Young Muslim Women's Politics of Everyday Living: Australia and the Digital Social

Digital technologies have transformed the possibilities for religion and how it is experienced today. They have also magnified racist and sexist encounters, while simultaneously providing spaces of resilience and community. This paper explores young Muslim women's embodied practices of social networking in an Australian context. Contrary to the clash of civilizations thesis, young Muslims in Australia are not tasked with a distinct choice between tradition and modernity. Nowhere is this more evident than in the hybrid performances they engage in on mainstream social media sites. Platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat require different performances of the self, foregrounding different identities at different times. The study shows that for young women, Islam is constituted in new ways through digital media and cultures, and this includes an interaction with “offline”, “traditional” religion and religious practices. Connections with other Muslims, with non-Muslims and with political events impacting global Muslim communities are also constantly negotiated in ways that sometimes enforce traditional power structures, but also allow for a performance of the self that reconfigures power to centralize the individual's everyday practices. Digital media practices are here shaped by the gender and cultural expectations of different communities, impacted by a difference between online and “offline” selves, and the consequences of presenting as a woman in both types of spaces. But social media also impacts on young Muslim women's different selves. The research makes a case for small samples in order to focus on situated knowledges and the notion of polyvocality within categories of people and within people themselves. In-depth mixed-methods research with twelve participants has allowed a better understanding of the intersectional identities of young Australian Muslim women and their online performances.