This electronic thesis or dissertation has been downloaded from the King’s Research Portal at https://kclpure.kcl.ac.uk/portal/ WORDS, WIGS AND VEILS MODEST RELIGIOUS DRESS AND GENDERED ONLINE IDENTITIES Fitzsimmons, Eleonora Awarding institution: King's College London The copyright of this thesis rests with the author and no quotation from it or information derived from it may be published without proper acknowledgement. END USER LICENCE AGREEMENT Unless another licence is stated on the immediately following page this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ You are free to copy, distribute and transmit the work Under the following conditions: Attribution: You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Non Commercial: You may not use this work for commercial purposes. No Derivative Works - You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work. Any of these conditions can be waived if you receive permission from the author. Your fair dealings and other rights are in no way affected by the above. Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact [email protected] providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Download date: 30. Sep. 2021 WORDS, WIGS AND VEILS: MODEST RELIGIOUS DRESS AND GENDERED ONLINE IDENTITIES Eleonora Fitzsimmons Theology and Religious Studies King's College London, University of London Submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Religious Studies, September 2016 !1 Abstract Words, Wigs and Veils: Modest Religious Dress and Gendered Online Identities In this thesis, I explore how Muslim and Jewish women in a predominantly North American cultural context use online public spaces to blog about their religious dress practices. Existing comparisons between online self-representation and religious dress among Muslim and Jewish women includes work by Reina Lewis (2013) and Emma Tarlo (2013 and 2016). My research builds on and expands their contributions, while depending on slightly different primary sources and theoretical frameworks. Consequently, I use Mol’s (2002) concept of ‘enactment’ to elaborate how Mahmood’s (2005) and Avishai’s (2008) arguments for women’s religious practices within the confines of conservative religions to be understood as a form of ethical agency, might operate online. Additionally, in light of how different forms of authority are enacted in the primary sources, I interrogate Heidi Campbell’s (2007) preliminary framework of multiple layers of religious authority online. Approaching the loose blogging networks of about 30 blogs per religion from a qualitative, humanities perspective, I consider the bloggers to have creative control over their writing: I study online writing about religious dress, not religious dress itself. Beyond using snapshots of blog posts written by individual bloggers, I consider how some of the bloggers’ perspectives have changed over time, and analyse interactions between bloggers and commenters in the ‘Comments’ sections of relevant posts. I argue that enactments of gendered religious identities online are often led by women, within frameworks that are simultaneously personal and which the bloggers themselves consider orthodox. Such personal, but not necessarily feminist, online accounts challenge mainstream narratives about religious dress as oppressive and externally mandated, and instead calls for an understanding of modest dress practices as mutable aspects of lived, and gendered, religious identities. !2 Abstract 2 Acknowledgements 6 0 Introduction 8 0.1 Religious dress and the rhetoric of oppression 8 0.2 Research questions and hypotheses 11 0.3 Outline of thesis 13 1. Literature review 15 1.1 An interdisciplinary approach 15 1.2 Secularism and secularisation theories 15 1.3 Religion online 20 1.4 Being (in) a minority 24 1.5 Gender and religion 30 1.6 Terminology of dress 40 1.7 Dress studies 41 1.8 Dressing for the King and other men – early dress studies 42 1.9 Dress and the body 43 1.10 Dress from a cross-cultural perspective 44 1.11 Can dress communicate ideas? 46 1.12 Dress as material culture 49 1.13 What are they wearing? 49 1.14 Jewish religious dress 51 1.15 Muslim religious dress 54 1.16 Approaching the sources – blogging and enactment 56 1.17 Conclusion 59 2 Methodology and primary sources 61 2.1 Blogs as part of the online public sphere 61 2.2 Blogs as medium and genre 62 2.3 Methodology: finding relevant blogs 65 2.4 Search engines and traffic 67 2.5 Reading the comments 67 2.6 Developing research questions based on concerns in sources 68 2.7 Research challenges and ethics 69 2.8 Right to be forgotten 71 !3 2.9 Fair use and quotations 71 2.10 Geographical boundaries – or not 72 2.11 The real death of the author? 