Contesting Feminisms: Gender and Islam in Asia (SUNY series, Genders in the Global South) - Softcover

9781438457925: Contesting Feminisms: Gender and Islam in Asia (SUNY series, Genders in the Global South)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1438457928 ISBN 13: 9781438457925

Publisher: State University of New York Press, 2016

Creates a new space for hybrid feminist analysis of Asian Muslim women’s lives.

Contesting Feminisms explores how Asian Muslim women make decisions on appropriating Islam and Islamic lifestyles through their own participation in the faith. The contributors highlight the fact that secularism has provided the space for some women to reclaim their religious identity and their own feminisms. Through compelling case studies and theoretical discussions, this volume challenges mainstream Western and national feminisms that presume homogeneity of Muslim women’s lives to provide a deeper understanding of the multiple realities of feminism in Muslim communities.

“An educational, insightful, and powerful read.” — Women’s Alliance for Theology, Ethics and Ritual

“Contesting Feminisms attempts to offer nuanced understandings of Muslim women’s struggles that are firmly rooted in close attention to local social, economic, and historical contexts with an eye to opening up theoretical spaces in which to examine local and transnational feminist Muslim activism. As such, the volume offers rich insights into women’s lives and struggles in moving away from the reductionist frame of a strictly Qur’anic view of women that is mobilized by both Western detractors and Islamic normativizers to constrain women’s agency, and instead brings into view the heterogeneity of Muslim women’s lives and struggles.” — Zayn Kassam, editor of Women and Islam

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About the Author

Huma Ahmed-Ghosh is Professor of Women's Studies at San Diego State University and the editor of Asian Muslim Women: Globalization and Local Realities, also published by SUNY Press.

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