Week 6 Blog Post

I found the first two of Monday's readings to be the most interesting of the week, as Mahmood's piece mostly elaborated upon issues we had already discussed, while both Cainkar and Shakhsari addressed gender in contexts that I had not previously considered. All three authors, however, reflect on the issue of gender and agency in evolving modern contexts, especially when it comes to expressing one's religiosity - even if they do all approach these issues through very different examples and with varying vantage points.

Discrimination against women in hijab has been an issue I've heard about for much of my life, since it seems to have increased after 9/11, an entire decade ago. Similarly, images of Muslim men as terrorist threats are easy to spot. Before reading Cainkar's piece, however, I had never considered how Muslim and Arab men and women were treated so differently - with the men with violent tendencies fitting masculine stereotypes, if not Western ideals, and women wearing hijab in some way actively thwarting Western ideals of femininity and freedom of choice. It's very ironic that this idea of freedom of choice actually limits women's choices, by denying them social acceptance should they choose to wear the hijab. That more women would be discriminated against then men because they are easier targets in suburban areas is simply not something I had ever considered, and I found the dichotomy between "freedom" and "subordination" here both interesting and disturbing (in that Americans who do not recognize the paradox continue to press their own form of subordination upon Muslim women).

Similarly, I have never been forced to consider the different prescribed roles for men and women in the blogosphere. Although I have heard the term "Weblogistan," I had never considered it from a gendered perspective, with men being responsible for political reform and women in the diaspora often being expected to express their freedom in terms of sexual liberation. The latter expectation discursively implies that these women have a repressed counterpart in Iran that needs a liberal discourse on sexuality to truly attain liberation. I agree with Shakhsari when she says that this call for an Iranian sexual revolution "oversimplifies politics and sexuality,"(15) as if writing about sex somehow breaks down the regime. Limiting women as agents on the internet only in terms of sexuality, or even limiting them to the internet at all (Shakhsari points out that women also participate in organizations in rural areas that have less internet access (17)), robs them of political participation beyond the realm of their own sexuality.