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From Marginal to Mainstream: An Ethnographic Exploration of Faith, Fashion, and Female Muslim Entrepreneurship in the United States

Abstract

The Modest Fashion Phenomenon has created new ways of understanding the complexities of Muslim womanhood through Islamic corporeality and entrepreneurial engagement within the United States. By moving beyond the veil as a mere marker of a collective religious identity and instead as an expression of hyper-individualized female Muslim subjectivity, new regimes of visibility and entrepreneurial activity are recognized. Female Muslim entrepreneurship has created a space of empowerment fostered through the neoliberal marketplace, catapulting female Muslims and their enterprises into the mainstream like never before altering Islam's cultural footprint with the west.