Responding to the secular Other multiple first person perspectives Using blogging as a way of explicitly challenging criticism about what religious dress indicates about gender roles in their communities is therefore part of how Muslim and Jewish women bloggers enact their online identities. Common themes in such posts include discussions of the limits of contemporary secular feminism and society, personal agency over religious dress (demonstrating how their dress practices are related to wider feminist debates), and through offering personal and often humorous rebuttals to what they argue are misunderstandings (and resulting stereotypes) about their religious practice. Bloggers from nominally isolated or traditional religious communities thus demonstrate a sophisticated understanding of the criticisms levelled at their dress practices and associated gender roles. In both the Jewish and Muslim blogosphere repeated emphasis on counter-narratives tend to be found on blogs that deliberately serve that specific purpose. While they remain based in first person perspectives, these are often blogs that aggregate more than one person’s writing. Examples of such blogs include AltMuslimah, the more recent The Hijab Project, or Jew in the City. Founded in 2009 on the principle of creating an online space where Muslims between the ages of 18-45 could write about their concerns about gender and Islam, AltMuslimah is now (2016) a resource and platform for Muslims and non-Muslims alike to discuss those matters. Similarly, Jew in the City was started in 2007, and has since grown to a team of twelve people who publish frequently about many aspects of Orthodox Jewish life, as well as offering consultancy services, short films and social media content. The longevity of and activity on such blogs indicates that the need to address the representations about religious women as oppressed remains. Such blogs can, but do not necessarily, promote a consistent set of arguments. Instead, the strength of aggregation blogs usually stems from the diversity of voices and perspectives about different aspects of being a woman practicing a minority religion in the West. Thus, I agree with Xxxx (2015) that the aggregation blog AltMuslimah, which was one of the first ones consulted in this research, contains blogs posts that act as counter-narratives. In contrast to her results, however, I have not found this to be an exhaustive category for analysing writing about religious dress in the blogging networks I have studied. Wh...
