“This Girl is a Nation”: Muslim Women’s Narratives of Self and Survival in the Academy

This chapter explores the narratives of self and survival of three transnational professional Muslim women who live and work in British universities. The women’s complex layered identities expressed through faith, memories of home and experiences of racism reveal the ways in which the macro structural discourses of race, gender and religion intersect and are lived through the women’s embodied experiences at the micro level of their social world in the corridors of the academy. Developing the theoretical concept of embodied intersectionality, the chapter explores the ways in which the women draw on their embodied practices (such as wearing the hijab) and inner sense of self (through expressions of faith and belonging) to negotiate and survive the postcolonial disjunctures of racism and Islamophobia which framed their everyday lives. Through their agency and subjectivity, the Muslim women continually challenged and transformed hegemonic discourses of race, gender and religion in educational spaces.