Producing the category of 'Islamist' women: a Deleuzian perspective

Abstract

When addressing the Muslim women question, one of the problematic issues is the centrality of a religious tradition or a political ideology as a primary subject of inquiry. Muslim women are seen as the embodiment of a singular tradition or ideology, as in the case of Turkey, where the contemporary headscarf-wearing women are represented as 'Islamist'. In this project, I aim to problematise this stereotyping categorisation through ontological conceptualisations, inspired by the French thinker Gilles Deleuze. To implement the relational ontology of Deleuze, I examine headscarf contestations in Turkey through interviews conducted in two women's organisations in Turkey: Capital City Women's Platform (Baskent Kadin Platformu) and Hazar. I argue that the world constantly 'becomes' through flows of relations between multiple elements; therefore, it is a multiplicity, an intensity and fractured. With this Deleuzian ontology in mind, I consider the quotidian physical, material and social resources of my interviews with the aim of elucidating relations between a female body and the commodities produced by multiple socio-economic and political factors in Turkey. Then I address a Deleuzian understanding of categorisations such as class, gender, race and ideology. These categorisations, for Deleuze, are aggregations of multiplicities and fluidities forming specific fixations according to a range of ascribed characteristics, such as income, education, employment or dress codes. In this regard, I conclude that the label 'Islamist' restrains the relational and multiple characters of headscarf practices within a unifying category by attributing certain features to particular embodiments and materials.