This research focuses on young to middle-aged Muslim women’s leisure and recreational activities and whether and how they play a role in their self-formation, with a specific focus on their agency and desires. I will explore women’s rising interest in fitness and sports in women-only sports facilities in Istanbul, Turkey, where, the number of women-only gyms and fitness centers has increased twenty-fold in the last seven years. Women, who prefer to exercise in such segregated spaces are also those who have concerns (Islamic, traditional, or else) related to their body movements in mixed spaces, which led them either to exercise in a homosocial space, or to limit those movements if they exercise in a public one. Moreover, unlike the other homosocial spaces in Islamic contexts (i.e. public baths or tea parties), the need for such spaces are not based on social networking or daily hygiene needs, but are related to global trends that trigger new forms of desires and self-making. The customers of women-only gymnasia are also those in demand of a fit, healthy and skinny look triggered by factors related to contemporary fashions. Drawing on in-depth interviews and participant observation, this paper proposes that Muslim women’s temporary patronage of women-only gyms form an experience that is “intersubjective and embodied; not individual and fixed, but redeemably social and processual” (Moore 1994:3). Both women’s fascination with fitness, exercise, re-fashioning their bodies (Buckley 1986) and Muslim women’s changing relationship with their bodies have been perceived and presented as false consciousness in the literature. This view purports that women let their bodies become objects of masculinist aesthetics from which they are not fully aware of. Instead of criticizing women’s popular interest in exercise as an object of masculinist aesthetics, I suggest looking at their interest itself as a popular means of enthusiasm, entertainment and enjoyment. I suggest that, women’s popular (or even banal) entertainment or leisure activities are worth looking at; mainly because such an emphasis will enable us to question the system that made women’s popular entertainment banal. Indeed, for women’s leisure, I believe that “its very banality calls us to understand the technologies that produce its ordinariness” (Berlant & Warner 1998:549).

Based on sixteen months of fieldwork among Palestinians living in housing projects in Denmark this paper examines how girl talk offer a transformative threshold that allow Palestinian women to become someone else, if only for a moment. My first impression of the different women’s clubs in the basement of projects in Denmark was an overwhelming sensory experience. Shrouded in smoke from cigarettes and argilas (water pipes), the women would sing along to the latest Lebanese pop songs, dance and try on different outfits while they commented on each other bottoms, breasts and complexions and exchanged views on men, underwear and creams. These regular occasions of public women intimacy, however, never seemed intimate but rather excessive: the sweets too sweet, the colours too bright, and the laughter too high-pitched. The stark contrast between the light chit-chat and the ongoing suffering of the individual women made these public get together not only pleasant but also exhausting. The history of the Palestinian women that forms the tapestry for the girl talk is centred on catastrophes or Nakbas, as they are referred to in Arabic. Not only al-Nakba of 1948 when the Palestinians were displaced from their homeland, but also the many recurring wars and the individual catastrophes that involve dead family members, rapes, loss of children and abusive husbands. The plenitude of suffering, however, is only seldom discussed in public. What is discussed in detail is for instance g-strings, boob jobs and facial creams. In this paper I will investigate the girl talk not as opposed to or different from the daily suffering, but as an intrinsic part of the suffering in which a lot of effort is put into trying to ignore the partly shared knowledge of each other lives (Dilley 2010). While the girl talk might be thought of as a way of keeping up appearances I will argue, that it is not simply a superficial phenomenon that covers up the harsh realities of the women’s lives. Rather the girl talk might be thought of as a site of potential transformation that by way of excess and sensory affects (Deleuze 1989) hold the potential for conjuring up new worlds.

This presentation will focus on the work of a counselling centre from Southern Cairo that I have chosen to call Generous Heart. Its members are almost exclusively women. It is dealing with issues of love and sexuality, using methods combining psychological studies, self-realization manuals, and references to Islam. The tensions rising from this mixing are at the core of my ethnographic inquiry: on the one hand, Generous Heart seems to promote “emotional liberty” (W. Reddy), for instance through group therapies where all participants are asked to tell their grieves, suffering, and hopes; on the other hand, its discourse affirms the primacy of morals shown as anchored in God’s commands. It is through a silencing of the hesitations of desire that equilibrium is reinstated: even at a young age, love and sexual attraction are deemed as normal, but marriage is presented as everyone’s natural expectation. Premarital and extramarital affairs are pathologised, as the outcome of a lack of love during childhood leading to a constant need to regain this missed out affection. Homosexual desire is also seen as an illness to cure. In the same manner, marriages crossing class boundaries are presented by the members of the centre as endangering for mental health. However, Generous Heart’s program is not void of ambivalences, enclosed in the rhetoric of Progress that it defends. The mastering of the right ways to express one’s feeling is largely depicted in Egypt as a privilege of the educated. Through this, transnational imaginaries of what romantic love should be easily become partly associated to the belonging to the upper and middle classes. As the idea of Progress that Generous Heart defends is also strongly linked to the living standards and the class expectations of its members, who define themselves as middle class Cairenes, desire becomes a matter of intimate questioning open to contradictory interpretations of the right way to behave.

In the Netherlands and other European countries, young Muslim women are increasingly active in combat sports, such as boxing and thai-/kickboxing. This anthropological study investigates young Muslim women’s engagement in combat sports as an emergent trend. What drives and enables young Muslim women to practice kickboxing and what are the effects of these activities on their notions of self and on their position in society? This paper is based on a year of intensive fieldwork, including participant observation and in-depth interviews, among Moroccan-Dutch female kickboxers in The Hague, The Netherlands. It will explore the process of acquiring bodily knowledge (ways of knowing) and the acquisition of skills (enskillment) as a means of (re)-producing notions of self and senses of belonging. This enskillment is not merely about modeling and copying, but is a form of coordination between a person’s body, perceptions, resources, tools and environment. The investigation of ways of knowing in this particular kickboxing setting does not only provide insight in the practice of kickboxing and the notion of being a kickboxer, but as well in the different ways of knowing regarding gender, ethnicity, class and religion. Whereas many debates on the Muslim female body in Europe are focused on pious practices, this paper aims at developing an alternative view on the politicization of the relationship between the individual and society, in which women’s bodily practices are the sites for contestations over national, ethnic and religious identities and forms of belonging.