Inconvenient voices: Muslim women in the Labour Party.
| Author | Hussain, Farah |
In February 2016, a group of women led by the Muslim Women's Network UK spoke to BBC Newsnight about their experiences within the Labour Party. Fozia Parveen spoke of a smear campaign against her during a local government selection contest: Muslim men in her local Birmingham Labour Party had turned up to her parents' home and intimidated her mother to stop Parveen from standing for selection. They claimed that she was having an affair with an existing councillor. Shazia Bashir, a party member in Peterborough, spoke of how Muslim men in her local party made her step aside in a local selection process because, despite being 31 years of age, she didn't have her father's consent and support to stand. The Labour Party responded to the programme by issuing a weak statement claiming that its processes are 'fair, democratic and robust' and that it was committed to making sure that 'candidates are representative of the communities they seek to represent'. The party did not acknowledge the women's specific complaints and experiences. Soon the issue was forgotten, the press moved on, and nothing was done to support Muslim women who face misogynistic discrimination from Muslim men within the Labour Party.
My argument in this article is that if Labour wants to address this question it needs a much better understanding of the complex ways in which gender intersects with ethnicity and race.
Intersectionality
The concept of intersectionality, a theoretical framework that was developed by black feminists in the United States in the 1980s, is key to understanding Muslim women's experiences and the Labour Party's (lack of) response to them. An intersectional theoretical approach shows us why Muslim women face so much discrimination - and why no one has done anything about it.
First conceptualised by Kimberle Crenshaw in 1989, intersectionality refuses to treat gender and race as mutually exclusive categories of analysis - that is, it shows that they intersect. Intersectionality demands that we question the idea of group homogeneity, and focus our attention on the least-privileged members of every group. Crenshaw argued that the experiences of black women in US society could not be explained by simply adding together the experiences of white women and the experiences of black men. (1) Instead, their lives can only be understood by analysing how gender and race interact with one another to shape their lived experiences. She employs the metaphor of a traffic intersection or crossroads to demonstrate how black women, standing where two roads intersect, are most at risk of injury as they face oncoming traffic from all four directions. The same metaphor can be used to describe the experiences of Muslim women in the UK. They stand at the intersection of race, religion and gender and, therefore, are at risk from multiple sources of discrimination.
Patricia Hill Collins's analysis of black organisations in the US, including civil rights organisations, shows that though such organisations claim to speak for all black people, black women have never held leadership positions within them, and much of US black thought has a 'prominent masculine bias'. (2) In such organisations, not only are women rendered secondary and invisible; when they do begin to question their subjugated position, they face opposition and hostility from male members. This adverse reaction is often characterised by claims that by fighting gender inequality within black spaces, black women are acting in a way that is counter-productive to the wider struggle for black empowerment. Women are forced to stay silent about the oppression they face from within their...
To continue reading
Request your trialCOPYRIGHT GALE, Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.
