[Piety, fashion and business: positions of ethical/aesthetic femininity in muslim lifestyle-vlogs].

Abstract

The article discusses empirical findings on the construction of models of Muslim femininity in German-speaking lifestyle vlogs on YouTube, in which faithful Muslim women appear as influencers and stage their everyday routines and practices in a mostly idealized way and with references to religious knowledge. Applying a post-structuralist theoretical framework, I consider those models as subject positions of a specific discourse of Muslim femininity promoting certain modes of self-understanding, self-conduct and related ways of affection. After a brief discussion of Muslim and secular discourses of femininity in which my data can be located, I present results from a discourse analysis of videos from two German-speaking channels: I suggest that the producers constitute a hybrid model of Muslim subjectivity which encompasses templates of a successful Muslim life in a secular society. In this context, producers seek to dissolve everyday contradictions and tensions between Western consumer and popular culture on the one, and Muslim religiosity on the other hand. By doing so, they produce a position of ethical/aesthetical Muslim femininity that brings together ideals of fashionable expressivity with religious self-conceptions and (neo-)liberal discourses of female autonomy and self-entrepreneurship.