The War on Terror on Muslim Women and Girls: Forging Transformative Solidarities

This article is based on remarks delivered at Invisible No More in November 2017 by CUNY law professor Chaumtoli Huq. ¹ These stories, including of Huq’s experience of brutality at the hands of the New York City Police Department and of two young Muslim women profiled, detained, and, in one case, deported post-9/11 on suspicion of terrorism, are discussed in greater detail in Invisible No More: Police Violence against Black Women and Women of Color (Beacon Press, 2017). ² They continue to resonate as violence against women and trans, gender nonconforming, and queer people in Muslim-majority nations is used to justify the “Muslim ban” while Muslim women – like Itemid Al-Matar, whose story of being tackled, strip searched, and arrested by three police officers as she ran from one subway platform to the next in an attempt to catch a train home, is also told in Invisible No More ³ – continue to be profiled and policed as “terrorists.” Huq’s call for internal and international solidarity that names these two shapes of Islamophobia as different faces of the same coin, and for a refusal to shun Muslim women so labeled, is both timely and necessary.

The ideology and rhetoric of the “war on terror,” ⁴ terminology that emerged after 9/11 to describe the United States’s foreign policy driven by Islamophobia, militarization, and war, is rooted in colonialism and orientalism. ⁵ It is premised on the idea that the United States, or Western countries more generally, are “civilized”; that Islam is “barbaric”; and that Muslim people, communities, and countries are prone to violence and terrorism. Bush’s polemic framing of that moment ⁶ – “You’re either with us or against us” – set up a false dichotomy of a “clash of civilizations” that continues to this day, amplified by the current president and political climate. The United States maintains a foreign policy in which drone strikes, “shock and awe,” and collateral damage are justified as part of the war on terror’s “civilizing” mission. It is therefore not surprising that Muslim majority countries in which the United States has intervened or destabilized are the subject of the current travel ban. ⁷

The war on terror also informs US domestic policy. Under its logic, Muslims are seen as a dangerous national security threat. Recent studies show that 56 per cent of Americans perceive Muslim Americans to be insufficiently American, and that Republicans want to subject Muslim Americans to greater surveillance and even to deny them the right to vote. ⁸ Although advocacy narratives around resistance to the war on terror have largely focused on men, Muslim women have led campaigns for their husbands, sons, and male family members who were targets of the war on terror policy – and have themselves been targeted.

Gender is integral to the war on terror. Part of the logic of the United States’s civilizing mission is that Muslim women need to be saved from patriarchal and barbaric Muslim men and the regimes that oppress and exploit them. ⁹ The war on terror thus employs gender to justify violence and war abroad and to exclude people from the United States. When in the United States, Muslim women are expected to assimilate into Western society. But when they maintain their religious identities and refuse to embrace this narrative and the possibilities for “liberation” that the country offers, they are viewed as untrustworthy and dangerous.

It is not just Muslim women who are framed as being at risk of violence and subjugation by Muslim men and nations. Anti-Muslim groups such as Act for America use gender to sound a false alarm that the presence of Muslims in the United States represents an effort to impose shariah (Islamic) law, and that groups like them defend Muslim and American women and children from shariah law so that they can enjoy the protections of the US constitution. ¹⁰

Through cases that involve Muslim women and girls from different time periods, I illustrate how false assumptions about Muslim women and war on terror logic are present and embedded in the US legal system. I also highlight how the war on terror is part of a criminalizing web that supports patriarchy, xenophobia, Islamophobia, and white supremacy. Finally, I urge us to practice transformative solidarities where we hold movement space together and to forge a politics that counters these multiple forms of oppression.

First, I want to bring back into focus two teenage girls who were causalities in this war on terror. In 2005, two sixteen-year-old Muslim girls – Tashnuba Hayder, from Bangladesh, and Adama Bah, ¹¹ from Guinea – were arrested on the pretext that they were potential suicide bombers. Both girls were undocumented and, not unlike many young immigrants brought to the United States, did not know of their immigration status until they were arrested. At that time, Tashnuba lived in Queens, New York, and Adama lived in Harlem, New York. Each was detained solely based on her tangential association with the other at a mosque and, in Tashnuba’s case, for listening online to an Islamic cleric accused of encouraging suicide bombing. ¹² An FBI agent posing as a youth counselor interrogated Tashnuba about her life in such a way as to promote a profile of a lonely, radicalized teenager.

Their cases were among the first to involve allegations of terrorism brought against minors. While no terrorism-related charges were ever brought, both teens were charged with immigration offenses because they were undocumented. While Tashnuba and her family accepted voluntary departure and agreed to leave the United States rather than challenge deportation proceedings, Adama filed for, and was eventually granted, asylum. ¹³ To date neither girl, now young women, have ever been informed of the evidence that was the basis of criminal allegations that they were suicide bombers or supported terrorism. Yet the manner in which they were interrogated and arrested criminalized them as such, depending on and perpetuating narratives that construct Muslim women as dangerous threats and funnel them into the immigration enforcement system.

The war on terror rhetoric has infused our anti-immigrant policies such that the narrative of national security threats allows the state to justify employing state violence against the bodies of two minor girls and detaining them for six weeks before placing them into deportation proceedings.

A painful but rarely surfaced aspect of these girls’ stories, especially Adama’s, is the lack of support. Adama reports being shunned by both the Muslim community and by the broader activist community because people were afraid that she was in fact a suicide bomber or a terrorist. She was not viewed as a community member who deserved solidarity and support. After her ordeal, still a young girl, she had to drop out of high school and work in various low-wage jobs to support her family. Through her story, we clearly see the interlocking impacts of white supremacy, anti-Black racism, the war on terror, patriarchy, state violence, and xenophobia. New York’s Muslim and broader progressive communities were unable to forge solidarities to confront these systemic concerns until much later, when we became more aware of her case and these issues. ¹⁴

I can personally relate to Adama’s disappointment through my own experience of aggressive arrest ¹⁵ after a 2014 rally to oppose bombing in Gaza. ¹⁶ While suing the NYPD for my unlawful arrest, I experienced a different kind of distancing from activists. In some cases, people seemed to not want to be involved in my case because I had been at a rally to support Palestine as a Muslim woman. In others, people seemed to distance themselves because my case did not fit the narrative of police brutality impacting men, or because I had not been brutalized “as badly as others.” ¹⁷ Yet policing, state violence, race, gender, and Islamophobia are all interrelated, and we need to think through their connections in moving forward. Accordingly, I talk and write about my case in a way that articulates these connections without flattening the complexities and unique ways in which white supremacy, sexism, and xenophobia lands on each of our personal/political histories. ¹⁸

Tashnuba’s and Adama’s cases, involving a Bangladeshi and West African immigrant girl both targeted by the war on terror and xenophobia in 2005, remind us that the criminalization and stigmatization of Muslims, including women and girls, predates Donald J. Trump’s presidency. Muslim women continue to be viewed as dangerous and radicalizing in the current political climate, as the cases of Tashfeen Malik and Noor Salman illustrate. ¹⁹

Tashfeen, one of the 2015 San Bernardino, California, shooters, was presented as more responsible for the mass shooting and as someone who radicalized her American husband and used her marriage to gain access to the United States. ²⁰ This narrative of the duplicitous and dangerous Muslim woman shows up in other places – for instance, some speculate that Colin Kaepernick’s protest of police brutality in the United States was instigated by his Muslim girlfriend Nessa Diab. ²¹ Noor Salman, the wife of the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooter Omar Mateen, was charged with, but later acquitted of, providing material support to terrorism. Evidence showed she did not know about her husband’s plan and was in fact a survivor of domestic violence. ²² Even though she was subjected to patriarchal intimate partner violence, she was not afforded protection as a survivor of violence, and instead was viewed as complicit in it. ²³

The cases of Muslim women alleged to be dangerous or involved in terrorism share some common tropes. The dangerous burka- or hijab-wearing Muslim woman or girl in the United States juxtaposes the victimized burka- or hijab-wearing Muslim woman or girl in Muslim-majority countries who needs to be saved. On one hand, the war on terror says we need to protect – we need to save – the Muslim women who are oppressed. One the other hand, it frames Muslim girls and women in the United States as dangerous and as a national security threat. Even where there is evidence of domestic violence, as in Noor’s case, Muslim women are framed as too dangerous to protect. Even if Tashnuba had been an impressionable teenager lured by the ideas of an online Islamic cleric who espoused violence, as was suspected, she was not afforded the same consideration as a “victim” that white teenaged girls lured by sex traffickers into prostitution or other criminal offenses would receive. We see a similar lack of compassion for Huda Muthana, an American citizen who says she was brainwashed to join ISIS as a teenager and seeks to return to her family in the United States; as of the time of writing, the Trump administration is seeking to deny her return and challenging her US citizenship. ²⁴

The trope of the dangerous Muslim woman is rooted in a larger Islamophobia manufactured to justify the war on terror. Reports found that more than $200 million was spent between 2008 and 2013 to promote fear of Muslims. ²⁵ This fear existed even before 9/11 but consolidated and gained traction afterward. It is what allowed the arrests of Tashnuba and Adama based on the flimsiest of “evidence.” It is why, under former New York City mayor Rudi Giuliani’s administration, immigrant taxi drivers were called “taxi terrorists” – a loaded term with which to characterize a labor force that was ready to strike for better living conditions in 1998. Post 9/11, the Islamophobic message was clear: these immigrant and predominantly Muslim drivers were hauling bombs in their roving taxis. ²⁶ These messages aimed to perpetuate and contribute to the Islamophobia and justify the war on terror.

Over the past two decades, a convergence of consciousness and movements for social justice has illuminated the connections between white supremacy, Islamophobia, xenophobia, and patriarchy. Black women have visibly advocated around the intersections of police and state violence throughout US history. ²⁷ In 2000, radical feminists of color began to collectively articulate a politics that confronted state and interpersonal violence as intricately connected. More recently, the groundbreaking work of Black feminist activists through #SayHerName has called for the recognition of the impact of policing on Black women and girls. ²⁸ Black Lives Matter has centered our understanding of white supremacy and state violence. Black immigrants through organizations like Black Alliance for Just Immigration and UndocuBlack Network ²⁹ have highlighted the importance of applying a racial justice lens to our immigration system. Immigrant rights groups, like Families for Freedom and Detention Watch Network, and coalitions, like #Not1More, have linked mass incarceration and immigration. It took organizing among Muslim communities and progressive activists in groups like National Coalition to Protect Civil Freedoms to draw connections between policing, state violence, and Islamophobia, and the leadership of Black Muslims to show how Islamophobia has been part of the US legal system since long before the war on terror. ³⁰ It was through dialogue, engagement, coalitions, and community-based organizing that these movements began to understand the threads between these disparate forms of oppressions intended to marginalize, separate, and criminalize their communities to justify and legitimate state violence.

We are now beginning to see how all of these movements intersect in the same ways that racism, sexism, immigration, militarization, and violence abroad intersect in our lives. We see how the assignment of communities as “dangerous” or “a national security threat” enables the state to justify police brutality and state violence. These labels serve a disciplining function that prevents dissent and discourages communities from expressing their views.

