Reading Against Technoliberal Subjectivities

The author argues that technoliberal subjectivities produced by big data logics and reified by archives, official governmental reports, and datasets produce aspatial and ahistorical representations of Ahmadi and other Muslim women. The practices of datafication undergirding these logics cement Muslim women as passive victims relegated to home spaces and violent encounters while also building genderless worlds of religious persecution. The author traces the relegation of Ahmadi women to passively inhabiting space and place both in current practices of religious data collection and analysis as well as in two historical reports: a 1947 report by the Ahmadiyya community and a 2007 report by the UK All-Party Parliamentary Humanitarian Group. She focuses on the feminist historiographical practice of reading for the silences and gendered spatial moments that work against easy consumption of Ahmadi women’s narratives. She argues the systematic devaluing of gendered ways of placemaking produces a relationship between the Ahmadiyya community and religious persecution that becomes patterned and replicated within the process of datafication. She asks, How are women contained within the archives that eventually become incorporated in datasets providing us with the gendered possibilities of reading against technoliberal logics?