Navigating Stigma through Refashioning Islamic Veiling: Muslim Women’s Sartorial De-Stigmatization Strategies in Contemporary United States

Abstract

This article examines Muslim women’s de-stigmatization strategies in everyday urban interactions in contemporary United States with a focus on their sartorial choices geared toward navigating stigmatization. It is particularly interested into how intersubjectivity, emotions and materiality work together in navigations of the quintessentially hybrid and unstable meanings of Islamic veiling. Within this frame, it demonstrates that Muslim women’s socio-spatial relations in the context of rising public hostility initiate socially creative processes of self-representation that are navigated through a broad range of sartorial practices. The article pays significant attention to the dialogic-material aspects of Muslim women’s self-presentations in the aftermath of the election of Donald Trump. It concludes that experimentation with sartorial styles provides veiled Muslim women a productive site to navigate the tensions between self-identifications and hegemonic other-identifications imposed from outside and experienced as powerfully stigmatizing. Yet, at times of political crisis marked by a striking rise of anti-Muslim hostility, the productive aspects of their sartorial management become obscure and futile.

Keywords:

• Islamic veiling
• Muslim women
• de-stigmatization strategies
• Islamophobia
• United States

Introduction

Veiled Muslim women in Western migration contexts are subject to a form of hypervisibility which is produced through particular political and cultural filters that stigmatize the veil by reducing it to a threatening symbol of difference and otherness (Bilge 2010). The stigmatization of veil draws on Orientalist constructions of Muslim difference that positions veiled Muslim women as victims of an “essentially patriarchal” religion and thus “incompatible” with the Western ideal of “emancipated” and “modern” femininity (Razack 2004, 2022; Yegenoglu 1998). Especially in contexts marked by an upsurge of anti-Muslim sentiments, Islamic veiling as an easily discernible marker of Muslim identity becomes the target of the public gaze of the non-Muslim majority that is motivated to know, unveil, and discipline the “Muslimwoman” (Cooke 2008). Studies reveal that the discursive and institutional dimensions of this hypervisibility generate dramatic socio-psychological impacts on Muslim women, which unfold in their everyday strategies conforming to, reversing, and navigating the hegemonic discourses on Muslim distinction (Hammer 2013a; Mirza 2013).

Previous research demonstrates that in the face of stigmatization, Muslim subjects develop novel strategies of self-representation to navigate the hegemonic rhetoric on Muslim identity (Chapman 2016; Eijberts and Roggeband 2016; McGinty 2012; de Jong and Duyvendak 2021). Their strategies relating to religious belonging may concentrate on the identification-rejection nexus, displaying strengthened affirmation of religious identity and/or conformity to hegemonic discourses in the form of abandonment of visible Muslim self-representation. For example, regarding the US context, studies report an acceleration in the process of re-Islamization in the aftermath of 9/11. An increasing number of adolescents and young Muslim women assumed a public Islamic identity in the post 9/11 context by adopting headscarf as a form of reactive religiosity (Haddad, Smith, and Moore 2006; Mishra and Shirazi 2010). Others suggest that Muslim women might also scale back their religious identity, belief, and practice through opting for unveiling in the face of rising Islamophobia (Voas and Fleischmann 2012). Yet, this rigid nexus of identification and rejection as a coping strategy to navigate public hostility does not provide comprehensive insights into how Muslim women use socio-culturally available means of self-making to navigate the intersubjective implications of their veiling practices in the everyday context of rising Islamophobia.

This article examines Muslim women’s de-stigmatization strategies in everyday urban interactions in contemporary United States with a focus on their sartorial choices and revisions geared toward navigating stigmatization. De-stigmatization strategies here are understood as “everyday micro practices enacted in reaction to perceived stigmatization, racism, and discrimination” (Lamont and Mizrachi 2012). The article uses the concept of “stigma” to highlight how Islamic veiling functions as a visual cue to mark Muslim women’s identities through a reductive and stereotyping gaze. In the original Greek meaning of the word, stigma refers to bodily signs that communicate the bearer’s marginalized identity and results in public exclusion (Göle 2003). Islamic veiling as stigma implies the centrality of this bodily aspect and the cultural repertoires and the language of relationships that sustain its negative perception. Thus, it exposes a realm of relationality in which the hegemonic meanings of Islamic veiling are not endemic to the veil itself but are constantly reproduced through public perception and discourse (Glapka 2018). Along these lines, this article is particularly interested into how sartorial revisions are used as dialogic efforts or communicative actions to navigate the negative evaluations of Muslim belonging and to intervene into processes of inclusion and exclusion. Building on the recently growing scholarship on Muslim women’s management of stigma in everyday urban relationalities (Chapman 2016; Najib and Hopkins 2019; McGinty 2012; Shams 2018; van Es 2019), it foregrounds attention to how intersubjectivity, emotions and materiality work together in navigations of the quintessentially hybrid and unstable meanings of Islamic veiling. It aims to demonstrate that Muslim women’s socio-spatial relations in the context of rising public hostility initiate new forms of conduct and socially creative processes of self-representation that are navigated through an elaborate construction of sartorial biography and various micro-hijab practices- “the ways in which different garments are combined, tied, pinned, wrapped or draped to their color arrangements, patterns and sizes” (Harkness 2019).

Within this frame, the article investigates revisions of the materialities of Islamic veiling with a focus on the meanings attributed to them as interpretative repertoires, i.e., schemes, descriptions, evaluations, and tropes (Bartkowski and Read 2003). It looks at how these meanings are developed in context-specific ways to make sense of contextually available subject positions. It builds on the idea that the materialities of Islamic veiling are shaped by and are shaping the intersubjective dialogic actions of diasporic Muslim identity. It approaches gendered Muslim agency as material-dialogic relationality that anchors formation of subjectivity within a nexus of social relations and assemblages of embodied experiences negotiated in this “dialogic space”. As a result, the analysis brings to the fore the importance of material-dialogic intersubjectivity in grasping the relations between social representations and social identities.

