5 - Muslim Lifestyle Media

Summary

Introduction

Since the turn of the twenty-first century Muslim lifestyle media has expanded rapidly. Within the sub-genre especially prominent are Muslim women producing content for other Muslim women. Muslim women bloggers – so-called ‘hijabi bloggers’ – attract large global followings. For instance, Huda Kattan, an American born to Iraqi parents, now based in Dubai, has 45.5 million Instagram followers @HudaBeauty, which Vogue Arabia contextualises as ‘nearly 15 times the population of Dubai’ (https://en.vogue.me/culture /huda-kattan-10-facts-about-her/). The Islamic marketplace reveals geographical diversity with hubs of activity based in countries such as Indonesia, Quwait, the United Arab Emirates, the US, Canada, Australia, The Netherlands and the UK. Working from these countries and others, Muslim women bloggers are optimising their reach by communicating across multiple media platforms, such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.

Muslim lifestyle media creates digital spaces of exchange and is associated with consumer capitalism. As I discuss in this chapter there are also less explored dimensions around access to informal education that can transcend local or national contexts. Often a stated intention of Muslim lifestyle media is strengthening supra-national identification with what is sometimes termed the global Muslima, or Muslim female community. Online minority spaces for identification and belonging are found to be especially attractive in hostile local environments where subjects might experience multiple forms of social and economic exclusion in the lived everyday (see Warren 2018, 2019). The Islamic marketplace, modest fashion and hijabi blogging have received academic attention in relation to identity formation and belonging, but there are very few qualitative studies into the everyday performance of media work. The critical roles of Muslim women in performing media and digital labour has not been widely explored, nor has the strategic work of mobilising representations of Muslim women that are positive and inclusive of intra-Muslim difference (for an exception see Lewis 2015). The lack of attention to Muslim women's labour power is perhaps surprising given the growth in popular and scholarly interest in issues of gender, Islam and sectarianism, access to education and labour and its gendered, racialised and faith dimensions, the role of digital media in social organising, and the continued rise of the Islamic cultural industries. Original empirical insights in this chapter explore the lived experiences of female producers within the burgeoning arena of Muslim lifestyle media and its imbrications with ‘mainstream’ media.