Becoming a Hijabi Now?
Identity Performances of Muslim Women in Canada
Keywords:
Young Muslim Women, Hijab, Religious Identities, Stigmatization, Erving GoffmanAbstract
The hijab is an issue that feminists criticize, anthropologists interpret, religious authorities prescribe, and politicians and activists promote or oppose. This paper examines ways in which Muslim women in Canada perform their identity through starting to wear the hijab after arriving in Canada. In-depth interviews were carried out with five young immigrant Muslim women who did not wear a headscarf in their countries of origin but started to wear it after few months living in Canada. Findings indicate that there is a wide array of reasons for the adoption of the hijab: a tool of liberation from the sex-object role, moral and religious justifications, a symbol of defiance and resistance, and/or a “shield” and “protection” from the secular lifestyle. To explain this complex behaviour the strengths of Erving Goffman’s model of social interaction is combined with Alejandro Portes and Rubén G. Rumbaut’s theory of reactive ethnicity.
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