over a two-year period. Participants’ life histories reveal that personal capacity to invest in identity capital (a contextually-dependent hybrid self) relies on an individual’s unique possession of various forms of capital. This study thus cautions against generalizations about Muslim women’s university experiences, and suggests that Muslim minorities as multicultural students and that their multilingual/multicultural skills, as forms of ‘intercultural capital,’ should be valued by all societal institutions.

KEYWORDS:

• Identity capital
• intersecting multiple capitals
• university
• Muslim women
• Hong Kong

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

GAO Fang is Assistant Professor in the Department of International Education and Lifelong Learning, the Education University of Hong Kong. Her main research interests are in minority education and higher education. She has published Becoming a model minority: Schooling experiences of ethnic Koreans in China (Lexington Books, 2010), 23 papers in international refereed journals, and 12 refereed book chapters. She is also the editor for two upcoming edited books Education, ethnicity and inequality in multilingual Asian context; Tertiary education in Asia and Eurasia: Sustainable policies, practices and developments by Springer.