This article moves away from applying the dichotomous frame of “resistance” versus “submission” to the dynamics of representation and identity in relational encounters. The dialogic-material approach here illuminates the co-constitutive and multi-layered relationship between Muslim women’s embodied practices and their intersubjective encounters in cosmopolitan urban spaces. It aims to expose diverse modes of reasonings and self-reflexive negotiations of the contextual dynamics at the nexus of materiality, intersubjectivity and emotions. The analysis draws on qualitative data gathered through in-depth interviews with veiled Muslim women of Turkish background who have moved to the US in the post-9/11 period. It acknowledges that it is only by looking at their dynamically changing temporalities that we can understand the meanings and practices of Muslim women’s sartorial styles. Thus, it examines the interviewees’ “sartorial biographies”, namely, the temporalities and intersubjectivities that mark their biographical experiences and inform the meanings that they attribute to different veiling styles and the transformation of their sartorial choices in the migration context (Tarlo 2007a). Drawing on the findings, it highlights the importance of ethno-nationality/cultural background in making sense of diasporic Muslim women’s dynamic responses to stigmatization.

Moreover, the article pays significant attention to the dialogic-material aspects of their self-presentations in the immediate aftermath of the election of Donald Trump as president, where the incitement to discourse on Muslim distinction has accelerated. It explores their everyday sartorial engagements geared toward navigating the complex “emotional habitus”, i.e., internalized ways of feeling, thinking, and acting (Illouz 2007), shaped, and influenced by the upsurge of anti-Muslim sentiments. As a result, it hopes to portray the material-dialogic management of a complex emotional terrain marked by narratives of empowerment, agency, and hope, as well as fear, anxiety, and vulnerabilities that surface in everyday gendered Muslim lives.

The article concludes that experimentation with sartorial styles provides veiled Muslim women a productive site to navigate the tensions between “self-identifications” and hegemonic “other-identifications” imposed from outside and experienced as powerfully stigmatizing (Brubaker 2016). Yet, at times of political crisis marked by a striking rise of anti-Muslim hostility, the productive aspects of their sartorial revisions become obscure and futile. At such moments, Muslim women as agents simultaneously engaged in ethical, esthetic, and political projects report feeling overwhelmed by the overloaded signification of their “visible” Muslim appearance. Their accounts suggest that as perceived and lived Islamophobia generates emotional turbulences in Muslim women’s psycho-social inner worlds, the promising and dialogic qualities of creative sartorial experimentations and veiling practices yield a loss of orientation in making sense of the visible Muslim “distinction”.

Gendered Islamophobia in the US Context

The politically loaded significations of Islamic veiling have particularly intensified in the US context in the post-9/11 era and led to the operationalization of a securitization discourse through imperialist goals to “liberate” Muslim women from oppressive governmental regimes (Abdelkader 2020; Hammer 2013b; Lichtblau 2016). Situating Muslim women as eternally “Eastern” and thus antithetical to the ideal of “American freedom”, this discourse has rendered the identity of Muslim women an “empty signifier” to be deployed for the maintenance of national security and the so-called American values. Pointing out the proliferation of this rhetoric under the Trump Presidency (2017–2021), recent reports suggest that Muslim women who veiled under the Trump era were exposed to more discrimination and assault than those who did not (Abdelkader 2020; Dana et al 2019). The Trump administration has proliferated the public discourse on Muslim identity, coding Islam and Muslims as militant, patriarchal, and parochial and leading to a heightened visibility of Muslim subjects in the public sphere. This anti-Muslim rhetoric was officially sanctioned and legitimized through two Executive Orders (EO) issued in 2017 with the aim to ban Muslim’s mobility. The reference to honor killings in the first EO testifies to the fact that the anti-Muslim thinking of the Trump administration draws on the image of “repressed, helpless” Muslim woman and “violent, sexually aggressive” Muslim man. Although the US courts challenged the EOs, their effects were strongly felt in Muslims’ everyday lives and in public debates. Recent studies and reports indicate that the rising anti-Muslim sentiments under the Trump Presidency have led to an increase in all components of stigmatization of Muslim identities, i.e., labeling, stereotyping, separation, status loss, and discrimination (Casey 2017; Elfenbein 2019; Kaufmann 2019; Laughland 2018).

Against this background, this article focuses on Muslim women’s veiling practices performed on a day-to-day basis to navigate the complex patchwork of dominant discourses on Islam, gender, and veiling in the contemporary US context. It notes that Muslim women living in the US comprise a very diverse population with different ethnic ties, nationalities, and legal status (Haddad 1993; Hammer and Safi 2013). Far from representing a shared Islamic American identity, they display a wide range of cultural, economic, educational, sectarian, and ideological positions. Given this, there exists tremendous diversity among Muslim women in the US in terms of their veiling styles and practices. Ethnic backgrounds and levels of religiosity inform Muslim women’s enactment of piety, leading to diverse veiling practices. Different sartorial choices such as Indian Muslim women’s saris, Arab Muslim women’s abayas or black Muslim women’s ethnically influenced forms of veiling generate a great repertoire of veiling styles. The socio-political significations of these veiling styles also differ both within the Islamic community and in the broader public sphere (Haddad, Smith, and Moore 2006; Huisman and Hondagneu-Sotelo 2005; McGinty 2014, 2020; Mishra and Shirazi 2010).

