Muslim Women on the Internet: Social Media as Sites of Identity Formation

20 Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Vol. 43, No.2, Spring 2019 Muslim Women on the Internet: Social Media as Sites of Identity Formation Dorothy Lee Goehring* Formation and Introduction On January 10, 2014, Noorulann Shahid, under the Twitter handle of @ YxxngHippie, tweeted "White fems want to pull your hijab off and liberate you and Muslims claim, you don't need feminism. #lifeofaMuslimfeminist."1 This tweet and its hashtag quickly became popular and started a viral conversation among Internet denizens regarding the identity politics of intersecting identities of Muslim and women. Between Muslim women expressing their dismay at the larger community's preoccupation with the politics of hijab, advocating for more overarching consideration of women's rights, and engaging in Twitter conversations with others who may not have been aware of such a debate, the Twitter-verse became abuzz with conversation2 . The total number of tweets generated with the hashtag currently amounts to 3,316 tweets3 . Twitter itself is unique within the world of social media platforms. Limiting its users to 140 characters per post, or "tweet", it forces the user to be very concise, sometimes to the point of being inflammatory. Without the space to qualify one's claims without making an entirely separate tweet, one is required to declare one's statement in a succinct manner, sacrificing nuance for brevity, gaining clarity and possibly unintended consequences. Marking one's tweet with a hashtag, therefore, is very significant. Originating from *Dorothy Lee Goehring received her M.Div. from Harvard Divinity School in Islamic Studies in 2016. She holds a B.A. in Theology and Anthropology from Fordham University. A former NAIN Young Adult Scholar and Science, Religion, and Culture Junior Fellow, her scholarship focuses on the intersection of religion, identity, education, politics and public policy, and pop culture. 1 Shahid, Noorulann. Twitter Post. 10 January 2014. 8:52AM. 2 #lifeofamuslimfeminist. Twitter search. 10 Feburary 2016. https://twitter.com/ search?src=typd&q=%23lifeofamuslimfeminist 3 Ibid. 21 an instance of code, the hashtag acts as an indexing platform, linking every user who utilizes it together in a user-friendly searchable format. Particularly popular hashtags appear at the bottom of Twitter's homepage, where they are seen as "trending". This allows other users to click on the hashtag, read older tweets, and participate in the conversation if they so choose. Before long, outside websites began to take notice of this trending hashtag. News websites including Buzzfeed4 and the Huffington Post5 curated lists of tweets that they deemed to be most powerful, analyses of the hashtag were hashed out in think-pieces on third party blogs, and before long, the fuller internet was ablaze with questions: What exactly is meant by this hashtag? Who is it speaking for or speaking to? What are problems and critiques with this hashtag? What is it defining, and what is it leaving out? And who gets to decide? Framework and Methodology At its heart, this paper, however, is the assertion that both identities, and the frameworks that are used to explore and shape them, matter. Who one is, what one chooses to be, and what others see in them are all incomparably important in forging social relationships. The spaces in which those relationships are forged are, I argue, equally as important for one to understand their identities themselves, especially in the context of these relationships. In other words, through the action of creating a relationship with another person, one learns something about one's very self. Hashtag activism offers a very particular way of engaging in selfidentification in a broadly public sphere. Social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook provide Muslim women in the West a uniquely public avenue to engage critically with identity negotiation over and against prevailing political stereotypes through the form of hashtag activism and the conversations that arise from it. By engaging the political as personal in a public forum, Muslim women are expanding the definitions of their identities and challenging dominant political discourses. Withinthispaper,Iwillshowthatsocialmediapostings,particularlyaround hashtag activism, are contributing to larger overarching conversations about religion, gender, and politics for Muslim women in the West. I will first 4 Nashrulla, Tasneem. "32 Powerful and Brutally Honest Tweets from #LifeOfAMuslimFeminist...