The Others: On Being Australian at the Intersections of Islam, Ethnicity, Race and Gender

Abstract

This chapter explores the subjectivities of Muslim women at the intersections of gender, race, ethnicity and religion within the context of Australian social relations. The analysis demonstrates that Muslim woman identity is locked into binary understandings of Muslim womanhood that are signified by the veil, measured against normative understandings of gender and variously positioned as the Other. Those who veil are constructed as pure and religious, while those who are unveiled are seen as impure. Furthermore, women who veil are homogenised as oppressed and participating in their own oppression, positioning them as unassimilable Others. In contrast, women who do not veil are constructed as liberated (read: Westernised), palatable and afforded belonging as ethnic Others. Either way, irrespective of their status of the veil, Muslim women are objects of epistemic violence. These binary and narrow myths about Muslim women that silence the diversity, plurality and struggles of Muslim women, and processes of Othering, function to sustain coloniality in Australia by constructing borders between ‘us’—egalitarian, racially superior Australians—and ‘them’—those misogynist, oppressive Muslims. With this being said, however, many Muslim women transgress colonial definitions and hierarchical binaries and renegotiate representations of Australianness in multiple ways that reflect their ‘Australian subjectivities’.