In Fighting Feelings: Lessons in Gendered Racism and Queer Life, Gulzar R. Charania explores the gendered racialization of women of color through a plethora of interviews with her participants, paying specific attention to the intersection of identities that these women hold such as gender, race, sexuality, age, and socio-economic status. Charania centers the thoughts and experiences of racialized Black and women of color feminists to provide her readers with critical tools to navigate the lived experiences of racialized women while also acknowledging the violence of dominant narratives entrenched in white supremacy. By attending to the practices of scholars and theorists as well as the lives of her participants, Charania urges readers to reconsider the convergence of gender and sexuality in racialized hierarchies.
Keyword: women’s studies
Review of Being Muslim: A Cultural History of Women of Color in American Islam by Sylvia Chan-Malik (NYU Press)
Sylvia Chan-Malik’s Being Muslim argues that Muslim women of color in the United States have historically engaged with Islam as concurrent rejoinders to systemic racism and those national and cultural patriarchies directed against them. Chan-Malik centers the divergent experiences and insurgent faith practices of women of color, particularly African American women, within the fundamental character of Islam in the 20th and 21st US. Through the juxtaposition of multiple methodologies—archival, discursive, affective, and oral historical—Chan-Malik follows her subjects’ complex lives rather than inserting them within expedient political or academic discourses that often subsume the intersectional politics of US women in Islam.