Abstract
Among the back pages of a polemical magazine from the mid-1980s rests the following prescient observation from the Welsh Muslim convert Meryl Wyn Davies:
Muslims are prepared to organise for issues as they see them: to create a platform for being Muslims in Britain. But there is no obvious political home for this developing Muslim politics. […] All sections of the Muslim community share the view that Islam is misunderstood, falsely stereotyped and the recipient of prejudice and discrimination. A young generation has grown up on these lessons, but by living in Britain has actually had access to more information and debate about Islam than their contemporaries in many Muslim countries, or their parents’ generation before they settled in Britain.
(Davies, Marxism Today, 1985)
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Notes
It should be stressed that this distinction is problematic, but is adopted as a heuristic device to develop this particular point. For example, in her landamark Gender Trouble, Butler (1990) argues that any coherence achieved within categories of sex, gender and sexuality does in fact reflect a culturally constructed mirage of coherence that is achieved through the repetition of what she calls ‘stylised acts’. She argues that, in their repetition, these acts establish the appearance of what she describes as an essential or ontological ‘core’ gender. This leads Butler to consider one’s ‘sex’ — along with one’s ‘gender’ and ‘sexuality’ — as being ‘performative’, and since this challenges biological accounts of sexual binaries, it is recognised that Butler would both support and problematise the above analogy. That is, while she may support it by agreeing with the contested nature of ‘gender’, she might also problematise it by rejecting ‘sex’ as something given — rather than produced.
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© 2010 Nasar Meer
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Meer, N. (2010). Conceptualising Muslim-Consciousness: From Race to Religion?. In: Citizenship, Identity and the Politics of Multiculturalism. Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230281202_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230281202_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
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