Kristin Peterson’s Unruly Souls, which highlights the positive ways that Muslim and Christian feminists are utilizing digital media to resist and overcome patriarchal systems, is a welcome report, given current criticism over the uses and abuses of social media. “Digital media provide the space and supportive community in which to work out one’s identity as a religious misfit,” she writes (8), thus their importance to activists seeking social change. The book’s theoretical foundation rests on intersectional, feminist, decolonial, and queer perspectives in its examination of religious identity. Peterson is well aware of the ethical issues involved in conducting internet research, and explains her attempts to anticipate, avoid, and ameliorate problems. In five succinct chapters, plus an introduction and conclusion, the book alternately examines the purity culture(s) that enclose evangelical Christian and Muslim women, and then at the multifarious ways in which activists are breaking those boundaries—on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook,...
University of California Press