Why Muslim Women and Smartphones?

In Why Muslim Women and Smartphones, Karen Waltorp studies the use of Internet-enabled smartphones by her “informants” as sensory technologies with forms of presence and affordances. By doing so she transforms the online spaces from mere parallel worlds to integral parts of the milieu they inhabit. To achieve this goal she organizes the book into four twin chapters, including four major chapters—marked A, B, C, and D—and four mirror chapters— marked with the small letters a, b, c, and d. The major chapters focus on how the Muslim women, who live in the Blaagaarden social housing area of Copenhagen, use digital technologies to navigate their daily lives and maintain contact with their significant others, relatives, and friends across the globe. Waltorp leaves aside questions of methodology and epistemology, to study closely the issues raised in the major chapters and methodology and epistemology in their corresponding mirror chapters. At the center of her argument lies the notion of harakat. She explains that this Arabic term is used as slang by young Muslim people in Noerrebro to imply playing a trick on someone in a “cunning, smart, or charming way” (13). The smartphone, Waltorp argues, plays a crucial role here in offering sets of opportunities for her informants to constantly do harakat and negotiate “differing notions and practices of public, private, and intimate spheres and the complex interfaces between them” (14). The twin chapters “A” and “a” take Donna Haraway’s (1985) notion of cyborg and propose that the smartphones and their image-making and sharing technology change the affordances perceived in the environment—the environment not as the physical world, but rather as what is perceived or misperceived. Waltorp argues that the distinction made between public and private—based on things that have to be shown and things that have to be hidden—is blurred or even challenged by how her informants negotiate appropriate concealing and revealing in their everyday lives. For instance, they wear hijab in the photos taken in the private physical space of the living room—where they usually do not need to wear hijab—because of the plan to upload it to the semipublic online space of Facebook, while they often do not wear hijab in photos they take for the private online space of Snapchat.