Trans/national knowledge production through difference: dilemmas of doing research on veiling in Amman, Jordan

Abstract

This article examines some dilemmas I experienced while doing research on fashionable veiling in Amman, Jordan. My fieldwork experience and the knowledge I co-produced with the participants were shaped by each layer of my identity as a Jordanian, Muslim, non-veiled woman, with a particular classed, spatialized Ammani heritage and affiliation with western feminist academia. The article engages with the implications my positionality had on my insider-outsider status and the knowledge the participants and I co-produced. I argue that the research setting, while fraught with difference, constituted a site for transnational solidarity and knowledge production. The participants and I had divergent understandings of, and aspirations for, Jordanian Muslim femininity shaped by our varying positions within the Global North-Global South. I argue that we practiced solidarity by collaborating and co-constructing a transnational site to unpack and defend their viability. I found that our collaboration was not fuelled by a shared sense of injustice and did not produce a shared outlook on Islam, Jordanianness or femininity. Rather, it created a site where we were able to emphasize our divergent sense of these paradigms as women positioned differently within the trans/national, cultural, and religious spaces we shared.

Keywords:

• Difference
• feminism
• solidarity
• transnational knowledge production
• veiling

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to the research participants for sharing their insights and non/veiling stories with me. I also sincerely thank the anonymous reviewers, Kanchana N. Ruwanpura and all the journal’s editors for their insightful feedback on previous drafts. I conducted the research for this project at York University’s School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies.