Appearances: Unveiling the Terrorist’s Daughter
The intersection of race and gender was also apparent in the harassment of women who wore a headscarf. A general consensus among community leaders was that federal government policies disproportionately targeted men while hate crimes and incidents of harassment in the public sphere disproportionately targeted women. As Farah, a Muslim American woman community activist put it, “Women who wear hijab were more of a target because they’re more visible than Muslim men in public. The awareness that they were in more danger and were more impacted than men could be seen by all of the events that were organized in solidarity with veiled women in response to the backlash. There were days of solidarity organized across the nation.” Several cases in which employers fired women from their jobs for wearing headscarves instilled a sense of apprehension about the acceptability of discrimination against Muslim women in the public sphere among several of my interlocutors. As Manal, a university student explained, “We felt supported, but at the same time, there was a concern for our safety. I had never carried pepper spray. I started carrying pepper spray after 9/11 and was really being mindful of my surroundings. I remember the Muslim Student Association meetings—afterwards everyone would make sure that no one was walking alone to their cars.” Several Muslim American community leaders recalled cases in which women debated whether they should remove their scarves. As Amal, another university student put it, “I knew I had to prepare for at least some kind of backlash because I was visually identifiable. My mother, who doesn’t cover, specifically told me, ‘Don’t go outside for a month or two. Wait till things die down.’ I was like, ‘I shouldn’t hide. I shouldn’t be scared or restrain my lifestyle because of ignorance.'” In this sense, considerations of whether and to what extent one should wear or remove a headscarf or go out in public generated an “internment of the psyche” or the awareness that one must become habitually concerned about hegemonic misinterpretations and mistranslations.
While “Arab Muslim” masculinities were produced as the subjects of discourses that construct their primary and stable identity as violent agents of terrorism and/or misogyny, or the “true” enemy of the nation, “Arab Muslim” femininities, signified by the headscarf, were articulated as extensions of those practices. In several cases, that headscarves signified an identification that transformed particular women into daughters or sisters of terrorists in general, or Osama or Saddam in particular, exemplifies one of the ways in which gender permeated nation-based racism in the context of the “war on terror.” Lamia, a community activist summarized what she witnessed through her work among Arab Muslim youth in the Tenderloin area of San Francisco: “After September 11, girls who wear hijab received lots of harassment on the bus, at school and on the street. People would try and pull their hijab off.” The following excerpt from a group interview with Iraqi youth elucidates Lamia’s point:
Maha: “My sister was coming home from school one day and people were calling her, ‘Osama’s daughter.'”
Salma: “At school, kids take off their shirts and put them on their heads and say, ‘We look like Osama’s daughter now. We look like you now.’ Some kids would come up to us and say, ‘Why don’t you take it off? Are you still representing Osama?'”
In this narrative, young Arab Muslim girls are constructed as though patriarchal kinship ties are the sole determinants of their identities. Reduced to “daughters of Osama,” they are transformed into the “property,” “the harmonious extension” of the enemy of the nation within, or symbols that connect others to the “real actors” or “terrorists” but who do not stand on their own (and lack agency).1 The “daughter of a terrorist” metaphor also articulates a condemnation of Muslim women for veiling. Reifying the gendered logic of nation-based racism that constructs a binary between us versus them and good, or moral Americans versus bad immoral potential criminal terrorists, Salma’s peer not only asks her to “unveil” but also reduces her realm of possibilities to either “taking off her veil” or “representing Osama.” For Salma’s peer, either she is unveiled/with us, or she is with terrorism. In this sense, the “veil” serves as a boundary marker between “us” and “them,” and as long as women remain “veiled” they remain intrinsically connected to “potential terrorists.”
- Shohat, Ella and Robert Stam. 1994. Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media. New York: Routledge. [↩]
