GENDER & SOCIETY, Vol 34 No. 4, August, 2020 648–678
DOI: 10.1177/0891243220932156
© 2020 by The Author(s)
Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions
THE MATRIX OF GENDERED
ISLAMOPHOBIA
Muslim Women’s Repression and Resistance
SABRINA ALIMAHOMED-WILSON
California State University, Long Beach, USA
Drawing on 75 semi-structured qualitative interviews with Arab, South Asian, and Black
Muslim women social justice activists, ages 18–30 years, organizing in the United States
and the United Kingdom, I theorize their experiences as the basis of the matrix of gendered
Islamophobia. Building upon Jasmine Zine’s concept of gendered Islamophobia, I synthe-
size this concept with Patricia Hill Collins’s theory of the matrix of domination to give a
more in-depth and nuanced structure of how gendered Islamophobia operates and is
resisted by Muslim women activists. This article identifies the overlapping configurations
of power that affect Muslim women’s lives through structural, disciplinary, hegemonic,
and interpersonal domains, countering reductionist accounts of Islamophobia as a univer-
salized, unvariegated social force impacting all Muslims in similar ways (thereby privileg-
ing Muslim men’s experiences and subjectivities while contributing to the erasure of
Muslim women’s agency). Instead, the matrix of gendered Islamophobia locates
Islamophobia within shifting axes of oppression that are simultaneously structured along
the lines of gender, race, class, sexuality, and citizenship. The findings of this research
reveal a dialectical relationship between Muslim women’s oppression and simultaneous
contestation of gendered Islamophobia via their collective remaking of alternative ideas,
politics, discourses, and organizing practices.
Keywords: activism; gender; global/transnational; race; gender & class; race/ethnicity
R
ecent scholarship on Islamophobia has produced important contri-
butions in theorizing about the inequality Muslims endure within
Western societies. However, our understanding remains incomplete
because it does not integrate analyses of gender (Meer and Modood
AUTHOR’S NOTE: Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to
Sabrina Alimahomed-Wilson, California State University, 1250 Bellflower Blvd., Long
Beach, CA 90840-0004, USA; e-mail: sabrina.alimahomed@csulb.edu
932156GAS XX X 10.1177/0891243220932156Gender & SocietyAlimahomed-Wilson / GENDERED ISLAMOPHOBIA
research-article 2020