Unveiling Agency: Investigating Muslim Women’s Agency in Hijab Discourse through Positioning Analysis

Ewa Glapka

Abstract


The central premise of this article is that of all approaches to veiling, discourse analysis has a particular potential of demonstrating its multifaceted nature. Drawing on interviews from South African Muslim women, the study investigates one of the most polarizing aspects of veiling—the agency of hijab-donning women. Because its constitution protects public veiling, South Africa offers women the freedom to define their own hijab practices without legal compulsion or prohibition, providing an ideal context in which to explore hijabi agency. Often simplified in social and political studies for their lack of attention to language mediating women’s experience, here veiling is examined via positioning analysis. With its focus on how individuals situate themselves and others in discourse, positioning analysis reveals complex mechanisms of identity construction. The findings illustrate participants’ commitment to ‘new veiling’, as they seek to construct and maintain agentic identities while the intersecting structures of power, religion, and culture constrain these efforts, highlighting how contested agency in veiling is. Ultimately, the article shows that participants’ diverse subjectivities identified via positioning analysis, undermine the reductive, hijabophobic discourses that portray Muslim women as passive and oppressed.


Keywords


agency; hijab; new veiling; positioning analysis; stance analysis

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References


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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17576/gema-2025-2503-05

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