The muslim female body: reading the politics of representation and resistance in Kerala

Abstract

Recent enterprises on Muslim women often place the critiques of Muslim women‘s clothing practices in Kerala in the larger contexts of global Islamophobia and the rise of militant Hindutva in India, or the ―perceived oppressive structures‖ inherent in Islam that limits the visibility and mobility of Muslim women‘s bodies by overtly sexualising them. To challenge and unsettle the regnant modes of analysis of the Muslim female body as the ―oppressed/protected‖ or resistive trope, this study attempts to forefront the constitutive role of the Islamic tradition of Kerala in forging the diverse motivations regulating the bodily conducts of Muslim women, their religiosities, and aspects of their gendered religious embodiment. Using a methodological framework informed by two critical approaches, body studies and Islamic feminism, the study traces the emergence of the discourse on Muslim female body through an analysis of Islamic interpretative tradition in Kerala. It reads texts on ethical self-fashioning and intra-faith debates between the traditionalists and reformists in the complex and embedded social, religious, and political schema of twentieth century Kerala. In this attempt to historicise the debates on Muslim women and body, the study traces the pre- reformist, reformist, and Muslim women reformist enterprises on body through an analysis of select texts. Besides analysing the contemporary debates in Kerala and examining the role of interpretative texts on ethical self-fashioning and ―religious bodyhood‖ in creating the dominant discourse on the gendered female body, the study locates female articulations on body from within faith and also attempts to examine the nature of Muslim women‘s resistances from within these sects.