(Un)Bounded Systems

Abstract Against the backdrop and analysis of two legal cases, this article explores how Muslim women who chose to wear a niqab or a hijab deepen sociological understandings of lived religion and lived citizenship. I argue that the legal regulation of religion, in our case Muslim women’s sartorial religious practices, is anchored within notions of the authoritative rights of the state that adjudicate the ways that religion ought to be embodied in the public sphere and how citizens are permitted to differ for what Joseph Pugliese (2010) has termed prosthetic citizen wherein certain bodies must conform to state-sanctioned norms to be fully recognised as citizens. Drawing from this, I introduce the notion of ‘prosthetic believer’ to explore the politicised constraints placed on religious practice. The article argues that Muslim women’s engagements with law and public space reveal the multiplicity and complexity of agency; and the relational understanding that women have of themselves, their bodies, their sense of self, and their subjectivities that are inseparable from their lived experience of religion and lived citizenship.