It’s Not About the Burqa: Transversing Heterotopia and Hypomnemata in Muslim Women’s Life Narratives

Muslim women who are forcibly displaced from their homophobic parent culture are further oppressed within the structures of Islamophobia in the host culture. Discursive re-imaginations based on their Islamic authenticity have skewed them as either veiled or unveiled women from other homogeneous ethnic cultures. Such cursory representations have cemented perceptions about them as outsiders and so a source of constant threat. Therefore, the main objective of this article is to aid discursive reconfigurations of partial representations affecting transculturally or forcibly displaced Muslim women at the intersections of racial, gender or religious persecutions. Through a reading of the life-narratives by similarly displaced Muslim women in the anthology It’s Not About the Burqa, this article examines two key questions: 1) How do these women negate discursive conceptions of single stories? 2) How do they reach a unique discourse that addresses such partial representations? The article proposes heterotopia and hypomnemata as two transversal possibilities. Heterotopias are worlds within worlds which mirror what is outside. They can contain differences and undesirable bodies. Whereas hypomnemata refers to personal notes used for later reading and meditation. There has been little work bringing together the transcultural and the transversal. While the transcultural is a system of thought that conceives of cultures as an ongoing flux of confluences,[1] transversality endorses plural possibilities. It offers tools to deterritorialize closed logics.[2] This article therefore calls for revisiting the collaborative dynamics of these concepts as contested through the life-narratives of displaced Muslim women. [1] Arianna Dagnino, ‘Manifesto for a Transcultural Humanism’, (2014) [Accessed 27 May, 2022]. [2] Gary Genosko, Felix Guattari: An Aberrant Introduction (London: Continuum, 2002), p.55.