This article investigates the narratives of first-generation migrant Muslim women of Turkish background who are well-educated, professional, and self-reflexive of their Muslim distinction in the US public sphere. It acknowledges that the participants are not representative of the entire Muslim community of Turkish background in the US but rather their positionalities are marked by their cosmopolitan dispositions, high education levels, and their commitment to intercultural dialogue. The article particularly focuses on their sartorial responses to the discourses interpellating and addressing their identities. These communicative mechanisms or acts of “talking back”, as Bracke (2011) calls, include efforts to blur the symbolic boundaries of secular and pious by refashioning Islamic veiling in relation to different spatialities and multiple audiences. They also center on a self-reflexive agency actively constructing a sartorial biography as an interpretive scheme to make sense of the flexibilities and contextually situated aspects of piety in the country of origin and the migration context. These communicative acts generate an emotional habitus that gives way to the performance of critical dispositions claiming authorship over the symbolic meanings of “visible” Muslim appearance. In what follows, the discussion will explain how they are enacted through the micro practices of sartorial management and navigate the invisibility and hypervisibility of veiling in the US context.

Ruptures and continuities of past and Present Veiling Practices

Most of the interviewees in this study report that their initial experience of migration in the US in the late 1990s was largely shaped by an idealized conception of the US as a highly pluralistic society where religious attachments can be freely cultivated. This romanticized notion of the migration destination is closely related to the interviewees’ positionalities in the country of origin. In the late 1990s, the Turkish context was largely shaped by antagonistic political struggles between ultra-secularist actors and Islamist politicians, which resulted in the 28 February military intervention leading to the dismissal of the Islamist government at the time. The restoration of the ultra-secularist hegemony in the aftermath of 28 February process led to the introduction of headscarf bans strictly limiting veiled women’s access to public universities and other public sector institutions (Cindoglu and Zencirci 2008).

This political landscape had dramatic influences on veiled Muslim women’s rights and psycho-social well-being. Ethnographic studies report that due to the bans many women could not continue their university education and assume professional roles in the workforce (Akbulut 2015). These vulnerabilities have also deeply affected Muslim women interviewed in this study. Having experienced headscarf bans, many of them report that it is because of this biographical experience that they idealized the US in the initial stages of their diasporic life for being a pluralistic society where they can freely engage in religious practice.

In Turkey, the interviewees had close connections with the Islamist revivalist movements that were on the rise in the post-1980 period. Their veiling styles composed of a large headscarf fully covering head, neck and shoulders and a loose, ankle-length overcoat in muted colors can be seen as a symbolic product of the upsurge of Islamist revivalism in Turkey. Unlike unreflexive forms of veiling common among rural and traditional Muslim women, these tesettür styles were mainly adopted by university students who used the discourse of free choice and a self-reflexive, informed approach to acquire Islamic knowledge. These styles represent the distinction between traditional/spiritual and political Islam promoted by the post-1980 Islamic revivalist movement. By the early 1990s, the tesettür styles and the long, loose overcoats accompanying them had become the symbol of political Islam and were perceived by the secular public as a security threat putting at risk the so-called modern, urban, Western lifestyle.

In 2000s, as a result of the proliferation of fashionable Islamic clothing and the emergence of Islamic consumer culture, more elegant and stylish clothing took over the Islamic consumer landscape and tesettür styles were revised with constantly shifting experimentations with color, fabrics, and styles in line with latest fashion trends. In this period, Muslim women have increasingly started to juxtapose the “modern” and the “traditional” in this new Islamic consumer landscape and regarded “new” tesettür styles not only as a site of ethical self-cultivation and a medium for the construction of political subjectivity but also as a form of “social and aesthetic capital” (Sandıkçı and Ger 2007) to reinforce rising Muslim visibility and enhanced social status in the public sphere.

Previous research notes that Muslim women of Turkish background in diaspora tend to adopt Islamic dressing styles that are highly influenced by sartorial trends originating from the veiling regime in the homeland, i.e., the spatially realized sets of hegemonic rules and norms regarding women’s veiling in Turkey (Curtis 2013; Secor 2002; Unal and Moors 2012; Unal 2013). Since tesettür styles dramatically shape Muslim women’s socialization into veiling in Turkey, they also function as an important pillar in the negotiation of sartorial styles and ideals of piety in the diasporic context and acquire new meanings ‘in a nexus between two cultures’ (Williams and Vashi 2007). They operate as significant “interpretive schemata”, i.e., a perspectival lens that offers them cognitive tools to make sense of their veiling practices both in Turkey and in the US (Gokarıksel and Secor 2010; Sandıkcı and Ger 2007).

Some of the interviewees in this study had already been using tesettür styles when they moved to the US, while others who were wary of the political signification of such styles in Turkey adopted them in their new diasporic lives. What is particularly striking in their narratives is that they engage in a self-reflexive effort to closely monitor, revise, and renegotiate the significations of these veiling styles and renegotiate the historically and culturally located implications of their loose overcoats in relation to their self-identifications and other-identifications. In this sense, the intersubjective aspects in their narratives disrupt a unilinear and fixed process of ethical self-cultivation and hint at a high degree of flexibility utilized to bring together different moral rubrics, future aspirations, and past experiences. The discussion below demonstrates that the identifiable trajectories in Muslim women’s sartorial biographies communicate processes of striving to become “better” Muslims and present a modern and cosmopolitan Muslim appearance while contesting stigma and stereotypes.

Methodology

This article draws on in-depth, semi-structured interviews conducted in New Jersey in the summer of 2017. In total, fifteen interviews were conducted in Turkish with Muslim women of Turkish background ranging from the age of 24 into early 40 s. All interviewees were selected via the snowball sampling method. Their names, places of work and other identifiable details are anonymized for protecting their confidentiality. All of them are highly educated, middle, or upper-middle class Muslim women with cosmopolitan aspirations to cultivate professional, social, and cultural skills necessary for successful emplacement in the US context and seek intercultural interactions at workplace and in their neighborhood.

