TY - JOUR
T1 - ‘Lebanese Muslim’
T2 - a Bourdieuian ‘Capital’ offense in an Australian coastal town
AU - Abdel-Fattah, Randa
PY - 2016/7/3
Y1 - 2016/7/3
N2 - This article focuses on encounters between differently habituated bodies at ‘Bayside’, a popular Anglo-majority Australian coastal town. Based on in-depth interviews with locals, I show how banal speech acts, interpretations of encounters, corporeal attitudes and practices of exclusion construct the embodied behaviour and haptic space of Lebanese Muslims visitors as threatening and inferior, producing a racialised habitus of Lebanese Muslims. I enrol Ghassan Hage’s theoretical framework on habitus and the field of Whiteness in multicultural Australia to argue that the fields of gender, class, ethnicity, religion and race – evoked in various settings such as the beach, cafes, parks – ‘fold’ [Noble, G, 2013. ‘It is home but it is not home’: habitus, field and the migrant. Journal of sociology, 49 (2–3), 341–356] into the field of Whiteness such that Lebanese Muslims are situated in a hierarchy of valuation that privileges the different forms of capital possessed by Bayside residents. The result, among the participants, is a perception of Lebanese Muslim body techniques and modes of using public space as inferior, threatening and out of place.
AB - This article focuses on encounters between differently habituated bodies at ‘Bayside’, a popular Anglo-majority Australian coastal town. Based on in-depth interviews with locals, I show how banal speech acts, interpretations of encounters, corporeal attitudes and practices of exclusion construct the embodied behaviour and haptic space of Lebanese Muslims visitors as threatening and inferior, producing a racialised habitus of Lebanese Muslims. I enrol Ghassan Hage’s theoretical framework on habitus and the field of Whiteness in multicultural Australia to argue that the fields of gender, class, ethnicity, religion and race – evoked in various settings such as the beach, cafes, parks – ‘fold’ [Noble, G, 2013. ‘It is home but it is not home’: habitus, field and the migrant. Journal of sociology, 49 (2–3), 341–356] into the field of Whiteness such that Lebanese Muslims are situated in a hierarchy of valuation that privileges the different forms of capital possessed by Bayside residents. The result, among the participants, is a perception of Lebanese Muslim body techniques and modes of using public space as inferior, threatening and out of place.
KW - embodiment’
KW - habitus
KW - Islam
KW - Islamophobia
KW - Muslim
KW - racism
KW - whiteness
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84977628266&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1080/07256868.2016.1190696
DO - 10.1080/07256868.2016.1190696
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84977628266
VL - 37
SP - 323
EP - 338
JO - Journal of Intercultural Studies
JF - Journal of Intercultural Studies
SN - 0725-6868
IS - 4
ER -