Beyond Fashion Tips and Hijab Tutorials: The Aesthetic Style of Islamic Lifestyle Videos
Film Criticism 40(2)
DOI:10.3998/fc.13761232.0040.203
Kristen M. Peterson
Request full-text PDF
To read the full-text of this research, you can request a copy directly from the author.
Among young women, lifestyle videos have become extremely popular on YouTube, and a similar trend has emerged among young Muslim women who share modest fashion tips and discuss religious topics. This paper examines the videos of two prominent Muslim women on YouTube, Amena Khan and Dina Torkia, in an effort to understand how they engage with aesthetic styles in order to work against Western stereotypes of Muslim women as oppressed and lacking individuality. Islamic lifestyle videos might appear to simply promote a vacuous focus on appearances, but I argue that it is through the aesthetics and affects of these videos that Amena and Dina do political work to redistribute the sensible and shift what is considered attractive, beautiful and pleasurable in Western society. Additionally, the hybrid aesthetic styles and affects of authenticity and pleasure, which are possible in digital spaces like YouTube, offer Amena and Dina the chance to control their own visual images and to resist being coopted as icons of Western freedom or Islamic piety.
No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
... At the same time, digital media provide opportunities for new authorities to emerge, as they may be more efficient at using new technologies than established religious leaders. For instance, young Muslim women gain authority as they effectively engage with social media spaces and Islamic fashion to spread information about religious piety and modesty (Peterson, 2016;Beta, 2019). ...
... Similarly, contemporary studies of digital media and religion focus on spaces that provide easy access to data on how people make meaning online. Research projects analyze mobile applications, like the Bible app (Hutchings, 2015) or meditation apps (Grieve, 2017), or they look at social media spaces, such as Facebook groups (Abdel-Fadil, 2019), Twitter hashtags like #MuslimWomensDay (Pennington, 2018) or YouTube videos (Peterson, 2016). While all of these research projects offer insightful analysis of these interconnections between media and religion, certain forms of religious expression and media spaces remain under-analyzed ...
Pushing boundaries and blurring categories in digital media and religion research
Kristin M. Peterson
As religious identity and spiritual practices transform and expand in the digital media moment, this article advocates for more critical scholarship on media and religion that examines the complex ways that individuals make meaning in the digital age. First, I present an overview of foundational media and religion theories that analyze the interactions between these ever‐changing fields, such as the culturalist tradition, mediatization theory, and the social shaping of technology approach. Furthermore, this essay highlights insightful research trends that blur distinctions between media spaces and complicate definitions of religion. Finally, a discussion of gaps in the scholarship will justify an argument for more theories centered in international contexts, as well as analysis of the relationships between media technologies, aesthetics, affect, identity and religious expression. These emerging approaches provide more in‐depth discussions of how the fast‐changing and ever‐complex digital culture is deeply connected to the evolving nature of religion and human existence.
... Similarly, Jones (2010) notes that women who adopt Islamic fashion are criticized for promoting consumerism and the fetishization of material goods at the expense of spiritual commitment. Thus, as Peterson (2016a) remarks, online personalities associated with Islamic fashion are subject to conflicting tensions and negotiate their position within these tensions or "ambivalences". ...
... This experimentation involves styling the hijab in different ways and pairing it with outfits inspired by modern fashion trends. While this influence of fashion may seem at odds with the spiritual significance of what they wear, they exercise their agency and reconcile these conflicting tensions or "ambivalences" (Peterson, 2016a), Instead of submitting to either extreme of these tensions, they negotiate a position somewhere along a continuum between them. However, as the Neelofa incident illustrates, this negotiation occurs within certain boundaries that remain immutable. ...