73 2.12 Blogs in a social media setting 74 2.13 Interviews and secondary sources 75 2.14 Methodological drawbacks 76 2.15 Blogging networks as primary sources 77 2.16 Mapping networks at different times 78 2.17 Blogs by Jewish writers 79 2.17.1 What do all the acronyms mean? 79 2.17.2 Anonymity – or not? 80 2.17.3 Taglines as a shorthand 81 2.17.4 Age groups and tech savvy 82 2.17.5 Geography 82 2.17.6 Here today – not gone tomorrow 83 2.17.7 Blogrolls and links 83 2.18 Blogs by Muslim writers 84 2.18.1 Anonymity and identifiers 84 2.18.2 Converts and community 84 2.18.3 Geographical dispersion 85 2.18.4 Age, tech savvy and turnover 85 2.18.5 Activism online 85 2.19 Conclusion 86 3. Counter-narratives and enactment of online gendered religious identities through writing about religious dress 87 3.1 Introduction 87 3.2 Analytical framework 89 3.3 Responding to the secular Other – multiple first person perspectives 90 3.3.1 World Hijab Day and a variety of enactments 93 3.3.2 Counter-narratives and enactment on Jewish blogs 95 3.4 Sharing concerns in a hybrid online space 99 3.5 Not necessarily isolated 103 3.6 Subversion of secular expectations 108 3.7 Secular feminism and religious dress 111 !4 3.8 Trying to conform more creatively 116 3.9 Managing dress and costs through community and comparisons 123 3.9 Ethnic diversity and the challenges of modest dress 128 3.10 Dress is not static 130 3.11 Conversion and wanting to conform 133 3.12 Drawn to religious dress 136 3.13 Teaching children to creatively conform 140 3.14 Conclusion 142 4. Negotiating religious authority online: gendered practices and gendered spaces 143 4.1 Introduction 143 4.2 Religious authority online – analytical framework 145 4.3 Religious texts as sources of authority 152 4.3.1 How are religious texts used on the Jewish blogs? 153 4.3.2 Religious texts and revisionist conclusions – or not 157 4.4 Religious hierarchy as authority on blogs 163 4.4.1 Religious hierarchy as authority on Muslim blogs 164 4.4.2 Religious hierarchy and authority on Jewish blogs 169 4.5 Unorthodox sources of conservative ideas 172 4.6 Multiple forms of religious authority 179 4.7 Managing men’s attitudes online 181 4.8 Aggregation as a form of authority 187 4.9 Conclusion 191 5 Conclusion: modest religious dress and gendered online identities 192 5.1 Doing a PhD in an emerging field 192 5.2 Changing attitudes to terminology in research questions 193 5.3 Hypotheses and conclusions 197 5.4 Responding to feminist critiques of the postsecular turn 208 5.5 Future avenues for research 210 Bibliography 211 Appendix one: primary sources 230 Muslim blogs 230 Jewish blogs 231 !5 Acknowledgements In Swedish, we say ‘ingen nӓmnd, ingen glӧmd’,‘no one named, no one forgotten’, to avoid missing anyone out when summing up contributions to large projects. These acknowledgements are, possibly, the reverse of that. Many thanks, firstly, to my supervisor Fiona Bowie, who has patiently read through and commented on drafts, offered detailed feedback and valuable perspectives on my research. Special thanks for being so kind during difficult times – it made an enormous difference. Thanks also to the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the King’s Continuation Scholarship committee and the King’s Jewish Studies bursary for financial backing. Early stages of this research owe thanks, in different ways, to Andrea, Carool and Ben, and to Oliver and Paul for timely support. The British Library, the Maughan Library, the New York Public Library, Lund University Library and Malmӧ Hӧgskolas Bibliotek were sources of inspiration and knowledge. (I think I’ve cleared my fines with all of them.) I also benefited from either presenting papers or attending study days and conferences at King’s College London and City University New York about the body in religious studies and research ethics, at Lund University in Sweden about dress and fashion, and at the Nordic Network on Media and Religion in Sigtuna. Comments, support and feedback at the Digital Media and Sacred Text conference, the British Academy for the Study of Religion and the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change helped boost my confidence. Great thanks to my old team and employers at the Government Digital Service, who helped me find a new career during my interruption of studies. They relentlessly encouraged me to continue my research, teaching me much about writing and the internet in the meantime. Russell and Mike, #bestbosses.