The interviewees were born, raised, and studied in different parts of Turkey. They moved to the US in their early and mid-twenties due to education opportunities or marriage. They have university degrees in various fields such as biology, Turkish language and Islamic Theology; one has a Master’s degree in Communication and three of them have Ph.D. degrees in Economics, Industrial Engineering and Mathematics. Some are actively working at major international companies while others are stay-at-home mothers. All of them are married and currently live in New Jersey. Some of them have also lived in other major US states such as Florida, Virginia, Chicago, Texas, and Arizona. The fact that New Jersey is a multicultural state with a diverse population from different ethnic and religious backgrounds exposes them to a myriad of urban encounters where they attempt to blend their Muslim particularity with the non-Muslim elements of the urban setting.

This article acknowledges that sartorial norms of the “veiling regime” in Turkey provides significant interpretive lens to the interviewees under consideration here. It utilizes this ethnic lens not to imply a static process of diasporic identity construction that ignores the diversity, elasticity, temporality, and hybridity of the interviewees’ relationships to their place of settlement. Rather, adopting a relational sociological perspective (Huttunen and Juntunen 2018), it accommodates an historically contingent approach to Muslim women’s diasporic identities that is tuned to capture the complex ways in which they reevaluate self and others in line with the relationalities and transactions in the diasporic social context as well as the past memories, customs and habits.

Avoiding an essentialist approach that regards Islamic dress as a derivative of religious/ethnic background, the article puts emphasis on the temporal, material, and spatial shifts in sartorial choices in everyday diasporic Muslim lives and considers these shifts as useful clues to expose the intertwined relationship between emotions and materiality in Muslim women’s navigations of gendered Islamophobia. It notes that veiling practices do not suggest an inert state of piety as an endpoint, but connote a process of openness, of becoming and entail “communicative choices” that Muslim women make in response to the incitement to discourse on Muslim difference and Islamic veiling (Droogsma 2007).

Regarding Islamic veiling as a technique to cultivate the self in ethical terms and achieve spiritual transformation (Mahmood 2005), the article pays attention to Muslim women’s uses of various garments, i.e., headscarves, overcoats, long skirts, long tunics and pants, and the codes of conduct that ensure continual agentive investment to perform the Islamic concept al-haya (shyness, modesty) as a virtue. Drawing on various discourses, motivations, and aspirations to rethink themselves in relation to multiple others, diasporic Muslim women open leeway through sartorial experimentations to navigate the loaded significations of “visible” Muslim appearance (Jouili 2009). In this sense, the article draws attention to the fact that Islamic veiling style as an aspirational space informed by multiple agencies (religious, political, esthetic) and motivations (ethical self-cultivation, cosmopolitan self-representation, upward social mobility) can operate as strategic tool to manage overlapping life projects and to make sense of the emotional landscapes of grappling with future aspirations and past experiences as well as stigmatization and exclusion at the same time.

Discussion

The politics of hypervisibility attached to Islamic veiling in Western migration contexts engenders complex processes of identity construction for Muslim women where their grievances invoke a wide range of sartorial practices that serve as material and heuristic tools to navigate the socio-political signification of their identities (Jouili 2009). The emotional–material dynamics and dialogic aspects of their sartorial choices renders Islamic dress an “ambivalent”, elastic space that has a productive capacity to resist final closure and appropriation to dominant codes of meaning.

Throughout the interviews, the interviewees have elaborated in detail on the temporal or sequential nature of their sartorial engagements. Exposed to headscarf bans at public universities in Turkey, the interviewees developed certain sartorial techniques to survive in a strict veiling regime such as wearing wigs, unveiling at university, or not veiling. Their sartorial appropriations have acquired new dimensions when they moved to the US in their mid-twenties.

The increasing negative resonance of “Muslim distinction” in the aftermath of Trump’s election as president comes to the forefront as a major turning point generating significant effects on their self-positioning in US society. Their aspirations to cultivate a modern, professional, and religiously observant self against the rising anti-Muslim hostility and their quest to contest the stereotypical coding of their embodied Muslim particularity as “submissive and oppressed”, reinforces the elastic aspects of their sartorial experimentations.

Sartorial biographies: Self-representation in progress and temporalities of Islamic Dress

Saadet is a 41-year old financial expert and senior manager at a multi-national company in New Jersey. She started to veil in Turkey in mid-90s as a part of her search for religious knowledge. She reports that coming from a highly secular and elite family, she had difficulties in explaining her parents her decision to study Islamic teachings and was rejected by them because of her veiling. Late 1990s was a tumultuous political period in Turkey where Islamic veiling was regarded as the symbolic “carrier” of the antagonistic political struggles between ultra-secularists and political Islamists. Frustrated with headscarf bans at the university, at the age of 24 Saadet decided to move to the US for graduate studies. While studying for PhD in economics in Arizona, she became aware of the historically and contextually situated meanings attributed to Islamic dress in Turkey and the US and reflected on her self-identification as a culturally located subject:

We go through a strict dress code training in Turkey. According to this, veiling the body is not enough, you also need to hide bodily contours by using multiple layers. To do this, you need to stay away from clothing items such as pants and use items like overcoat. In Turkey, wearing an Islamic overcoat implies that you are a good Muslim whereas here in America it is perceived as ethnic dress.

