Defining “Muslimahgyny”

How anti-Muslim racism, sexism, and gender-based violence impact Muslim women

Muslim women* experience a unique form of discrimination and prejudice when anti-Muslim racism, sexism, and gender-based violence are coupled with each other. In order to understand and contextualize the everyday experiences of Muslim women, it is important that we consider the nuanced ways in which Muslim identity is constructed across cultural contexts and geographical borders and how it intersects with race, ethnicity, and gender.

Mainstream narratives of feminism, women’s rights and empowerment often fail to define and center the experiences of Muslim women who are disproportionately impacted and harmed by the compounding effects of gendered Islamophobia, Orientalism, and colonial feminism. In an effort to counter these narratives, I introduce the term “Muslimahgyny” which seeks to intentionally draw attention toward the nuanced ways in which Muslim women experience misogyny and sexism. I believe it is integral that any such discourse is grounded in the context of place and space. For this article, I am intentionally choosing to focus on the experiences of (immigrant) Muslim women living in diasporic contexts, under settler-colonial nation-states such as the United States of America and Canada, etc.

In my work, I emphasize the use of a gender-expansive lens that disrupts the normative gender binary. Although my understanding and conceptualization of misogyny includes queermisogyny and…