Girlhood Studies

The image of a young girl wearing a hijab can be seen to be an iconic representation of the complex intersection between feminism on the one hand, and religion and culture on the other. While the hijab is a visible marker of traditional gender norms in some Islamic communities, many modern Muslim women and girls have reclaimed it as a symbol of faith, identity, and choice. In keeping with contemporary feminist dialogue, we seek to understand and respect these nuanced perspectives.

Although hijab has long been a subject of fascination in western¹ culture for some time, in the last several years the girl in hijab has been in the sociopolitical spotlight. As Katherine Bullock and Gul Jafri (2000) noted over twenty years ago, “Because of this Western cultural fixation on Muslim women's dress as a symbol of oppression, Muslim women often have to focus on that aspect of their identity as well, even if they would rather talk of something else” (37). With hijab being the most visible way to identify and be identified as Muslim as Wahiba Abu-Ras and Zulema Suarez (2009 along with Hodan Mohamed (2017) remind us, those who observe hijab with their dress experience the world in unique ways. The experiences of girls and young women in hijab are undoubtedly shaped by what Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989) and Patricia Hill Collins (2015) call intersectionality and under bell hooks's (2013) conceptualization of interlocking systems of domination. Central to these systems of oppression that shape the lives of Muslim girls and women are Edward Said's (1978) concept of Orientalism and what Jasmin Zine (2006) terms gendered Islamophobia as Lila Abo-Lughod's (2013) discussion of dominant narratives of Muslim women as oppressed clearly demonstrates.

In this article, I analyze the American flag as hijab both in the infamous “We the People” (2017) campaign poster by Shepard Fairey and its adaptation by Muslim girls and young women during protests against President Trump's inauguration and subsequent immigration policies (including the infamous Muslim Ban). Despite critical acclaim that hailed the American flag hijab largely as revolutionary, I argue that it embodies a symbolic visualization of a liberated Muslim woman figure that is central to the survival of American imperialism. Using frameworks that understand freedom shaped by neoliberal interests and interrogating the histories of the flag in both American immigration and colonial contexts, I demonstrate that the American flag as hijab for girls and women reinforces the larger constructs it seeks to resist.

I use the narrative method, The Listening Guide, to investigate Hijabi girlhood on YouTube through the girl-created trend #MyHijabStory that emerged in response to public misunderstanding of Hijab. The voice analysis examines how gendered subjectivities of Hijabi girlhood are constructed among narratives of piety, culture, fashion, community, and marginalization. I identified three voices: the convicted voice; the conflicted voice; and the critical voice. The first two involve looking inward and realizing multifaceted stories of coming to Hijab while the third involves looking outward to trouble the social world in which Hijabi girlhood is constituted through dominant discourses. I illustrate that #MyHijabStory vlogs are forms of narrative resistance by girls who seek to produce a public pedagogy of Hijab that is complex and embodied.

In this article, I use data from a Critical Participatory Action Research (CPAR) conducted in a high school in Salt Lake City, Utah to understand how racialization influences the sense of belonging for Muslim girls who veil. Using data collected through high school students’ questionnaires, Muslim girls’ personal experiences, and interviews with administration and faculty, I investigate how non-Muslim peers and school staff perceive Muslim girls at Mount Top High, a suburban high school. These perceptions shape the way members of the school community interact with Muslim girls and have a great impact on students’ sense of belonging and academic achievement.

Through collaborative autoethnography, a mother and a daughter with shared and diverging identities examine the hijab as a radical practice of feminist resistance in our lives. Our lived experiences as Indo-Caribbean social workers and university educators at a predominantly white institution offer a unique point of departure from normative narratives of hijabi girls and women. Using a critical feminist analysis, we chronicle our journey through more than 60 years of patriarchal oppression and white supremacy. Our stories reveal a complicated relationship with the hijab as an important faith practice which also functions as a marker of otherness that signals unbelonging in all spheres of our lives including the academy and social work practice.

We examine the emerging meanings of hijab practice as feminist strategy, and as a symbol of visibility for young Muslim women and girls in India. Through digital ethnography based on Instagram pages of selected retailers of hijabs, we explore the possibility of hijab as a costume of insubordination, and Islamic fashion as a critical practice against the backdrop of the 2022 Karnataka hijab row. We employ an analysis of Instagram posts to mark the intersecting points of faith, fashion media, and market in framing aesthetics for clothing practices among young Indian Muslim women. We also explore new contours of feminist assertions in the Muslim community, and how the digitally mediated visibility of Muslim women and girls contests the notion of Islamic fashion as oxymoronic.

In this article, I look at the perceptions, practices, and politics of donning the hijab in the lives of young Muslim women and girls in Kashmir. I conducted narrative analysis on observations and unstructured interviews that asked for young women's descriptions about the happenings, relationships, emotions, actions, and choices related to the donning of hijab with a recognition of the historical, cultural, and social context shaping them. My analysis departs from the binaries of oppression vs. resistance and personal vs. political to underscore the spatiotemporal everyday lived realities of hijabi girls and young women in locating the practice at the confluence of religion, militarization, and digitalization, tracing both the disjunctions and convergence in participants’ hijab narratives, thereby reconceptualizing the notion of agency.

Since 9/11 and the Global War on Terror, the West has fixated policy on the hijab, framing it as oppressive and as a threat to women's rights. This entrenched colonial perspective affects Muslim girl athletes globally. Public discourse on hijabs in sports often overlooks their complex symbolism and the athletes’ choices. Drawing on Indigenous, postcolonial, and critical feminist theories, we explore in this article how Muslim girl athletes navigate hijab politics, expressing their agency through refusal and resistance.

It all began when I was twelve

When I decided to wear my hijab

Inspired by the brave and resilient women who came before me

The hardships they had to go through

Not knowing that a simple cloth

Can start a riot

There are days I feel invisible, and days I wish I were. As a Brown Shia woman in hijab, I often feel as though people fail to see me, or do not care to. My experiences as a hijabi woman had me feeling simultaneously visible and invisible as those around me tried to decide which version of the Muslim girl I was—the oppressed Muslim girl who needed to be saved, the radical, or for those within my community, the good Muslim girl. The reality is I am none of these. In re/telling my stories, I explore how misrepresentations in the media made me question aspects of my identity and created feelings of (in)visibility, had me striving to be the model minority, and finally, how the hijab became a source of pride and a tool of resistance.