Saadet had her first root awakening when she started teaching for the first time at the graduate school:

One day before my first experience of teaching, one of my professors told me that I should wear something modern in the classroom if I want to get a good teaching evaluation. Now I wear pants with long, modern tops but at that time, I was wearing long, loose overcoats not because I was a very pious Muslim woman but mostly because it was practical to wear overcoats in Arizona where it is always hot and sunny. With cotton, light overcoats, I did not have to put on multiple layers of clothing. But my professor thought that my overcoat is a form of traditional dress with heavy religious connotation. This was the first time when someone in the US warned me about my outfit. First, I got offended but eventually I decided that he was right because dress really matters in this country. Although there is no legal regulation about Islamic dress, it would be too naïve to assume that a Muslim woman can wear anything she likes without suffering the consequences.

Turkish-style, ankle-length overcoat in muted colors covering her bodily figure from top to toe has been a significant part of Saadet’s veiling practice and her ethical self-cultivation since her first contact with the Islamist revivalist movement in Istanbul in mid-90s. In the initial stages of her new life in the US, the overcoat also served a practical purpose, helping her cope with the frustration about how to combine different garments in a new veiling regime where access to distinctively Islamic garments is not as easy as in Turkey. Yet, she soon realized that loose, ankle-length overcoats in muted colors are regarded as “cultural” dress in this new veiling regime and signify a traditional engagement with Islam. This culturalist signification, in return, generated new emotion-laden meanings and an “affective economy” where stereotypes “stick” to the gendered Muslim self and lead to the symbolic densification of Islamic appearance (Ahmed 2004).

In the aftermath of this root awakening, Saadet abandoned the Turkish style overcoat to dilute the hegemonic significations accompanying her visible Muslim appearance. This resignification of veiling reflects self-reflexivity on other-identifications related to the visual iconography of Islamic revivalist style and opens up possibility to claim an “unmarked” Muslim position. It displays an agentic capacity to carefully manage the relational and material aspects of everyday sartorial practices and navigate different audience expectations in different settings.

Previous studies note that to navigate stigmatization in Western majority societies, Muslim women frequently engage in efforts to free diasporic Muslim belonging from the traditional aspects of homeland culture (van Es 2019). One of the main reasonings in Saadet’s abandonment of the Islamic overcoat is to free her public self-presentation from the negative implications of “cultural” Islamic dress that signifies an unreflexive, backward, habitual, and unmodern Muslim position. As an educated and professional Muslim woman, Saadet aims to make sure that her Muslim appearance expresses her authentic religious belonging that is liberated from unreflexive cultural practices and is guided by moral autonomy and a discourse of choice.

Reappropriations of Islamic attire take place in a relational space where the relationship between the self and the “other” are formed in a complex reciprocity (Almilla 2016, Tarlo 2007a). The interviews in this study reveal that participation in working life is a milestone in Muslim women’s sartorial biographies where their embodied Muslim distinction crystallizes through urban relationalities and generates new interpretive lenses in situating the gendered Muslim self in the secular public sphere. Latife, 39 year-old PhD economist, states that she gave up wearing the Islamic overcoat and switched to modern suits when she started her job as a financial expert at a reputable bank in New Jersey. For her, Muslim particularity expressed through Turkish style Islamic overcoat is perceived too excessive in American society especially when professional Muslim women attempt to be part of “white” organization cultures characterized by invisible barriers regarding race, ethnicity, gender, and religion:

I could guess what is normal in society. You have your personal and your professional life… Now I am more senior, it is not only my image, but also my company’s image that I have to reflect carefully in terms of how trustworthy I look, how professional I look… Nobody told me that we cannot promote you because of your headscarf. But the barriers are invisible. When I was working at another bank, they put me in a magazine they were doing about diversity. They asked me if I would be comfortable in being in the magazine and I said yes. In my current company, there was a video about diversity in the company and I am actually in that video… On the other hand, my first manager who was like a mentor to me, told me personally that if I did not wear headscarf, I would be promoted earlier…

As Latife’s narrative exposes, Muslim women develop enhanced self-reflexivity to respond to the affective field generated by the negative significations of veiling. Anticipating potential prejudices and Islamophobic discriminations, they revise the heavy markers of their gendered Muslim identity in such a way as to ensure that their success in professional life is less predicated on their Muslim looks and more on their merits. In some cases, professional Muslim women make an implicit “sartorial bargain” with “white” organizations so that they can avert the stigmatization of Muslim distinction and ensure its recognition and those organizations can claim to be diverse through accommodating Muslim diversity. Yet, this sartorial bargain cannot be reduced to “submission” to hegemonic codes or a docile subjectivity simply attempting to “fit in”. It should be understood with an acknowledgement of the substantial capacity for agentic action that Muslim women’s resignification practices entail. As Göle (2003) explains, exclusion, discrimination, and harassment originating from stigmatization of veiling generate significant bodily effects for veiled Muslim women in their interactions with non-Muslims and requires re-signification efforts geared toward alleviating stigmatization. In this sense, the interviewees’ construction of a professional, modern, and Muslim identity at the workplace draw on carefully performed micro strategies that disrupt the rigid boundaries between ethnic religious community and the cosmopolitan public sphere and render space, diasporic identity, and dress habits relational and dialogic.

In reflecting on their sartorial biographies, the interviewees aim to acquire cognitive tools to manage the emotional landscape rendering the gendered and racialized Muslim body fragile. They display an awareness of the co-constitutive relationship between the materialities of their sartorial practices and the culturally located relationalities and transactions in the social context. The latent potentiality of this co-constitutive relationship must be acknowledged to grasp the multiplicity and the elasticity of the meanings that Islamic veiling might assume in Muslim women’s urban encounters. Since the materialities of Islamic veiling are always open to reinscription (Almilla 2016, Tarlo 2007b), they operate simultaneously a site of possibility and of vulnerability where Muslim women enact everyday struggles of living with Muslim distinction.

