CHAPTER 9: Gender, Islam, and Refugee Status: Possibilities For Negotiating Hybrid Identities and Contesting Boundaries In Digital Spaces

In this chapter, the author examines some challenges that young Muslim women who are resettled as refugees experience in Western spaces, such as the United States. In particular, the ways in which Muslim women and refugees are discursively constructed as weak and homogeneous are considered. Feminist postcolonial theory is used to problematize the dominant discourses about what it means to be a young Muslim woman with refugee status by considering the intersections of gender and religion with race, class, age, ethnicity, nationality, and language. In addition, the author argues that it is important to consider how historical and political contexts intersect to better understand the ways in which power functions to include and/or exclude Muslim women resettled as refugees in various global spaces. Finally, the chapter highlights creative possibilities that exist in collaborative Third Spaces, such as digital spaces, through which young Muslim women can negotiate their hybrid identities and interrupt some of the deficit-oriented discourses through which they are discursively constructed.

Every voyage can be said to involve a re-siting of boundaries. The traveling self is here both the self that moves physically from one place to another, following ‘public routes and beaten tracks’ within a mapped movement; and, the self that embarks on an undetermined journeying practice, having constantly to negotiate between home and abroad, native culture and adopted culture, or more creatively speaking, between a here, a there, and an elsewhere. (Trinh, 2010, p. 27)