R(e)-veiling the Hijab: Social Media, Islamic Fashion, and Religious Identity in Singapore
Fashela Jailanee
Pranav Malhotra
Rich Ling
This study examines how social media influences the choices Singaporean Muslim women make regarding the hijab and their attire. We conduct separate focus group discussions with young undergraduate students and older career professionals and find that mobile social media platforms like Instagram play a larger role in shaping the younger women's choices. Inspired by diverse representations of Islamic fashion promoted by hijabi (hijab-wearing) social media influencers, these young women experiment with their look while constructing the sartorial representation of their religious identity. Meanwhile, the older women are not as influenced by social media and possess a more definite sense of how their identity is represented. However, these differences do not necessarily engender generational tensions. Instead, the older women display an understanding attitude towards their younger counterparts' sartorial choices and are not averse to following certain fashion trends themselves. Thus, we utilize the conceptual lens of embedded agency to illustrate how women belonging to both groups actively negotiate a position somewhere along a continuum between seemingly opposing tensions like religion and fashion. We find that the agency these women exercise in negotiating this position does not represent complete freedom of choice. Rather, it is best understood as being shaped by various social and religious forces that may constrain or enhance it, including but not limited to the influence of social media.
... Academic interest in the usage of online platforms by Muslims who live in non-Muslim countries revolve around three major causes (Evolvi and Giorda 2021): First, the ways Muslims utilize digital media for gaining knowledge about Islam (Echchaibi 2011;Bahfen 2018); second, the expansion of the intersection of offline and online Islamophobia in the wake of the proliferation of online practices, including acts of threat, discrimination and abuse against Muslims and the imposition of stereotypes (Awan 2014;Evolvi 2019;Elfenbein et al. 2021); and third, the utilization of online tools for resisting stereotypes by Muslims in European and North American societies, responding to hate, integrating into society, as well as normalizing the practice of "lived Islam" in everyday settings (Van Zoonen et al. 2011;Evolvi 2017). This cause manifests itself in the online presence of Muslim women who wear hijab to consolidate agency and gain visibility (Echchaibi 2013;Wheeler 2014;Peterson 2016Peterson , 2020. ...
Shia Clerics, Holy Sites, and the Online Visual Culture of the Revolutionary Youth in Iran
Alireza Taherifard
Since the supreme leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) called on the clergy to embark on an online jihad to rescue youngsters trapped in the "killing field" of the internet, a vast number of clerics and state-sponsored religious organizations and actors have expanded their online activities. The growing body of Islamic online contents produced by the IRI's promoters and the proliferation of social media-related practices in religious places and events have shaped the online visual culture of the Iranian revolutionary youths. To explore this under-researched area, this study concentrates on three sets of visual tropes: (1) selfies with martyrs, (2) selfies taken by revolutionary clerics in disaster- stricken areas, and (3) shared images of the holy shrine of Imam Reza on Instagram. In addition to online documents (including posters, photographs, and reports), the data includes selectively chosen Instagram postings retrieved by searching pertinent accounts, hashtags, and locations on the platform. The investigation inquires the ways in which online image-making has been incorporated in the construction of holy sites and the culture of sacrifice and martyrdom propagated by the IRI as ideal youth aspirations. The findings demonstrate the extensive appropriation of social media and intensive integration of online image-making in this field. The study contributes to understanding of the online spaces and practices aimed at extending the influence over the online youth culture in Iran in line with the IRI's cultural plans and policies.
... People can create and develop various symbols, including significant images, to illustrate the meaning of social reality that is representing something. YouTube becomes a furnish medium to manipulate the meaning of social reality to be something that can be 'enjoyed' by other people for entertainment (Chu, 2009;Peterson, 2016 power of audio-visual that inserted on YouTube makes it more attractive compared to other social media such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. ...