Managing the discrepancy between self-identifications and other-identifications

In her anthropological study of Islamic veiling in London, Tarlo (2007a) draws attention to the fact that Islamic veiling displays a capacity to take on agency in gendered Muslim lives. She draws on Gell’s (1998) conceptualization of the secondary agency of objects to point out that objects can transform human’s sense of self as well as their relationship to others and the wider environment. Such an approach is not interested in exposing the authentic motivation underlying Muslim women’s sartorial choices but rather engages in an analysis of the lived experiences of veiling invoked by the subjectivation effects of governing discourses and different ways of relating to them.

In line with Tarlo’s approach, the interviews in this study suggest that certain properties of Islamic veiling take agency in interviewees’ everyday lives and shape as well as are shaped by embodied experiences, subjective emotions, and the discursive effects of the contextual setting. Interviewees engage in micro practices to carefully manage the agentic properties of Islamic attire and open space to claim an “unmarked” Muslim female subject position. For example, they appropriate the significations of slim fit pants in veiling styles in line with their urban relationalities with multiple audiences in different spatialities. Although wearing slim fit pants has become a common practice today for many veiled Muslim women, it still triggers tensions regarding the complex relationship between Islamic ethics and the aesthetics of veiling. Coming from a veiling regime where the use of modern pants in tesettür styles is always framed as a matter of adherence to/deviance from Islamic ethics (Unal 2013), most of the interviewees consider the use of long, loose skirts as a more “proper” garment in tesettür styles, yet opt for slim fit pants for a wide range of reasons, namely aesthetic choice, pragmatic sensibilities such as comfort, and the motivation to move away from an appearance signifying an orthodox Islamist position and to stress a liberal, modern Muslim position. As a result, the combination of slim fit pants with long tunics and shirts becomes an important signifier for the interviewees to cultivate Muslim looks in conjuncture with their concerns about gaining recognition and appreciation in the secular public sphere. Latife states that she uses fashionable slim fit pants with blazer jackets at her workplace, whereas she combines these pants with longer tunics and shirts when she interacts with the Turkish community. This sartorial arrangement enables her to selectively maintain ties to the ethnic community and cultivate a cosmopolitan Muslim identity through creative sartorial engagement informed by relationalities in different spaces and the communicative processes that accompany it.

Muslim women utilize different sartorial combinations and experimentations in veiling practices not just in terms of how others see themselves, i.e., other identifications, but also how they see themselves, i.e., self identifications. Buse, part-time kindergarten teacher and graduate student in Theology, explains:

I feel more comfortable when I wear pants combined with long tunics… If you wear long skirts, that makes you feel more obedient and domestic. I know that wearing skirts is more appropriate and virtuous in terms of Islamic ethics, but in America I can only be myself with pants-tunic combinations.

Buse draws on different forms of knowledge and moral rubrics, namely taqwa (level of piety), aspirations and principles regarding gender relations and self-perception as a cosmopolitan, empowered Muslim woman. Multiple self-identification projects and ideals in Buse’s narrative points out her highly self-reflexive agency managing multiple power structures and imagining her sartorial engagements as aspirational sites through which she hopes to reconcile the processes of becoming a practicing Muslim and grappling with the questions of what it means to be a young, educated, and diasporic Muslim women of Turkish background. Putting these different moral rubrics and aspirations into dialogue, she looks beyond the “perfectionist” understanding of Islamic ethics and redefines her veiling practices in more flexible ways that go beyond a strict regulation through binaries such as “proper” and “unproper” veiling and tradition versus modernity.

In addition to the use of pants, avoiding black and wearing visible colors such as bright red and yellow are also among the micro strategies that come forward in Buse’s narrative. What is interesting is that she responds to hegemonic discourses not only for herself, but also for other Muslim women. She states that when older female, veiled relatives from Turkey come to New Jersey to visit her, she strongly encourages them not to wear black and even offers them colorful garments from her own wardrobe. Since self-identification as Muslim in a Western diasporic context entails being held accountable for the whole Muslim community, Buse’s everyday sartorial strategies imply what van Es (2019) calls an “ambassadorial position”. She develops an awareness about her personification of Islam publically through donning the headscarf, feels responsible for representing the “modern” face of Islam and also urges others to adopt this ambassadorial role.

Buse’s sartorial choices geared toward conveying a modern Muslim self-presentation can be seen as a part of a broad repertoire of moral rubrics and communicative choices closely monitoring everyday conduct such as being well-groomed, smiling in daily urban encounters, being communicative, social, and open to interactions:

I always try to be very careful about my conduct and my outfit in public places. I try to be friendly and helpful towards others and dress neat, clean, and nice clothes. Sometimes, my neighbors come to me and say that they really liked the patterns or the colors of my dress. This positive feedback means a lot to me.

This closely monitored and strategic self-representation should not be regarded as “unauthentic”; rather, it is a response to the discrepancy between self-identification and negative other-identifications imposed from outside and is constitutive of the dialogic and gendered Muslim self. Although Muslim women’s communicative acts geared toward contesting stigmatization provides them leeway to enact a dialogic, modern self-presentation, this constant monitoring of social conduct also leads to the overpoliticization of everyday life and conflates their identities to politics of representation and signification. Moreover, as it will be shown below, the agentic capacities of such communicative interventions significantly diminish in the face of rising anti-Muslim sentiments in society.

