Unruly Souls: The Digital Activism of Muslim and Christian Feminists

A hip-hop artist in a hijab stares defiantly at the camera in a YouTube music video.A Twitter user jokes about the trauma she endured in Christian purity culture.Two women laugh on a podcast as they talk about "gender apartheid" in American Christianity.These are among the tactics of resistance that Kristin Peterson spotlights in Unruly Souls: the digital activism of Muslim and Christian feminists.Peterson dedicates her book to "all the unruly souls," signalling at the outset that she sees the work of the religious feminists that she chronicles as full of revolutionary potential."Unruliness," for Peterson, is about a lack of fit, as in those women who do not conform-because of their race, their size, or their beliefs-to the normative frame of womanhood constructed by patriarchal religious traditions.But unruliness also implies a playful sort of agency exemplified by the way that women use seemingly innocuous digital practices like meme-ification and selfie-taking as transgressive acts that challenge domination.As Peterson explains, "traditional religious spaces rarely welcome criticism from the margins, so digital spaces like Twitter, Instagram, podcasts, and digital videos offer creative outlets for these significant critiques" (93).Peterson argues that digital media enable and incubate new feminist critiques of religious traditions.In Unruly Souls, the author takes a broad view of the digital toolkit at the disposal of religious feminist activists by analyzing Twitter discourse, Instagram influencers, popular podcasts, and YouTube music videos.In her first chapter, Peterson carefully lays out the intersecting hierarchies that structure racial, religious, and gender oppression in American society.She begins with American evangelical Christians and explains how this group has successfully syncretized their religious exegeses to support white supremacy and male dominance, in effect marginalizing Black Christians and women.Following on from this, she charts how American Christians see Muslims either as in need of saving or as enemies in a holy war, and she traces these discourses to European colonial thought.Peterson does not fall into the trap of seeing religious feminism as birthed by the internet's possibilities, and, in this chapter, she looks back to the scholars of religious feminism, many of them "unruly souls" themselves, that preceded those she chronicles in this book.Peterson makes the interesting choice to examine two different religious traditions in her case studies: Christianity and Islam, and she focuses on the cultural, rather than the theological or formal expressions of these faiths.Chapter two looks at how Christians, organizing first through message boards and Facebook groups and then through Twitter hashtags, used humour and meme-ification to collectively recover from the trauma associated with Christian purity culture.In doing so, Peterson argues, these women created the activist networks that would scaffold the later #ChurchToo movement that ultimately led to several known abusers being removed from positions of authority in evangelicalism.Chapter three switches to examine unruly Muslim influencers on Instagram whose self-fashioning subverts both colloquially understood stereotypes about pious Muslim women and normative gender expression on