Understanding Communication and Identity Strategy of Indonesian Diaspora Women as YouTuber
Kurniawaty Yusuf
Rini Sudarmanti
em> Nowadays the presence of internet provides virtual spaces for diaspora women who are living outside Indonesia. Living within different cultures are challenging and social media platform can be as self-actualization medium to representing identities and expressing their emotional bonding with homeland. There are only several research which have revealed on how Indonesia women diaspora from mixed family especially in maintaining YouTube platforms. The aim of this study is tried to portray how Indonesian diaspora women revealing their national identity within video YouTube content. This research method was descriptive qualitative. Data were collected from ten videos of two Indonesian diasporas YouTuber who have mixed family, living abroad, and have more than 1 (one) million subscribers. We tried to explore from some categories such as video's location, moment or time background, target viewer, and on how delivering the messages within videos. Research finding showed that the video's contents indicated kind of negotiation construction for showing love and caring between homeland and recent locations, also acceptance with local identities. Elements of Indonesian are attached in their everyday life. In addition, they were still depicted as being related to domestic role and being responsible for taking care of the family. </em
... In particular, members of minority groups can benefit from the public character of the Internet and, at the same time, choose to create closed profiles to safeguard their privacy (Ross, 53 2019). When it comes to Muslims living in non-Muslim countries, previous academic scholarship has shown how the Internet can function as a space to negotiate religious identities and help Muslim women become narrators of their own stories (Kavakci & Kraeplin, 2016;Peterson, 2016;Waninger, 2015). Boy, Uitermark, and Wiersma (2018) explore the hashtag #hijabfashion and discover that Muslim sartorial practices exist across global networks but are also based on local centers that become relevant for Islamic fashion, such as the Dutch city of Rotterdam. ...
Likes, Comments, and Follow Requests: The Instagram User Experiences of Young Muslim Women in the Netherlands
Lale Mahmudova
Giulia Evolvi
Young Dutch Muslim women often lead complex existences: on the one hand, they may be considered "other" to European culture and expected to conform to so-called Western values; on the other hand, they can be subject to scrutiny within their cultural and religious communities. This article explores young Dutch Muslim women's online practices by focusing on Instagram. By discussing the theories of third spaces (Bhabha, 1994; Pennington, 2018b) and composite habitus (Bourdieu, 1990; Waltorp, 2015), we investigate the following questions: How do young Dutch Muslim women use Instagram? What are the opportunities and constraints that they face when using Instagram? Through qualitative interviews, we discovered that Instagram helps young Dutch Muslim women express their identity in their own terms, but it presents negative aspects connected with privacy and surveillance. We then discuss the need not to generalize Muslim women's experiences and instead to consider their selective use of Instagram and heterogeneity within Islam.
... Both digital technologies and online contents hold material qualities as they sustain the religious experience in ways which are complementary to physical objects. The materiality of the hijab is thus also relevant to religious practices in its digital mediation (Peterson 2016). I argue that the Internet embeds the materiality of the hijab on different levels: the veil, per se a material object that functions as a medium for the articulation of religious meanings and identities, is further mediated through the circulation of aesthetic narratives on the Internet. ...
The veil and its materiality: Muslim women's digital narratives about the burkini ban
In the summer of 2016, around 30 French cities banned the burkini—swimwear used by Muslim women that covers the entire body and head—from public beaches. French authorities supported the ban by claiming that the burkini was unhygienic, a uniform of Islamic extremism, and a symbol of women's oppression. Muslim head-coverings, including the burkini, are religious objects whose materiality points to complex semantic meanings often mediated in Internet discourses. Through a qualitative analysis of visual and textual narratives against the burkini ban circulated by Muslim women, this article looks at the way digital media practices help counteract stereotypes and gain control of visual representations. Muslim women focus on two main topics: 1) they challenge the idea of Muslims being 'aggressors' by describing the burkini as a comfortable swimsuit not connected with terrorism; 2) they refuse to be considered 'victims' by showing that the burkini holds different meanings that do not necessarily entail women's submission. Muslim women's digital narratives positively associate the materiality of the burkini with safety and freedom and focus on secular values rather than religious meanings.
... Yo ung people's engagementwith the Internet includes alsoMuslims in non-Muslim countries. Forexample, some young Muslim women create fashion blogs or Yo uTubev ideos to describer eligious-related stylistic practices, and also to negotiatethe visibilityofthe hijab (Kavakci /Kraeplin 2016;Peterson 2016). The use of humour on Tw itter allows Muslims to create spaces of socialization, as in the case of the hashtag #Muslimcandyheartrejecte mployedt oi ronically talk about romanticrelationships between Muslims living in the We st (Wills /Fecteau 2016). ...
