Aversion and Desire Negotiating Muslim Female Identity in the Diaspora by Shanaz Khan (United Kingdom: Women’s Press, Ltd., 2002. 152 pages.)

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 ...