Geographies of Identities: Reading Gender and Space in British Muslim Women’s Writing

Abstract

Abstract This thesis examines the interaction between geography and women’s identities and experiences as portrayed in four texts by British Muslim women writers: Monica Ali’s Brick Lane (2003), Leila Aboulela’s Minaret (2005), Fadia Faqir’s My Name is Salma (2007), and Sabba Khan’s The Roles We Play (2021). These novels engage with the concepts of space and place as fundamental to the construction, negotiation, and contestation of female migrant identities and everyday experiences in Britain. The thesis draws on feminist geography to theorise key concepts such as ‘the right to the city’, ‘embodied identities’, ‘intersectional embodiment’, ‘moral geographies’, and ‘third space’ in analysing women’s spatial experiences. The discussion of these four texts is structured around three main lines of argument. First, I argue that gendered spatial relations shape women’s access to and use of certain spaces, as well as their freedom, behaviour, and representations of their bodies in public, work, and leisure environments. Second, I contend that Muslim women’s experiences of space as gendered intersect with other forms of social inequalities, including class, race, religion, and migration status. Finally, the third argument focuses on women’s resistance to and negotiation of these intersecting forms of marginalisation through the construction of new, hybrid, and creative identities. These in-between spaces are not static blends of two cultures, but dynamic, ambiguous, and continually evolving contexts for identity formation.