The affective field of gendered Muslim Vulnerabilities in Trump’s America

Proliferation of racializing discourse on Muslims under the Trump presidency generated dramatic consequences in Muslim lives not only at the policy and discursive level but also in micro-politics of social interactions and paved way to anti-Muslim harassment, discrimination, and stigmatization in everyday life (Abdelkader 2020; Casey 2017; Elfenbein 2019; Kaufmann 2019; Laughland 2018). During the interviews, the interviewees have mentioned recent incidents of harassment and discrimination that they have experienced in urban encounters and pointed out the negative affective sense of self triggered by the growing anti-Muslim hostility. Yasemin, a university lecturer in Mathematics, tells that she was harassed twice in the aftermath of Trump’s election. She was stalked and verbally attacked by youngsters while playing with her child on a playground. Another time she was accused of being a bad driver on a parking lot of a pharmacy with the remark “Muslim women cannot drive”. For her, it cannot be a coincidence that she was harassed twice in a month after Trump’s election. She reports that the affective field generated by the rising public hostility has been overwhelming for her and has urged her to reconsider her decision to veil in the US migration context:

When I came to the USA at the age of 25 for graduate studies, I knew that stereotypical representations of Islam and Muslims have been dominant in American society after 9/11 but I have chosen not to take off my veil and have taken the risk of stigmatization and harassment. Having faced harassment after Trump’s election, I have started to question my decision to keep wearing my headscarf in America…

The emotional habitus arising from the experience of “standing out” in the context of anti-Muslim hostility might lead to dissociative impulses regarding veiling (Chapman 2016). Some of the interviewees in this study consider unveiling as a possible response to increased stereotyping and the reduction of the veil to a threatening symbol of difference. Like Yasemin, Latife, a senior financial expert, states that the practice of veiling under the Trump rule has increasingly become a source of ambivalence for her, leading her to consider unveiling as an option to avert possible anti-Muslim acts:

After Trump’s election and even during the campaign, there was a lot of negative discourse against Islam. That really affected me, emotionally, I think. Because it was so obvious that the society did not want to embrace my Muslim identity. It really hurt me. I remember crying a lot in front of TV at that period. A society that rejects me because I am a Muslim. And especially the headscarf is so obvious… I started to feel that my headscarf is revealing too much of who I am. It is taking over my personality more and more. That’s why I started questioning it recently.

On the other hand, Sevgi, 38-year-old communication expert and mother of three, states that her feelings of vulnerability do not directly originate from experience of harassment or discrimination but from a more emotive source, i.e., from knowing that a significant part of contemporary American society does not embrace her Muslim identity. Stressing the overwhelming psychological effects generated by the recent intensification of anti-Muslim sentiments, Sevgi tends toward self-essentialization through embracing stigmatization and frames her “visibly” Muslim identity as a symbolic barrier for her children:

The shift of presidency from Obama to Trump has led to dramatic changes for Muslims in America. In parallel to this, my experience of veiling in American society, which started as a positive experience in 2007 has evolved into something really difficulty… Since I am a mother now and my kids go to school here, I am especially worried about how they are feeling about my Muslim appearance. Are they ashamed of it or anxious about it? These fears and worries have started to dominate my veiling experience here.

These statements about heightened vulnerabilities demonstrate that everyday urban relationalities have become increasingly loaded with tension, anxiety, and racist intolerance in Muslim women’s lives in the aftermath of Trump’s election. Processes of disassociation from stigmatized identity and considerations of unveiling appear to be a significant part of their self-positioning vis-à-vis the intensification of stigmatization. Yet, such dissociative impulses do not imply decreased attachment to Muslim identity and/or a complete rejection of the religious significance of veiling.

Heightened vulnerabilities might also lead to expressions of strengthened attachment to Muslim belonging and veiling. During the interview, Buse reports increased anxiety in everyday interactions with non-Muslims. There is a continual dialectic in her narrative between the processes of other-identifications and her self-identification as Muslim, which exposes the “redemptive potential of the intersubjective” (Chapman 2016; Mirza 2013; Jovchelovitch 2007) and propels Buse to consider refashioning her veiling style by switching from tesettür style veiling tightly covering hair, neck, and shoulders to hair bonnet. Yet, she also expresses a strong urge to consolidate her stigmatized religious belonging and her commitment to religious practice. While attempting to form a socially creative response to stigma, she puts a clear emphasis on the religious significance of veiling in her life and her search of recognition as a “pious and emancipated” Muslim woman. Her narrative reveals that cultivating the ethical self through submission to religious prescriptions and developing a strategic self-representation as an “emancipated and modern” Muslim woman are not two different and irreconcilable life projects, but are mutually constitutive and take place simultaneously:

I have made a couple of job applications recently [in the summer of 2017] for teaching positions. I believe that my Muslim background has negatively affected the employers’ decision. They called me for an interview because I had the experience that they were looking for but after the interview I did not hear from them again… I understand them anyway. They might be concerned about my pious appearance; after all, they will present me to the parents at school… I thought about changing the way I cover and using a hair bonnet. Some people use it because it has become fashionable lately. But then, I realized that this cannot be a solution for me. I am not donning the headscarf because head covering is fashionable…

Heightened vulnerabilities might lead Muslim women to consolidate Muslim belonging and/or dilute “visible” Muslim appearance. Yet, as the sartorial biographies in the study have revealed, their complicated, creative, and nuanced ways of dealing with the stigma in everyday life go beyond the limited logic of this identification-rejection mechanism. Their multiple relationalities in everyday interactions are based on self-awareness and self-reflection on conflict, dialogue, and negotiation. In navigating, contesting, and blurring the symbolic boundaries of stigmatization, they draw on a wide range of communicative strategies, agentic capacities, moral rubrics, and aspirations which crosscut each other.

