Nadine Naber,
"'Look, Mohammed the Terrorist Is Coming!' Cultural Racism, Nation-Based Racism, and the Intersectionality of Oppressions after 9/11"
(page 5 of 6)
Dark-Skinned, Bearded Terrorists, and the "Queery-ing" of "Muslim Masculinities"
Several interlocutors reported incidents in which beards, coupled
with dark skin and in some cases a particular form of religious dress,
emerged as signifiers of "Islamic fundamentalism" or "terrorism." Salah
Masri, director of one of the largest mosques in San Francisco,
explained:
I know this man who is a peaceful Tunisian Muslim that
dresses in white robe with a long beard. He is extremely quiet and
polite. He is a good engineer. He is an Internet web designer. After
September 11, we didn't see him at the masjid for a long time.
When we asked about him, it turned out he didn't feel comfortable
changing his clothes or shaving his beard so he decided to stay home.
Some people didn't want to look Muslim. I know people who dyed their
hair blond. One of them was a Turkish guy who dyed his hair blond
because he thought he looked Arab or Middle Eastern. We had many cases
of people shaving their beards or people who stopped attending the
mosque. But why dye your hair?! He still looked Middle Eastern with
it!
That Salah conflates "looking Muslim" with "looking Arab or Middle
Eastern" epitomizes a consensus among many of my interlocutors that
dominant U.S. discourses do not distinguish between "Arabs," "Middle
Easterners," or "Muslims" and construct an image of an "Arab/Middle
Eastern/Muslim look." Persons who closely resembled the corporate
media's "Arab/Middle Eastern/Muslim look" were particularly vulnerable
to federal government policies and harassment on the streets. One
immigrant-rights lawyer explained that the federal government went after
"the CNN version of what a terrorist looks like. He was dark, Middle
Eastern, and had a full beard. He was the typical terrorist looking
guy—or at least the guy who CNN portrays as the terrorist. Timothy
McVeigh is a terrorist, but he is not associated with terrorism because
he does not look like the typical terrorist-looking guy." My research
indicated that men who had beards, coupled with dark skin, were among
those most severely concerned for their safety—particularly if they wore
religious forms of dress perceived to be associated with Islam. That
non-Muslim South Asian men such as Sikhs who wear turbans were
repeatedly misidentified as Muslims (and in some cases killed) points to
the ways in which a range of signifiers can stand in as symbols of an
"Arab/Middle Eastern/Muslim look." Cases such as these reify dominant
U.S. distinctions between those who are with us and those who are with
the terrorists by rendering particular kinds of bodies not only as
unassimilable or "fundamentally foreign and antipathetic to modern
American society and cultures," but also as threatening to national
security and therefore legitimate targets of violence and harassment.[16]
Moreover, cases in which men considered shaving their beards or
avoiding attendance at their mosque illustrate that while dominant
discourses on "potential terrorists" often pulled particular bodies into
association with a violent "crazy" Muslim masculinity, they
simultaneously produced an internment of the psyche that they themselves
come to resist, transform, or reproduce.
On the streets, perpetrators of incidents of harassment often
deployed sexualized tropes in targeting men whose appearances "fit" the
"terrorist profile," reifying what Eman Desouky refers to as the
"queery-ing" of Arab-Muslim subjectivities.[17]
Dominant U.S. discourses have often depicted the United States as feminist and gay-safe through
comparisons between U.S. and Afghan views on gender and sexuality. Yet,
as Puar and Rai explain, "the U.S. state, having experienced a
castration and penetration of its capitalist masculinity, offers up
narratives of emasculation as appropriate punishment for bin Laden,
brown-skinned folks, and men in turbans." In other words, a highly
patriarchal and homophobic discourse has been central to the
racialization of persons associated with "Islamic fundamentalism" and
justifications for violence against them. Throughout San Francisco,
hegemonic conflations between queerness, sexual deviancy, and the
monstrous figure of "the terrorist" underpinned the subjection of
particular masculinities to physical or epistemic violence because they
"appeared" to be Muslim.[18]
Consider the following community activist's
narrative:
A guy from Afghanistan called into the hate-crime
hotline. He had gone to help his friend whose car had broken down when
he was doing some off-roading a couple of miles away from his
house—which is also near a military base in Dublin. By the time his
friend got out there to help him, there were two tow trucks out there.
The tow truck drivers called the police because the men had beards so
the drivers thought they were terrorists. They were near a reservoir and
the tow truck drivers were saying things like, "Oh, okay ... they're
tapping the water." So they took them to the military base to
interrogate them. Fifteen to twenty cops came. They all thought they
were trying to contaminate the water. One of the guys had prayer beads
with him and officers said quotes like, "your faggot beads. We're going
to f— you up; we're going to [give you oral sex]." The officers were
intimidating them.
In this narrative, the tow-truck drivers transform the Afghan men
into terrorists vis-à-vis assumptions that conflate "the beard" with
"Muslim masculinity" and "terrorism." Inscribing hegemonic discourses
that "they" are trying to kill/penetrate "us" on the Afghan men's
bodies, the tow-truck drivers transform them into terrorist
threats/enemies within. Here, patriarchal, homophobic discourses of
emasculation mark Islam—represented by the prayer beads—as "faggot," or
not quite the right/straight kind of masculinity. The police officers'
speech implicitly positions heterosexuality on the side of good and
queerness on the side of evil. Moreover, as the police punish Muslim
masculinities (read terrorists) with the threat of sodomy, a logic of
militarized patriotism intensifies the normativity of heterosexuality.
In this incident, as in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, homophobia and
racism intersect in the conceptualization that sexual degradation and
the transformation of Muslim masculinities into "faggots" is an
appropriate form of punishment.
Underlying this conceptualization is the heteronormative conflation
of shame, humiliation, and homosexuality. Trishala Deb's response to
the Abu Ghraib torture scandal offers an important critique of this
conflation. She argues that we need to ask ourselves what this latest
chapter (Abu Ghraib) teaches us about the inevitable homophobia and
racism in military culture as well as cultures of militarization.[19]
She adds "that there are more than two genders and the subjugation of
people who are any of those genders is not closer to femininity [or
emasculization] but to dehumanization."[20]
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