Abstract
A growing body of research acknowledges and investigates the salience of Whiteness as a dominant, yet unmarked racial identity in Eastern Europe (Imre 2005; Turda and Quine 2018). Scholars have analyzed imbrications of Whiteness with nationality (Balogun 2020; Jaskulowski 2020), Catholic religion (Balogun 2016; Fiałkowska 2020), migration (Botterill and Burrell 2019) and historically, positionality at the edges of colonial empires (Skulimowska 2019; Grzechnik 2020). To build on these foci, we “flip the script” and extend our analysis to strategic identity performances of Polish White female converts to Islam. By embracing a religion historically racialized as a non-White (Chan-Malik 2018), they must negotiate “non-normative Whiteness” and “non-normative White femininity” in the new religious field, and cope with shifts in social positioning. Additionally, those living outside Poland must wrestle with perceptions of their “non-normative Whiteness” as Eastern Europeans. Therefore, we argue that conversion to Islam, often intersecting with experiences of migration, illuminates racially framed intersectional identities in Eastern Europe. As theoretical lens, we use the concept of the White habitus (Bonilla-Silva ([2003] 2010, 104), that is ‘‘a racialized, uninterrupted socialization process that conditions and creates whites’ racial taste, perceptions, feelings, and emotions and their views on racial matters.” We focus on the question: how PWFCs deploy their White habitus to negotiate their racial-gender identities in Muslim- and non-Muslim-majority settings, within and outside Poland. We apply this analysis to a corpus of 35 qualitative interviews with PWFCs in Poland and the UK.
Presenters
Anna PielaVisiting Scholar, Religion, Northwestern University, Illinois, United States Joanna Krotofil
Assistant Professor, Institute for the Study of Religions, Joanna Krotofil, Poland
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Whiteness, Islam, Conversion, Race, Racism, Identity Performances, White Habitus
