The Pious Subject? A Media Sociological Investigation of Islamic Discourses on Gender and Veiling
project description
The project deals with the discursive construction of Muslim subject positions and their affective couplings in German-language YouTube videos, focusing on productions that negotiate from a Muslim perspective how femininity and femininely marked self-practices can be properly understood and performed in the context of a secular society. Using discourse-analytical procedures and the "Reading for Affect" approach developed in the SFB, I have identified three positions that link to different models and norms of femininity within and outside the Islamic field and differ with regard to their inherent ideal of Muslim femininity as well as the self-techniques and affective attitudes associated with it. In addition to an "exclusively moral-religious" position of femininity, which demands an orientation of the self towards rigid theologically based moral codes and a demarcation from secular self-designs, an "aesthetic-lifestyle-oriented" model could be reconstructed, which links religious practice with elements of Western-marked popular culture, as well as a "critical-activist" position, which demarcates itself both from attributions on the part of the majority society and from patriarchal structures in Islamic milieus.
Malli Gabriel
Following his BA in Sociology, Gabriel Malli completed a Master's degree in Sociology and Cultural Sociology at the University of Graz and the University of Trento (ITA). Since 2018, he has been studying sociology in doctoral studies and is a member of the FWF- and DFG-funded International Graduate School "Resonante Weltbeziehungen" at the University of Graz and the Max Weber Kolleg Erfurt. From October 2019 to September 2020, he completed a one-year research stay at the Max Weber Kolleg Erfurt; from November 2021 to July 2022, he is a visiting doctoral student at the Free University of Berlin (funded by the Marietta Blau Fellowship of the Austrian Exchange Service). His research focuses on the sociology of religion and culture, the sociology of Islam, and discourse theory and analysis. He is particularly interested in questions relating to the connection between discourses and affects.