#NousSommesUnis: Muslim Youth, Hypermediated Internet Spaces, and European Islam
Introduction: Islam, Space, and the Internet
Maria Chiara Giorda
A critical technocultural discourse analysis of Muslim fashion bloggers in France: charting 'restorative technoscapes'
J Market Manag
Kelly Pemberton
Jennifer Takhar
Using critical technocultural discourse analysis with attention to netnography and the insights of visual rhetoric, this study evaluates the online productions of 4 hijabi (veiled) French Muslim fashion influencers: Zozoliina, Lady Zorro, Salima Aliani, and the Barchamammas. We assess whether the increasing visibility of French hijabi fashion bloggers like these is changing attitudes about the integration of Muslims in France. The media construction of French Muslim identity and its resulting Islamophobia have created an 'imaginary Islam' steeped in negativism and racialised stigma, according to some scholars, to which our surveyed influencers respond, manipulating Orientalist tropes to foster ambiguities about religion, sexuality, and race. In drawing attention to dynamic, consumption-based intersections of modest fashion marketing, 'erasure,' and processes of meaning-making, we argue that hijabi French Muslim fashion bloggers are increasingly positioning themselves as 'cyberarbiters' of social transformation and shifting attitudes about the intersections of Islam, the body, and female sexuality.
Contextualizing current digital religion research on emerging technologies
Heidi Campbell
This article provides an overview of contemporary research within the interdisciplinary arc of scholarship known as digital religion studies, in which scholars explore the intersection between emerging digital technologies, lived and material religious practices in contemporary culture, and the impact the structures of the network society have on understandings of spirituality and religiosity. Digital religion studies specifically investigates how online and offline religious spaces and practices have become bridged, blended, and blurred as religious groups and practitioners seek to integrate their religious lives with technology use within different aspects of digital culture.
Blogging My Religion: Secular, Muslim, and Catholic Media Spaces in Europe
Religion in Europe is currently undergoing changes that are reconfiguring physical and virtual spaces of practice and belief, and these changes need to be understood with regards to the proliferation of digital media discourses. This book explores religious change in Europe through a comparative approach that analyzes Atheist, Catholic, and Muslim blogs as spaces for articulating narratives about religion that symbolically challenge the power of religious institutions. The book adds theoretical complexity to the study of religion and digital media with the concept of hypermediated religious spaces. The theory of hypermediation helps to critically discuss the theory of secularization and to contextualize religious change as the result of multiple entangled phenomena. It considers religion as being connected with secular and post-secular spaces, and media as embedding material forms, institutions, and technologies. A spatial perspective contextualizes hypermediated religious spaces as existing at the interstice of alternative and mainstream, private and public, imaginary and real venues. By offering the innovative perspective of hypermediated religious spaces, this book will be of significant interest to scholars of religious studies, the sociology of religion, and digital media.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any references for this publication.
Nobody likes a fake. Aesthetic value depends on perceived authenticity
Aenne A. Brielmann
Denis Pelli
People spend incredible amounts of money for original artworks and live music. Why? Perfect copies and high-quality recordings are available for less than one percent the price. Newman and Bloom (2012) have shown that people assign a higher monetary value to art objects that have had direct contact with the artist, suggesting that authenticity is key to the work's perceived value. With two online ... [Show full abstract] studies, we assessed the relation between perceived authenticity and aesthetic valuation. In experiment 1, participants (N=38) watched a series of live-music videos and were told in half of the trials the singer was lip-syncing. In experiment 2, participants (N=20) looked at German advertisements and were informed with half of them that the models in the photographs had been retouched. In both experiments, ratings of beauty, pleasure, and attractiveness were positively correlated with perceived authenticity and lower for "fake" stimuli involving lip-syncing or retouching. Videos and models rated "definitely not" authentic were never deemed "definitely" beautiful or attractive. Thus the earlier Newman and Bloom findings on monetary value are here extended to aesthetic value, affirming claims by artists (e.g., choreographer Bill T. Jones) that a feeling of authenticity is essential to aesthetic experiences, such as beauty.