Throughout the discussion, it has come into the open that Muslim women’s communicative choices expressed through creative sartorial engagements target multiple audiences, cater various aspirations, and contest stigma in different ways: (1) by reversing the prejudice through conveying a modern Muslim appearance, (2) blurring symbolic boundaries by combining secular and Islamic garments in creative ways (e.g.: the use of slim pants in Turkish tesettür styles), (3) navigating multiple relations by contextualizing Islamic dress and refashioning it depending on its signification in different spatialities and vis-à-vis multiple audiences, and (4) constructing a sartorial biography as an interpretive scheme to make sense of the flexibilities and contextually situated aspects of veiling. As a result, Islamic veiling emerges both as a religious practice geared toward ethical self-cultivation and as a “cultural toolkit” deployed to navigate the exclusionary processes and structural inequalities that mark the emotional topographies in diasporic Muslim lives (Avishai 2008; Bartkowski and Read 2003; Rinaldo 2014). Islamic veiling as “cultural toolkit” and as a religious practice is simultaneously at work and put to different uses by different actors.

On the other hand, the discussion has also revealed that one should not overestimate or romanticize the effects of this sartorial micropolitics that Muslim women enact to navigate hegemonic discourses. As Spivak (1988) argues, it is extremely difficult for gendered subaltern subjects to make their voice heard outside the hegemonic frames shaping power relations. The dominant frames of self-other encounters in the context of racialization map out the contours within which Muslim subjects can negotiate the cracks of ideological and symbolic structures of domination and claim agency over the dialogic effects that they aim to evoke through sartorial inventiveness. Nur, 38 year-old real estate agent and mother of three, stresses the limits of the communicative effects evoked through sartorial management:

Headscarf is a difficult matter for Muslim women. No matter how chic you look or how much you spend on your clothing, you can never get rid of the symbolic burden of your headscarf. We try hard to present a modern and aesthetically harmonious outlook. But in the end, I can never be sure if my clothing looks stylish or just outdated and weird. For example, when I see an Indian woman dressed in traditional clothing, I cannot decide if her outfit is stylish because it is a different form of aesthetics. I think it is the same with the Islamic dress. Especially these days I am more uncertain about my Muslim appearance than ever…

Conclusion

This article examined the ways in which Muslim women of Turkish background creatively engage in sartorial revisions to manage the processes of becoming a gendered and racialized subject of discourse in the US context. It highlighted that Muslim women’s careful sartorial management inserts them into the socio-political and moral fabric of the diasporic context not only as theological but also as relational subjects. Moreover, it exposed that the co-constitutive relationship between the material and intersubjective aspects of Muslim women’s sartorial practices renders the meanings of Islamic veiling fluid and elastic and reinforces possibilities for engagement and improvization in everyday de-stigmatization strategies. Forging dialogue on plurality through sartorial management provides leeway to negotiate the cracks of the ideological and symbolic structures of domination. On the other hand, one should acknowledge that this sartorial micro-politics operates as an ambivalent site where Muslim women affectively live out both the productive nature of sartorial management as a mode of openness and its destructive modes involving anxiety, vulnerability and precarity.

The discussion demonstrated that Muslim women’s strategies of responding to Islamophobia exceeds the limited logic of the identification-rejection nexus which categorizes Muslims’ responses to public hostility either as consolidation or concealing of stigmatized identity. The micro-strategies employed to respond to potential prejudices might display impulses to conceal visible religious belonging and\or consolidate stigmatized identity through a heightened commitment to religious practice, yet they also include other strategies inclined toward circumventing, compensating and confronting stigma. They draw on multiple agencies (ethical, esthetic, political), moral rubrics and life aspirations that simultaneously function and crosscut each other. In navigating these multiplicities, Muslim women perform Islamic veiling both as a religious practice of ethical self-fashioning and as a cultural toolkit strategically employed to present a modern self-identification.

The discussion also highlighted that diasporic Muslim women’s sartorial choices are simultaneously informed by past dress habits and are oriented toward the future and the present. The interviewees’ sartorial biographies point out that their past experiences of veiling in the Turkish context provide them an interpretive horizon that informs their creative everyday responses to the macro discourses on Muslim distinction and the micro-politics of social interactions in the migration context. Having been exposed to a strict governance of Islamic veiling in the ultra-secularist regime in Turkey, they had already developed an awareness about the agency of Islamic dress, its productive ambivalences and how to appropriate them to navigate stigma and discrimination. Experimentations with the materialities of Islamic veiling, i.e., using wigs at secular public universities and/or developing spatial veiling arrangements such as unveiling in certain spaces and/or refashioning the veil depending on the target audience were significant parts of these women’s everyday urban mobilities in Turkey. After moving to the US, they have continued to creatively experiment with Islamic garments and used sartorial revision as a cultural toolkit to ward off the negative effects of stigmatization. Noting this, one can safely argue that understanding the social and political realities of the veiling regime in the country of origin significantly improves the analysis of diasporic Muslim women’s everyday navigations of stigma.

As the interviews revealed, the racializing discourse on Muslims has proliferated under the Trump presidency and generated dramatic consequences in everyday Muslim lives. The construction of a diasporic female Muslim subject position under the Trump presidency refers to a complex psycho-social position loaded with anxiety and requires a substantial capacity for self-reflexivity to navigate the regulatory effects of hegemonic discourses. The interviewees state that in the aftermath of Trump’s election they have come to regard the aspirational qualities and the hopeful dissidence embedded in the careful management of everyday conduct and sartorial choices as futile. Within this frame, this article concludes that the dialogical possibilities generated through elaborate sartorial management cannot be reduced to dislocatedness outside the dominant power frames in the socio-political fabric. They can only be enacted in response to the replication of broader power constellations in self-other encounters.

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Didem Unal

Didem Unal is Academy Research Fellow at the Faculty of Theology of University of Helsinki. Her research interests focus on gender politics, right-wing populism, Islam and gender, and women’s movements. [email protected]