Affective-Relational Becomings: Contestations over Muslim Women's Identities

Abstract

In this project, I suggest a Deleuzian ontological perspective to address the interconnected and relational constitution of Muslim women‘s experiences and practices to illuminate the multiple-layers of their lives. Namely, I call into question the category ―Islamist,‖ used for contemporary headscarf-wearing women in Turkey, and examine how this categorization erases contingency, specificity, and relationality of women‘s experiences. For this purpose, I articulate the conception of body as a relational and affective multiplicity based on a Deleuzian ontology. According to this ontology, bodies are composed of an infinite number of smaller bodies through the confluence of relations and the creative capacity of affects, which are produced by this relational flux. Since the body is a relational and affective aggregate and a multiplicity within an assemblage, it is not a stable ontological essence or determined by overarching structures, but it is instead dynamic, continually changing, and always in a process of becoming. Since this Deleuzian approach problematizes the stability and singularity of identities, it offers a radical change for the framing of the question of Muslim women. This approach provides useful means to illuminate the experiences, desires, and practices of women in their contexts and through the particular characters of their relations and affects. Therefore, this project stresses the idea that we need analytical tools which allow us to attend to dynamic configurations of Muslim women without reducing them to existing categories or marginalities.