Aversion and Desire

Abstract

In this interesting book, Aversion and Desire: Negotiating Muslim Female Identity in the Diaspora, Shanaz Khan challenges us to rethink static and fixed conceptions of Muslim women. She also points out that because minority identities are fixed, women who happen to be Muslim are often forced to enter social and political spaces as Muslim women. Such restraints make it almost impossible to create a place for progressive politics, change, and fluid identities. As an anthropologist and observer, Khan pinpoints and focuses our attention on the situation currently facing Muslim women in the West, particularly in Canada. As a Muslim and a woman, she has located a space in which progressive politics and change may take place. Borrowing mainly from the work of Homi Bhabha, Khan calls for moving from fixed and static notions of Muslim women into what Bhabha refers to as the “third space,” from which hybrid identities can be constructed. The author argues that both Islam and Orientalism, the two dominant discourses from which ideas about Muslim women have been and are still articulated, have led to essentializing and idealizing our images of the Muslim woman. This is also true of feminism, which sees specific aspects of Islamic practice as oppressive to women and, therefore, the target of change; of colonialism and postcolonialism, which reinforce those stereotypes influenced by unequal power relationships between Euro-American and Muslim societies and that have an imperial history currently embedded in the neocolonial forms of control of other societies; and multiculturalism, which views the cultures and religions of nonwhite people as homogenous, unchanging, and unconnected to any social, political, and historical reality. All of these lenses through which the “others” are viewed contribute to this essentialization. Moving beyond an extremely useful theoretical discussion structured by the concept of hybridized identities in the third space, Khan then incorporates a series of case studies that are categorized in a manner designed to showcase a variety of Muslim women’s attempts to construct an identity, live life, and challenge the norms of both the wider society and of the Muslim communities in which they live. This is done from a third space, one that they themselves might not even realize that they are occupying ...