This dissertation builds from a longstanding sociological question: to what degree and in what manner do immigrants adapt to the new society of the United States. In particular, it examines Somali immigrants' ways of relating to both their original and the new mainstream American culture concerning gender roles and relationships. This study addresses three central questions: first, how do Somali immigrants negotiate their gender notions and practices between those maintained from the Somali culture and those adopted from the American mainstream culture; second, to what extent do immigrants’ understandings of Islamic gender texts shape the negotiation process- and in turn, how does the integration process shape their understanding of Islamic gender discourse; and third to what extent do resultant gender perceptions and practices reflect transnational/heterolocal integration and reconciliation between cultures.
This study broadens the model of heterolocalism by focusing on Islam and gender to understand the integration behavior of Somali immigrants. It also participates to the gender and immigration literature by focusing on the household and by shedding light on how gender functions in Muslim cultures. Results of this study contribute to Islamic studies by describing how ijtihad can facilitate Muslim immigrants’ incorporation into dominantly non-Muslim societies in the West. Results of this study are useful in designing integration programs for Muslim and Somali immigrants, whose numbers are increasing in the United States.
Heterolocalism is the theoretical foundation this study is built on. In response to the shortcomings of both the classical assimilation and the pluralism models in explaining the behavior of new immigrants, heterolocalism, established by Wilbur Zelinsky and Barrett Lee (1998), explains the relationship between spatial dispersion of new immigrants and the social cross-border networks that help preserve ethnic and religious identities without residential propinquity.
This study is based on a grounded theory approach to collecting/ interpreting data obtained from interviewing thirty-eight immigrants in Columbus, Ohio. Analyzing the data centered around two main issues:
1. Gender roles and relationships within the Somali immigrant family, including perspectives on female identity, gender division of domestic labor and decision-making power.
2. Gender relationships outside the family, mainly courtship patterns, “arranged marriages” and sexuality.
Participants’ accounts describe how they view gender roles and relations between the community networks in their original culture and the dominant individualism in the American mainstream, how they modify these in the new society and what Islamic principles they cite to support their new perspectives. Somali immigrants’ re-discovering and interpretation of the Islamic gender principles mediate between the two cultural polarized ends; the original and the American mainstream cultures. As part of the new wave of Muslim population into the United States, Somali immigrants’ gender and family experiences exhibit clear attributes of the heterolocalist behavior that crosses spatial and cultural boundaries. Analysis concludes that neither the classic assimilation theory nor the isolationist pluralism models explain Somali immigrants’ unique hybrid identities and behavior. Somali immigrants’ cross-cultural selection of aspects from both cultures and interweaving them in everyday lives indicates a heterolocal pattern of integration in a transnational globalised world.