Historically Locating Muslim Women: Race, Gender and Coloniality in Australia

This chapter contextualises the study and historically locates Australian Muslim women in the broader context of Australian social relations. Drawing on literature from multiple disciplines, the chapter explores colonial understandings of race and gender that informed settler colonialism and expansion, and reveals coloniality, the continuity of colonialism without an administration, in contemporary Australia. It examines coloniality under multicultural policies and the ways colonial discourses of race and gender—particularly in regard to Indigenous Australians and ‘ethnic Others’—have shaped and continue to shape intersubjective social relations in Australia. It also considers the rise in anti-Islamic discourses and the oppressed Muslim woman discourse, and the connection to colonial legacies. The argument is also made that colonial representations of the monolithic, veiled, oppressed Muslim woman are produced and reproduced by the coloniality of gender. The myth of decolonialisation is shown to obscure the continuity between historical and contemporary hierarchies of colonialism and race and to contribute to its pervasiveness and invisibility. These raced and gendered processes act to silence the lives and experiences of many, if not all, Australian Muslim women.