Nurturing Bodies: Exploring Discourses of Parental Leave as Communicative Practices of Affective Embodiment

Making Space for Embodied Voices, Diverse Bodies, and Multiple Genders in Nonconformist Friday Prayers: A Queer Feminist Ethnography of Progressive Muslims’ Performative Intercorporeality in North American Congregations

“…Intercorporeality is useful for understanding how individuals relate to others, especially those who are somatically different from them in locally significant ways—in the case of PM groups, according to sex, gender expression, sartorial choices, dis/ability, prayer posture, phenotypic indices of ethnicity, and voice. In line with recent work insisting that “diversity” and “inclusion” not become depoliticized catchwords, I argue that paying attention to relationships across bodily differences allows us to understand diversity discourses “as communicative practices of affective embodiment” (Just and Remke 2019, 47).…”

“…Experiences of marginalization often have to do with the body: people feel marginalized because of phenotype, gendered sartorial choices used to cover or reveal parts of the body, bodily movements that may index queerness, or, in the case of prayer postures, religious sect. While being male, Sunni, Arab, and cissexual is “charged with positive affect and … nurtured within the social/organizational setting” of most mosques, “other embodiments” like being female or genderqueer, trans, Shia, disabled, or a woman praying without a headscarf “are negatively charged and repressed or rejected” (Just and Remke 2019, 51). In other cases, even Muslims who might be assumed (based on ethnicity, language, religious background, gender identity, and/or sexual orientation) to feel belonging in conservative communities nevertheless develop nonconforming readings of the Islamic tradition and begin to find their beliefs incompatible with those espoused in most mosques.…”