Questioning Freedom: A Transnational Feminist Critique of the Representation of Muslim Women in I am Malala?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Do Muslim women need freedom? has remained a contentious question in gender equality discourses since 9/11. In this ongoing debate, the usage of personal narratives of Muslim women plays a critical role in popularising the perception that Muslim women are denied their right to freedom in Islamic societies. Approaching these narratives with the idea of freedom configured in secular liberal tradition impedes the critical responsiveness to the variants of freedom that govern the lives of Muslim women. As a corrective to this long-held critical bias, this research contends that any attempt to settle this controversy needs to be attentive to the questions that must precede the readings of such narratives: What is freedom? Is it an essentialist idea? What practices harm Muslim women? What type of freedom do Muslim women need? This paper responds to these questions by situating them in its reading of I Am Malala to destabilize the mainstream readings of the text, which view the oppression of Muslim women as rooted in religion. Informed by the transnational feminist understanding of freedom as postulated by Serene J. Kahder in Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational Feminist Ethic(2019), an anti-essentialist reading of this narrative rejects the representation of traditional forms of selfhood of Muslim women as marginalized compared to the dominant construction of individualized selfhood of Malala. Khader’s idea of freedom negates the liberal feminist’s approach to the value of independence individualism as a necessary precondition for freedom supports this paper to argue against the representation of Muslim women as oppressed in I am Malala.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.050 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
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".