Can Muslim Women Speak ?
This article is based on research led in Montreal between 2011 and 2015 with Muslim women and Muslim feminists from different backgrounds. I this research, I have been interested in understanding and situating mobilizations of Muslim women from their own point of view. By adopting a postcolonial feminist approach writing « against culture » (Abu-Lughod 1991), I explored feminist subjectivation of Muslim women in Quebec. This subjectivation provides complex discourses with no contradiction between Islam and feminism or « Orient » and « Western ». Islam is experienced as a complex set of self-techniques that structures the Muslim feminist consciousness through Islamic and anti-racist praxis. While most respondents agree that feminism is a struggle for social justice, their political orientations are diverse and non-homogeneous. However, in a context of objectification and gendered Islamophobia, Islam is experienced as an emancipatory source of self.