Proposed Paper Title: Playing for American Muslim Girlhood in a time of Genocide

This paper illustrates the ways American Muslim teen girls in the U.S. heartland respond creatively, playfully, faithfully and politically to the precarity of their world through playing basketball. I map the various authorizing forces which impact girls’ ability to play basketball and how the girls play authorities against each other to achieve their goals. I show that they do this by playing up or downplaying basketball as a serious endeavor. Their desire to play is very serious, but they play to have fun. While some girls "fight to play" by finessing the meritorious and beneficial aspects of playing basketball to parents skeptical of their daughters “wasting time,” other girls "play to fight," using their platform as esteemed athletes for anti-war activism. I argue that through playing, Muslim teens recover a girlhood for themselves in a context bent on denying it to them while transforming the community around them.