* The Latest & Greatest from SSRN
The latest from our colleague, Professor Suzanne Bouclin:
"YouTube and Muslim Women's Legal Subjectivities"
Oñati
Socio-Legal Series, Vol. 3, No. 7, 2013
This paper is located within the discursive and spatio-temporal
landscape of post 9/11 Canada in which national identity and beliefs about
belonging are embedded in pervasive Islamophobia. Its starting point is that
social media are key sites for expression of discrimination and intolerance
vis-à-vis people of the Muslim faith, and especially the constitution of Muslim
face and head scarves as a metonym for Islamic terrorism and a quintessential
symbol of uniquely fundamentalist manifestation of patriarchy. I ask, however,
whether new modes of visibility might be captured when we examine
representational sites of Muslim femininity through the lens of ‘new’ or
‘critical’ legal pluralism. I highlight how women have used Social Networking
Sites (SNSs) to respond and reconfigure more entrenched discourses around
Muslim femininity circulated elsewhere, such as in formal institutionalized
state-based law, mainstream/Western feminist discourses, and in popular
cultural productions. I have found that Muslim women deploy social media to
constitute or express alternative subjectivities and to represent and evaluate
their own understandings of feminism, normative femininity, religious
practices, including the multiple meanings that attach to the donning of
Islamic headscarves.
Full article available here.
