Sisterhood of the Digital Umma: The Complex Formations of Muslimah Mini-Publics

Abstract

Muslimah content creators have carved out nooks of digital space by themselves, for themselves. The popularity of podcasts and Instagram accounts can come into a perceived tension with the expected Islamic feminine values of moderation, modesty, and privacy. My thesis is that they seek to balance the cultural contestations that are produced by their active usage of social media. Specifically, these are contestations between Islamic communal expectations and the Muslimah’s individual desire to adapt social media norms of personal-cultivation, in order to ethically profit from the online attention-economy. They want to use these platforms not simply for profit, but for the goal of creating distinctly feminine digital “mini-publics” – frequently referred to as "Sisterhood." These mini-publics achieve two primary goals: they create a representational platform wherein her voice, as an anglophone Muslimah, is heard and normalized within the mass public sphere; mini-publics also create an agential platform that allows her to take certain epistemic stances and participate in the collective act of defining the ideal online Muslimah. For some, these dual performances of representation and agency extend to the conscious mobilization of their platforms for the propagation of a newfound political consciousness vis-a-vis the Gaza Genocide. Their cultivation of mini-public sisterhoods does not constitute a counterpublic, for Muslimah content creators lack a relative unity of networks or subversive intentions. Instances wherein Muslimah influencers do participate in counterpublic positionality – such as in regard to the genocide in Gaza – is not sufficient evidence of a Muslimah counterpublic. Rather, they intentionally align with the broader Muslim counterpublic, or other preexisting non-Muslim counterpublics to the extent of their personal intersectional identifications or unique social/moral allegiances.