Gendered Roles, Spaces and Political Activism

Abstract

In this chapter, we consider the intersections between ethnicity, gender and political activism among ethnic minority young people, paying attention to the ways in which these shaped political consciousness and activism among the activists with whom we worked. We begin by considering briefly intersections between ethnicity, gender and the political, and how these have been discussed within debates on feminism and feminist politics in the work of black, Muslim and Islamic feminist and politics of recognition literatures. These literatures have focused particularly on distinctive political issues among ethnic minority women - drawing attention to distinctive, and sometimes autonomous, political struggles. We then reflect on the growing focus on gender within the study of race and ethnicity and how this has been traced through political and public discourses, particularly in discourses on raced bodies and sexualities and black, Asian and Muslim masculinities and femininities. We consider how these intersections between race, ethnicity and gender have featured in contemporary academic writings and public discourses on ethnic minority young people — including some of the distinctive ways these have played out in Birmingham and Bradford in recent times.