WGSS Fall Colloquium: "Embodied Authority: Women's Experiences as Exegesis" (Open to faculty and graduate students)

This paper analyzes how the Women's Mosque of America (WMA), a women-only mosque in Los Angeles established in 2015, promotes a new genre of sermons based on women's experiences. It examines how the WMA preachers (who are all women) explore the subject of gender violence by treating women's bodies as an important site of knowledge and a valid basis to approach Qur'anic exegesis. It also analyzes WMA sermons that engage subjects like marriage and motherhood, and suggests that WMA preachers do not reproduce existing male forms of leadership but fill a critical gap in Islamic authority