‘The Muslim woman activist’: solidarity across difference in the movement against the ‘War on Terror’

Abstract

Feminist scholars have widely noted the centrality of gendered discourses to the ‘War on Terror’. This article shows how gendered narratives also shaped the collective identities of those opposing the ‘War on Terror’. Using interview data and analysis of newspaper editorials from movement leaders alongside focus groups with grassroots Muslim women activists, this article demonstrates how, in responding to the cynical use of women’s rights to justify war, participants in the anti-‘War on Terror’ movement offered an alternative story. Movement activists deployed representations of Muslim women’s agency to challenge the trope of the ‘oppressed Muslim woman’. I argue that these representations went beyond strategic counternarratives and offered an emotional basis for solidarity. Yet, respondents in the focus groups illustrated the challenges of seeking agency through an ascribed identity; in that they simultaneously refused and relied upon dominant terms of the debate about Muslim women.