Anna Mansson McGinty is Associate Professor of Geography and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her research centers on the formation of Muslim identities and geographies in the West, examining identity processes, gender and religion, and politics of representations. She is the author of Becoming Muslim: Western Women’s Conversions to Islam (2006), and in one of her current projects, Young, Muslim, and American: An Ethnography of Muslim Youth in Milwaukee, she looks at the diverse religious, political, and personal expressions of Muslim youth cultures and identities in the 21st century United States. Her work has been published in journals such as Environment and Planning A, Gender, Place and Culture, Social and Cultural Geography, and The Professional Geographer.
Abstract:
Everyday Embodiment of Citizenship and Religion: Narratives of Belonging Among Muslim American Youth
This paper explores the lived experiences and everyday embodiment of citizenship and religion drawing on an ethnographic study on Muslim youth in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Departing from in-depth interviews, the study attends to the intersections of gender, religion, race and ethnicity, and centers on the everyday practices through which young Muslim women and men claim belonging as American Muslims. What are their interests, passions, and dreams? What role does their religious faith play in their everyday life? In which spaces and neighborhoods, and with whom, do they feel at home? In which spaces, and through which social relationship, do they feel excluded and out of place? What organizations are they active in? What do categories such as “American” and “American Muslim” mean to them? In recent work within geography of religion and feminist geography, scholars have called for further attention to the embodied, intimate, and emotional aspects of everyday lives to better understand larger social and geopolitical phenomena. I argue that it is precisely in the context of the everyday that we can best understand the dynamic relationship between the intimate/emotional and geopolitical, the experiential and the discursive, and the personal and the political, as well as how these are closely interlinked. Approaching Islam as “lived religion” entails a focus on social relationships, memories, activities and emotions of the individuals embracing the religion in particular places. Drawing from such a definition of religion and religious identity encourages an understanding of religion not as a separate sphere but as integral to other everyday practices. The paper demonstrates how this approach challenges crude binaries, and highlights the diversities and complexities of what it means to be young, Muslim and American in contemporary American society.