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#Hijababes: Performing Muslim Cool on Instagram and Facebook
Abstract
A pharmacist in Dubai by day, and global marathon runner/mountain climber on holiday, Manal Rostom played different roles as a transnational Egyptian woman. She performed a more specifically Muslim identity in her digital homes – a personal Instagram account, and the secret Facebook group Surviving Hijab, which she administered. On Instagram, Manal showed off the Nike Pro Hijab, and her sporting adventures won her fitness fans globally. On the Surviving Hijab Facebook group, Manal appeared in live videos with simple headscarves and no makeup, explaining how members should support one another in order to keep wearing hijab despite cultural pressures. My paper analyzes her embodiments on these platforms as networked performances, toward a concept of Muslim womanhood as a dynamic digital symbol. Approaching Muslim womanhood along spatial lines of private and public embodiment has often meant making hijab a simplified marker of religious affiliation. By looking at Manal’s performance with hijab in different venues online, I complicate the idea of women’s dress as a sign of public piety. The Facebook support group was private, and could only be joined by women. Its discourse of pious beauty overlapped verbally, but not visually, with that of Manal’s Instagram page. Different audiences for the two styles of embodying what I call Muslim cool, shaped her complementary image-voice hybrids. The affordances of each digital platform also served as different performance spaces. My ethnographic research with focus groups of young Egyptian women, showed that Manal’s audiences accepted her fragmented persona as a familiar way of performing womanhood flexibly. A preliminary hypothesis is that Manal’s digital embodiments of Muslim cool, like her portmanteau hashtag Hijababes, point to an emerging culture of piety as spectacular practice.
Discipline
Media Arts
Geographic Area
Egypt
Sub Area
None