Environmental and Lifestyle Correlates of Good Vision in an Elderly Sample
A. M. Prestrude
L. G. Meyer
The proportion of the elderly (age 60 and above) in the population of the United States increases each year (Kline, Sekuler, and Dismukes, 1982). Even though the process of aging appeals to very few (the alternative is certainly less attractive), most of us can expect to join the ranks of the elderly. Unfortunately, as our years accumulate, we experience a general decline in sensory acuity, ... [Show full abstract] strength, vigor, speed, and beauty. In a society that values these attributes, youth is the standard and the signs of aging are to be avoided, delayed, and when possible, camoflaged. "At present, youth is the fashion and age without honor." Thus, Weale (1963) began the preface to his volume "The Aging Eye." References to human age and the aging process are usually pejorative. A brief scan of "Roget's International Thesaurus" (Chapman, 1977) revealed the following quotes. On youth, "To be young is to be one of the immortals" (W. C. Hazlitt). Old age was called, "An incurable disease" by Seneca and described as, "A tyrant which forbids the pleasures of youth on pain of death" by LaRochefoucauld. Furthermore, old age is considered to be synonymous with debility, fatigue, and weakness. In a similar manner, the verb to age means to become extinct, belong to the past, fade, fossilize, molder, obsolesce, outdate, perish, and rust. Aged means decrepit, infirm, and weak.
Kierkegaard's Сoncept of the Аesthetics and Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten
Ihor Pasitschnyk
The paper discusses the problem of relation of Kierkegaard's aesthetic conception to the original project of aesthetics of Baumgarten. I demonstrate that Kierkegaard's aesthetic conception wasn't inspired by Baumgarten. On the one hand, Kierkegaard wasn't acquainted with Baumgarten's texts and he could meet only later interpretations of Baumgarten's aesthetics as a beautiful science or philosophy ... [Show full abstract] of art, if at all; on the other, the conception of aesthetic stage of human existence has nothing to do with epistemic context of Baumgarten's science of sensitive knowledge. Kierkegaard understands aesthetic as sensuous in the meaning of sensuous immediacy that is here a basis of pleasure, not through the satisfaction of carnal desires, but related to the ability to understand beauty and art. So Kierkegaard's interpretation of aesthetic as sensuous doesn't originate from Baumgarten's aesthetics, but, in a sense, leads to it. The reason for this is that Baumgarten's project of aesthetics not only gave a stimulus for all later philosophical processes called "aesthetics" but also was – though neglected – their invisible distant background. In this perspective, Kierkegaard's aesthetic conception is interesting as a random unpredictable hint at Baumgarten's authentic aesthetics already in the 19 th century.
Oscar Wilde's Aestheticism
February 2018 · Journal of Arts and Humanities
Beibei Guan
p> Abstract -Dandyism is a very important and significant social phenomenon in 19<sup>th</sup> century Europe. This paper focuses on Oscar Wilde and Wilde's numerous works. Aestheticism was used as a tool by the dandy in his rebellious performances in London, manifesting the contradiction between the spiritual and the material, the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, and art and nature. The social ... [Show full abstract] backgrounds and life experiences of Wilde influenced his transformation into dandies during the time of the Victorian period. With his strong sense of fashion and style, and their elegant ironic use of language, the dandies focused on the importance of artificial forms - himself included — in daily life and work. The dandies' concern was pleasure seeking through consuming the visual and actual. To this end Wilde developed unique aesthetic theories regarding evil; he looked for the beautiful in the ugly and repulsive. At the same time, Oscar Wilde criticized the hypocrisy of bourgeois morality and values, showing the genuinely ugly and evil reality beneath bourgeois industrial society, and focusing on revolt and resistance against the bourgeois world. Index Terms -Dandyism, Aestheticism, Revolt</p