Challenging the myth of the happy celibate: Muslim women negotiating contemporary relationships

Abstract

In recent decades, the age of marriage in many minority Muslim communities has risen so that significant numbers of Muslims in these contexts are remaining unmarried into their late 20 s and beyond. As with other communities in Western contexts, Muslim communities have also experienced a rising divorce rate, leading to many more single women. These social and demographic changes, combined with traditional attitudes towards female sexuality and virginity, have led to a rise in the number of women who have either never had a sexual encounter or who no longer have sexual encounters. Cultural discourses surrounding virginity and female celibacy frequently conflate the virtue of refusing sexual encounters outside of marriage with happiness and satisfaction at 'choosing the right path'. However, these discourses negate or downplay women's sexual desires and result in women often feeling trapped into having to perform the 'myth of the happy celibate'. To disrupt this myth is to unleash the potentially destructive power of female sexuality, while to openly challenge it is to risk being positioned as a 'slut'.

Recreating Virginity in Iran: Hymenoplasty as a Form of Resistance

“…Per Iran's Islamic penal code, which regulates acceptable moral conduct, sex outside the confines of legal, heterosexual marriage remains a criminal offense (Mir‐Hosseini and Hamzic ). However, while Islamic teachings advocate modesty, no explicit requirement for female marital virginity exists in Islamic doctrine (Imtoual and Hussein ). Minority Iranian religious groups, such as Jews and Zoroastrians, also revere female bridal virginity.…”

Centring migrant community voices in forced marriage prevention social policy: A proposed reframing

“…Lina's parents continued to struggle with accepting her wishes around marriage. As other studies have shown, experiences of duress are often the starting point for a transformation of familial and social relations, rather than their breakdown (Das et al, 2001;Karim 2001;Imtoual & Hussein 2009). Anthropologist Veena Das has written that familial dynamics in the wake of various kinds of traumas and violence do not always result in the destruction of kinship relations, but rather in their redefinition (Das et al, 2001, 24).…”

“Women are Believers in Their Own Right”: One Muslim Woman's Challenge to Dominant Discourses Shaping Gender Relations in Islam

“…29 Women who make independent decisions regarding the sexual aspect of their lives and refuse to be subordinated are accused of spreading social chaos ( fitna) and sometimes disciplined. 30 In patriarchal discourse, the pure, submissive woman is often contrasted with the loose, outspoken woman. 31 The discursive position of a Muslim woman, or using cooke's term indicating indiscriminate merging of individual identities into one collective identity -"Muslimwoman" 32 -is therefore regulated by the binary nature of the stereotype, where fantasy and perceived "reality" freely mix; as Hall argues, people constrained by such binary discourses have to "shuttle endlessly between them, and sometimes [are] represented by both of them at the same time."…”