ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the contradictions implicit in young women’s activities as digital citizens in a media platform society. Informed by their social media posts and the interviews I conducted with young Muslim women, the chapter deploys the concepts of visual activism and visuality to understand how the various young Muslim women’s groups’ visualization of productive, pious feminine citizen-subjectivity transform the women into the aesthetic authority on young Muslim womanhood. The chapter acknowledges the groups’ visual activism but, at the same time, critically evaluates how they have turned themselves into the authority, prescribing a specific set of appearances, behaviours, and aesthetics of young Muslim womanhood. Thus, the young Muslim women’s visual activism cannot be interpreted solely through the lens of ‘subversion versus submission’. Rather, it provides a new perspective on the effects and agentic capacities at work in the popular representations of young Muslim womanhood.
