“I Would Have Given them a Piece of my Mind”: Spatialized Feelings and Emotion Work Among Racialized Muslim Women in Québec

Abstract

The 2013 Charter of Values in Québec proposed to ban “ostentatious” religious symbols in the public sphere; while ostensibly neutral, such bans harm women who identify as Muslim, hurting their sense of belonging. This article examines the emotional experiences of Canadian Muslim women and the emotion work they do to manage non-Muslims’ impressions of them in a context of rampant Islamophobia. To understand their experiences, I develop a concept called spatialized feelings—how emotions, relationally accomplished in intersectional hierarchies, are contingent on the spaces social actors occupy. My interviews and participant observation of Muslim women in Québec revealed that their feelings about self and belonging were spatialized. In spaces dominated by whiteness (work, school, in public), my participants felt different, due to experiences of exclusion. In spaces with other Muslims, participants felt connected, but belonging was complicated by intersectional identities. Although their engagement in emotion work indicated agency, emotion work reproduced raced and gendered bodies and spaces. With exclusionary politics on the rise across the Atlantic, targeted minorities will increasingly experience racialization in gendered ways in public spaces; spatialized feelings are at the core of understanding the consequences of these politics for belonging and emotion work.