Marketing Muslim Lifestyles

Dr Reina Lewis

In this seminar Dr. Lewis will analyse the development of English-language Muslim lifestyle media to explore how new forms of faith-based identities are being increasingly experienced and expressed through models of consumption. She will examine recent developments in English-language Muslim lifestyle press and related commercial websites. Recently developed to serve the consumption needs of the emergent Islamic bourgeoisie, fashion coverage in the Muslim style media has elaborated for Muslims a sense of identity through consumption parallel to that established previously for minority sexual cultures (Lewis 1996, 1997).

Drawing on interviews with Muslim lifestyle journalists, she will explore how new roles are being developed for Muslim cultural intermediaries, and how this relates to the expansion and diversification of markets for Islamic goods and services. In the context of the hyper-visibility accorded to the veiled woman in UK/US/EU debates about nation and belonging, security and social exclusion, Dr. Lewis takes particular interest in the fashion and lifestyle pages of magazines and related websites. Interviews and visual analysis track the challenges involved in producing fashion content, focusing on how journalists identify and negotiate the political, religious, aesthetic, and commercial concerns that inform decisions such as which shops/brands to feature and how to photograph and represent the dressed body.

Bio

Reina Lewis is Artscom Centenary Professor of Fashion Studies at the London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London.

She is author of Rethinking Orientalism: Women, Travel, and the Ottoman Harem (IB Tauris, Rutgers University Press 2004) and Rethinking Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation (Routledge 1996).

Dr. Lewis co-edited, with Nancy Micklewright, Gender, Modernity and Liberty: Middle Eastern and Western Women’s Writings: A Critical Reader (IB Tauris 2006), and with Sara Mills Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader (Edinburgh University Press 2003).

She is also Editor, along with Teresa Heffernan, of the book series Cultures in Dialogue: Women’s Travel Writing (Gorgias Press).

Organiser: Bloomsbury Gender Network and the Centre for Gender Studies (SOAS)

Contact email: N.S.Al-Ali@soas.ac.uk