Asena Karipek

I’m a sociologist of gender, religion, and postcoloniality who studies postcolonial feminism to show how women’s bodies are policed and how women of color resist colonial understandings of beauty. Using comparative qualitative methods, I link lived experience to institutional rules to show how Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism operate and how women resist, moving debates beyond Western-centric assumptions about beauty and feminism. My current project treats the hijab as a site where aesthetics, faith, and power meet: how policies, media, and everyday encounters frame it—and how hijabi women themselves redefine beauty, autonomy, and belonging in response. By exploring micro-level experiences, I clarify the mechanisms producing inequality and the strategies of resistance. The result is a theory of beauty politics that provincializes Western frames and centers Muslim women’s knowledge.