Muslim American Speculative Fiction: Figuring feminist epistemologies, religious histories, and genre traditions.

MUSLIM Americans; SPECULATIVE fiction; FEMINIST literature; AMERICAN fiction; WOMEN'S sexual behavior; MUSLIM identity; THEORY of knowledge

Rejecting the idea that the feminist mode is a Western innovation - in both the triumphant sense where feminist progress is imagined as attributable to Western modernity, or in the pejorative sense where it is reduced to colonialist imposition of cultural hegemony - Wilson's novel characterizes Fatima's agonistic feminist agency as prompted from her exposure to philosophical thought from both "Western" and "Eastern" traditions: "This is what happens", Lady Aisha says, "when you let a concubine read Ibn Arabi and Plato." The two novels, and the I Ms. Marvel i comic, feature explicitly feminist heroines who employ feminist rhetoric and launch feminist critique. In the second section of this article, I read these texts as participating in miriam cooke's Muslim feminist mode of "multiple critique", that expansive critical project where Muslim feminists identify and engage in multiple critical modes, balancing multifaceted critiques that acknowledge what are perceived to be conflicting allegiances and priorities. I Ms. Marvel i offers such a critique through discursive interventions regarding American multicultural pluralism and American Islamophobia. As they construct these historical critiques with care, they also fashion two different feminist types that enact the heroicism based on a Muslim ethos of I khilafa i and mutual care: Wilson writes agonistic heroines, to use Saba Mahmood's characterization of normative feminist epistemologies, while Chakraborty composes embedded ones. [Extracted from the article]