(Re-)Claiming Bodies Through Fashion and Style

“Like the wide array of practices these essays examine, this book invites readers to consider the diversity of settings and meanings that fall under the broad umbrella of Muslim sartorial style. We are introduced to the intimate yet high-stakes decisions ranging from headcover to nail polish, from Mauritania to Turkey to Indonesia. In so doing, we are reminded of the centrality of two important facts. First, that all forms of dress and the techniques of their use are always formed in dense familial, national, and transnational contexts. Second, that this variety still intersects with a fundamental fact: these styles dress and address the body. By refocusing on the body, this volume allows interdisciplinary perspectives to productively cross-fertilize the field of modest dress.” 

Carla Jones, Department of Anthropology, University of Colorado, Boulder, USA 

This book investigates ways of dressing, style and fashion as gendered and embodied, but equally as “religionized” phenomena, particularly focusing on one significant world religion: Islam.  Through their clothing, Muslims negotiate concepts and interpretations of Islam and construct their intersectionally interwoven position in the world. Taking the interlinkages between ‘fashionized religion,’ ‘religionized fashion,’ commercialization and processes of feminization as a starting point, this book reshapes our understanding of gendered forms of religiosity and spirituality through the lens of gender and embodiment. Focusing mainly on the agency and creativity of women as they appropriate ways of performing and interpreting various modalities of Muslim clothing and body practices, the book investigates how these social actors deal with empowering conditions as well as restrictive situations.

Foregrounding contemporary scholars’ diverse disciplinary, theoretical and methodological approaches, this book  problematizes and complicates the discursive and lived interactions and intersections between gender, fashion, spirituality, religion, class, and ethnicity. It will be relevant to a broad audience of researchers across gender, sociology of religion, Islamic and fashion studies.

Viola Thimm is Professorial Candidate (Habilitandin) at the Institute of Anthropology, University of Heidelberg (Germany). A cultural anthropologist, her research interests include cultural practices of mobility, gender relations and intersectionality, and Islam and its socio-cultural entanglements.