Grants and residencies

Research

Transnational Contexts and Digital Muslim Feminisms in Times of Right-Wing Populism

Application summary

This project scrutinizes conditions, forms and possibilities of Muslim feminist digital activism within increasingly diverse and complex feminist counter-publics in contemporary Finland and Turkey. Using interviews, digital media and other visual/textual data, it aims to provide comprehensive insights into how Muslim feminists’ interventions into the power asymmetries in feminist counter-publics and their transnational feminist awareness can play a critical role in reconfiguring the feminist political agenda and confronting reactionary populisms. Focusing on a Muslim majority and Muslim minority context, the project shall expose transnational flows of Muslim feminist activist practices beyond the rigidities of methodological nationalism and center-periphery or “First World-Third World” imaginaries. Positioning local Muslim feminisms within the global matrix of feminist resistance, the project shall demonstrate that the efficacy of intersectional feminist responses to reactionary forces in contemporary tumultuous times highly depends on how feminist subjects navigate tensions of inclusivity, difference, and pluralism in feminist politics of defiance. Focusing on the digital as an analytical means to study the enactment of feminist positions in loose networks beyond the rigidities of collective identity, it explores repertoires of contention, coalition building across difference, changed modes of communication and new configurations of Muslim feminist activism across national borders that can substantively and self-reflexively engage with issues of difference, politics of location and power asymmetries among feminisms. Within this frame, the project aims to contribute to a nuanced understanding of Muslim feminists’ digital narratives on multiple and overlapping oppressions across national frontiers as regenerative sources for intersectional and inclusive collective feminist politics in the context of rising right-wing populisms.


Drawing on feminist methods in social movement theory, intersectionality and feminist coalition politics, this project examined Muslim women’s digital feminist activism that confronts the epistemological conditions whereby the gender backlash of right-wing populist (RWP) politics operates in contemporary Finland and Turkey. It particularly scrutinized the potentials of the discourses, collective action frames, and repertoires of contention utilized by Muslim women to creatively disrupt the symbolic ecology of RWP politics and the gender backlash on a regional level, while also targeting the universalization of populist and misogynist ideologies. In the first part of the project, the analysis focused on Muslim women’s diagnostic frames that critically address the intertwined use of gender and Islam in RWP discourses, and their motivational frames that help them make sense of their own multiply-marginalized identities. The research findings suggest that young Muslim women’s collective action frames targeting the racializing and anti-gender agendas are deeply embedded in the tactical choice to reject the limits of the political horizon offered to them by the governing discourses in the current era. Subverting the RWP appropriation of the Islam–gender nexus, they generate a new Muslim feminist political project on digital feminist platforms that shift the focus from pre-defined, abstract identity categories to women’s divergent and embodied positions and vernacularizes feminist knowledge by stressing the contextuality and intersectionality of lived experiences. In the second part of the project, the empirical analysis explored the ways in which Muslim women’s discourses and actions in digital feminist activist platforms can invoke a transformative coalitional politics in terms of politics of intersectionality and bridge-building processes on the Islamic-secular axis. It examined Muslim feminists’ understanding of successful coalition-building between secular and Muslim feminisms in the Finnish and Turkish contexts with a focus on their repertoires of contention that are geared towards increasing the recognition of the diversity of women’s discourses, and modes of activism. As a result, it demonstrated that the efficacy of feminist responses to contemporary reactionary forces highly depends on how feminist subjects navigate tensions of inclusivity in feminist politics of defiance and vernacularize transnational feminist awareness in line with politics of experience in the local context.

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