Fashioning hybrid Muslim women’s veiled embodied geographies in Hamilton, Aotearoa New Zealand: #hijabi spaces

Abstract

In this article, we foreground the intersection of hijab and fashion as multiple expressions of Muslim women’s gendered identities and geographies in Hamilton, Aotearoa New Zealand. Muslim women use their bodies to express adaptations of femininity, religion, and nationalities. Using an embodied geography lens, this article grapples with mutual intersecting identities, including gender, religion and nationality and wider relations of power. Drawing on interviews with 30 participants and their social media images, we show how participants trouble a modesty and fashion binary. They do this in – and through – the city of Hamilton in both online and offline spaces. There are three findings. First, we show the complex relationship between identities, hijab, fashion, gender and religious power relations in and around their bodies. Second, Muslim women have conflicting emotions when wearing a veil and engaging with fashionable clothing and accessories in Hamilton. Finally, we focus on the ways that Muslim women use Facebook and Instagram and an array of fashion hashtags to illustrate the intersection of hijab, clothes, place and Western fashion. In doing so they negotiate online and offline spaces to construct hybrid fashionable-Islamic bodies and places. In each of these findings, we highlight the ways participants understand their Muslim-Kiwi identities.

Keywords:

• Aotearoa New Zealand
• embodied geography
• fashion
• Hamilton
• hybrid
• Muslim women
• veil

Acknowledgements

First and foremost, we would like to thank Muslim women in Hamilton who participated in our study and generously shared with us their time, homes, moments of hope and knowledge. We are also grateful to the Editor and reviewers for the very instructive feedback.

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Anoosh Soltani

Anoosh Soltani holds a Ph.D. in Human Geography from the University of Waikato, New Zealand. Her Ph.D. thesis explores Muslim women’s embodied identity (re)constructions and negotiations in the spaces of employment, leisure, and social networking sites. She is a social and cultural geographer, with expertise in the areas of feminism, gender, migration, the body, and inequality.

Lynda Johnston

Lynda Johnston’s research interests centre on the challenges and spatial complexities of inequality. Specifically, Lynda draws attention to the exclusionary ways in which various forms of marginalisation and discrimination – such as sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and racism – shape people’s places and spaces.

Robyn Longhurst

Robyn Longhurst has a long-standing interest in gender, equity and social justice. She researches in the broad areas of social and cultural geography, with a particular interest in embodiment. Robyn has carried out work on pregnancy, mothering, migrant women, body size and shape, and disability.