Decolonial Feminist Border Methodology: Researching Muslim Women’s Subjectivities

This chapter describes the study about Australian Muslim women on which this book is based. It begins with an introduction to the 20 Muslim women who participated in the study and provides an overview of the interviews conducted with the women. The decolonial feminist methodology used to theorise and analyse Australian Muslim women’s subjectivities is presented. The chapter begins by delineating the use of the postmodern concept of subjectivity in the study and then reviews intersectional decolonial feminism, with a particular focus on Gloria Anzaldúa’s ‘borderlands’ feminist theory developed by Maria Lugones. It then enters new territory by bridging theoretical epistemological insights from borderlands theory with discourse analysis. Guidelines are provided on how to undertake a decolonial feminist border analysis of the subjectivities of Australian Muslim women’s experiences of oppression and resistance across intersecting relations of power in light of the broader discursive, material and political context of their lives. As part of this methodology, Maria Lugones’s work on world travelling is introduced, to bring to the fore critical questions between the knower and the known, and to centre experience as a site of knowledge and knowledge production.