Security, violence, and mobility: The embodied and everyday politics of negotiating Muslim femininities

What it means to be a Muslim woman is a critical and highly contested global (geo)political issue. Muslim women figure largely in the nativist, nationalist, and Islamist political projects of Muslim majority and minority countries in the world. Increasing Islamophobia and racist and religiously-motivated discrimination and violence following the September 11, 2001 attacks in the United States often target Muslim women as well. As Muslim women navigate multiple and often conflicting political narratives about their bodies, dress, and subject positions in their daily life, they come face to face with problems of security, violence, and mobility (Hyndman, 2004). Their formation as political subjects occurs in this space of everyday encounters with political ideologies that often violently attempt to define and securitize Muslim womanhood, and regulate women's social and spatial mobility (Farris, 2017; Gökarıksel & Secor, 2015). While contemporary Western geopolitical discourses present Muslim women's veiling and expressions of public piety as threats to national and global security, Muslim communities variably locate Islamic identification, public morality, and national identity in Muslim women's bodies.