Reconciling Islamic-Reformist Feminist Thought with the Intersectionality Framework

Despite the recent wave of scholarship on intersectionality, feminist research has yet to adequately engage with the role of religion within discussions of intersectionality, other than to occasionally list religion as one in a list of relevant differences among the other collection of social divisions that are typically taken into account. Consequently, religion has received a relatively little attention within the intersectionality framework as an axis of difference and was rarely conceptualized as a positionality. This means that whenever movements such as Islamic-reformist feminism emerge, the response is to either label them as further proof of false consciousness, or to not engage with them at all. Thus, this paper will be mainly concerned with examining the discursive construction of the Islamic-reformist feminist thought on Facebook, in relation to the women to drive movement in Saudi Arabia, in order to shed some light on the arrays of meaning and discursive practices that emerged and manifested themselves online, and how women are reclaiming the usage of the intersectionality framework and integrating religious difference to it.