Muslimah Media Watch: Media activism and Muslim choreographies of social change

This article explores media activism in the Muslim context by focusing on the blog, Muslimah Media Watch. It analyzes the significance of blogging as an activist tool used by a group of Muslim women to influence an ongoing and contested process of social change in Islam. Through interviews with the founder and bloggers of the site and a textual analysis of the blog posts, the author focuses on the aesthetic forms and discursive practices of digital Muslim activism and argues that projects such as Muslimah Media Watch should be evaluated not in terms of a revolutionary subversion of hegemonic discourse on gender in Islam, but rather as part of small but consistent disruptive flows of dissent which are significant precisely because of the nature of their intervention and the tactics of their resistance. The blog has also become a prime discursive and performative space where young Muslims debate and contest what it means to be modern in transnational settings.