Covering Body, Uncovering Identity

Chinese Muslim Women's Vocabularies of Dress, Based on Fieldwork in Northwest and Central China

Authors

  • Maria Jaschok Oxford University
  • Man Ke Northwest University for Nationalities

Keywords:

Gender, identity, hijab, Islam, China, ethnography

Abstract

This ethnography of Chinese female Islamic dress serves to explore the way that Chinese Muslim women of different generations and backgrounds both seek accommodation and meaning within the gendered modernity of a rapidly changing Chinese (non-Muslim) society and also strive for transcending authenticity as they translate Islamic prescriptions into personal conduct. The authors present defining characteristics of local versions of the Chinese hijab within the rich diversity of China’s Muslim contexts and across complex religious landscape of an ethnic religion. Building on the work of international Islamic feminist scholars, the concept of the hijab is explored in terms of three dimensions, incorporating the visual dimension as shielding from the public gaze; the spatial, demarcating the public from the private sphere; and the ethical, informing thought and ideas.

Author Biographies

  • Maria Jaschok, Oxford University

    Maria JASCHOK (Ph.D., SOAS, London), is a Research Fellow at Lady Margaret Hall and Director of the International Gender Studies Centre at Lady Margaret Hall, as well as a member of Contemporary China Studies, School of Interdisciplinary Area Studies, Oxford. Her research interests are in the areas of religion, gender and agency; gendered constructions of memory; feminist and aural ethnography; and marginality and identity in contemporary China. She has conducted collaborative research projects in central China since 1994, addressing issues and implications of growing female membership of religions for local citizenship and civil society. She has co-presented and co-authored with her Chinese collaborator, Shui Jingjun, in China and internationally, in Chinese and in English, seeking to make published findings, articles and monographs, fully accessible to their respective home audiences. Women, Religion, and Space in China, published by Routledge (2011), forms the sequel to an earlier study of female-led Islamic traditions in China, The History of Women’s Mosques in Chinese Islam (Curzon), published in 2000 in English/2002 in Chinese (Sanlian Publishers & Harvard-Yenching Academic Library).

  • Man Ke, Northwest University for Nationalities

    MAN Ke (Ph.D., Chinese University of Hong Kong) is a social anthropologist and professor at Northwest University for Nationalities (China); she is also the editor of Northwest Journal of Ethnology. She was awarded a doctorate from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2009. Her publications include a monograph, Sacredness, Local Culture and Gender Relations: An Ethnographic Study of Dongxiang People in Gansu, China, based on her doctoral thesis, and various articles on Dongxiang Muslim communities covering issues of gender, identity, Islamic organizations and patriarchal culture. She is currently pursuing research on cultural communication and ethnic relations.

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Published

2016-09-27

Issue

Comparative Islamic Studies

Section

Comparative Islamic Studies

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