“Proof of Purchase”: Navigating the Montreal Fashion Scene Muslim Style
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Representations of Muslim women in Western media tend to deploy Orientalist elements portraying them as oppressed, backwards, and in need of saving. These images establish Muslim women as unfashionable, identical to one another, and without personality. However, at times, these representations are compensated with depictions of assimilated or “good” Muslim women in which they are portrayed as fashionable, sexual, and palatable to Western sensibilities and expectations. These portrayals have been maintained and reinforced through governmental policies, popular culture, and consumerism. However, these two dominant frames leave little room for any nuanced understanding of Muslim women themselves. \n \nThis dissertation explores the lived-experiences of dress and shopping practices of Muslim women in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. Through interviews and fieldwork, I focus on the meaning-making and negotiations that Muslim women make in their consumption of media, their interpretations and development of their own religious practices, their navigation of the consumer sphere, as consumers as well as an entrepreneur, and finally of the place of Islam in relation to fashion. In this context, I explore the Muslim women’s relationship to Islam and fashion. To see fashion and Islam as oppositional and contradictory is to ignore the complex ways in which Muslim women incorporate and synthesize concepts to balance their own interpretations of what fashion means in their own lives. \n \nThis thesis demonstrates the myriad and complex ways in which Muslim women create definitions of fashion that are compatible with their own interpretations of culture, Islam, modesty, and practice. Their definitions of Islam and fashion are constantly renegotiated, reworked, and renewed throughout the course of their lives. Adherence to fashion, then, does not necessarily mean assimilating to the West and rejecting Islam, but rather, can be interpreted as a means that Muslim women use to create their own way of representing themselves without succumbing to the binary of appearing either as liberated or oppressed.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.010 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".