Paper long abstract:

Based on recent qualitative research (July-August 2018), I examine how Muslim Tatar women negotiate gender roles within and outside the home, thereby challenging dominant perceptions of gender roles and Muslim piety in the region. Ten-fifteen years ago, at the peak of the Muslim revival, many practicing Muslim women were going against the grain of the dominant Soviet social norms. They actively advocated for their right to stay home and devote their lives to the private domain of caring for the family and children, based on their understandings of Islam and Muslim piety. Ten years later, some of these women are continuing to go against another grain—dominant perceptions of Muslim women as primarily wives and mothers that they had once advocated for. Faced with the reality of failed marriages or inability of the spouses to meet gender expectations they once held normative, these women are actively re-negotiating gender roles within and outside the home, advocating for their right to the public domain and personal growth, and ultimately challenging their own and others' prevalent popular and analytical assumptions about Muslim piety, Muslim women, and gender roles. This presentation is part of a longitudinal ethnographic study in Tatarstan, Russia, that examines how Muslim Tatar women draw on Muslim piety to achieve personal and social transformation.