Constructing Modernity from Its Borders: Muslim Minority Women's Encounter with Education and Assisted Reproductive Technology in Modern Greece

This article explores conceptions of modernity as both gendered and culturally mediated formations in the longstanding minority of Thrace in Northern Greece, examining how women in this community treat mobility, education, and the use of assisted reproductive technologies. In engaging these subjects both discursively and practically, this "minority within the minority" simultaneously embraces and undermines dominant understandings of modernity that code it as ethnoculturally Greek and as antithetical to traditional femininity. Through speaking and learning in Greek, as well as discursively exposing new ideas around gender and reproduction, these Muslim women first enter into a nationalized vision of modernity, whose incorporation of these once excluded subjects demands its own modification, and second impose their own distinct vision of modernity. Their minority status allows them to pursue a productive mobility, literally and symbolically, between Greece and Turkey, while their complex identities forge at moments a distinctive motile praxis of Muslim modernity-making.