Islamic Fashion in Migration Context: Sartorial Strategies among Pious Turkish Women in the United States

Type: 
Seminar
Audience: 
Open to the Public
Building: 
Nador u. 15
Room: 
103
Wednesday, March 14, 2018 - 11:00am
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Date: 
Wednesday, March 14, 2018 - 11:00am to 1:00pm

This paper looks at Turkish migrant women’s sartorial choices, maneuvers and strategies in the contemporary US context by regarding fashionable veiling as a site of self-cultivation and self-transformation. Making use of semi-structured, in-depth interviews, it attempts to expose the complexity of Turkish migrant women’s experimentation with fashionable veiling with a particular focus on how they build a self-reflexive pious self through their peculiar social location in the US migration regime. As a result, the paper aims to demonstrate that Muslim women’s engagement with fashionable veiling in the migration context is a multi-layered experience with temporal, spatial, material and aesthetic dimensions.

Didem Unal Abaday is Junior Thyssen Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies of Central European University. Previously, she was a visiting research fellow at the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies of Rutgers University and the Graduate Center of City University of New York. She received her Ph.D. from the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University. Her research interests focus on gender politics in contemporary Turkey, feminist subaltern publics, Islamic feminism and Islamic fashion. Her recent publications appeared in various journals such as Women’s Studies International Forum, Journal of Women, Politics and Policy and European Journal of Women’s Studies.