We need to discuss how to forge a solidarity that does not reinforce the oppressions against which we collectively fight. Scholar Cyra Choudhury discusses liberal feminists’ complicity in perpetuating the “saving Muslim women” mission without any critique of US foreign policy as legitimating the war on terror and violence. ³¹ After the Pulse shooting, liberal queer and trans groups – particularly elite, white, cis-men-dominated groups – reinforced the idea that Muslim majority countries are more homophobic, and that therefore we have to save queer and trans folks from these states. Scholar Jasbir Puar describes this as homonationalism, ³² through which queer and trans communities align with state powers to justify racist and xenophobic positions. We saw homonationalism at play in Trump’s speech after the Orlando shooting where he states: “A radical Islamic terrorist targeted the nightclub not only because he wanted to kill Americans, but in order to execute gay and lesbian citizens because of their sexual orientation.” Yet, this same president and administration perpetrates violence and hate against queer and trans communities. ³³

Thankfully, groups like the Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity provided a counter, intersectional analysis to this divisive rhetoric. In a statement from that time, the alliance writes: “We reject attempts to perpetuate hatred against our LGBTQ communities as well as our Muslim communities. We ask all people to resist forces of division and hatred, and to stand against homophobia and transphobia, as well as against Islamophobia and anti-Muslim bigotry.” ³⁴

One year later, the Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity reminds us of the commonality of our struggles:

Many racists attempted to use this tragedy as an opportunity to wedge Muslim, brown, black, LGBTQ, Latinx, and immigrant communities apart with sensational, Islamophobic storylines that obscured how we all, as criminalized communities, experience violence in common. We saw how the US media sought sensationalism; we witnessed how this hunger for easy narratives decentered Black and Latinx voices and lives in the aftermath of the Pulse massacre (and, of course, completely erased Muslim Latinx LGBTQ voices. ³⁵

These examples are just a few that illustrate the tensions among our activist communities with respect to how we respond to the war on terror narrative, which justifies state violence against marginalized communities and murderous foreign policy abroad.

Our uncritical stance of US foreign policy can also create different goals for activists in the United States and those abroad, preventing meaningful global solidarity. For instance, an open letter to United States- and Europe-based activists after the brutal killing of LGBTQ activist Xulhaz Mannan, authored by an anonymous queer and trans activist in Bangladesh, articulates this global tension: ³⁶

In your eagerness to help and be accounted for, you might be pushing us into a direction that benefits the Empire/West while simultaneously making life dangerous for the most vulnerable among us- those queers who do not even have the safety and mobility of the ones who were killed, those who are vulnerable due to their employment as sex workers, those who are reading all the hype on the Guardian and Buzzfeed and BBC and wondering how on earth this helps them get out of their homes because now even more people are looking their way- their battles are not with tolerance but economic justice, justice for rapes, coercion and displacement … If solidarity is your aim, then help us gather resources to aid those in need, those who have now been thrust under the microscope of visibility and aid them in relocations or even economically in order to survive. The queer fight is against Western hegemony, not by its side.

When we do not critique the underlying logic of the war on terror in our efforts to express solidarity with oppressed groups within Muslim majority countries, we reinforce ideas about who is dangerous, who needs to be civilized, who needs to be banned and contained, and who is criminalized. ³⁷ We may also increase the risks for communities who bear the greatest brunt of state violence in those spaces.

How, then, do we forge a politics that is really about solidarity and not necessarily a kind of solidarity that is politically convenient? Here, I borrow from Desis Rising up and Moving director of strategy and organizer Roksana Mun, ³⁸ who has long fought against the criminal legal system and Islamophobia to mobilize working-class communities, and their organization’s concept and coinage of transformative solidarities. I witnessed the effectiveness of this approach through my engagement with Desis Rising up and Moving: “Transformative solidarity goes beyond verbal solidarity, beyond transactional solidarity, and beyond expressive solidarity and is built not just by going against the grain, but by sacrifices and actual material costs taken on by mass bases of people.” ³⁹

Transformative solidarity calls us to move beyond our issue silos and performative solidarities to forge a politics rooted in mass-based organizing. We can achieve this by recognizing and puzzling through our political and ideological differences and by articulating principles of unity without reinforcing the forms of oppressions we are each fighting against.

What that would look like will depend on the organizers and communities involved, and there are great models for us from which to learn, like Desis Rising up and Moving. The queer and trans movements have been particularly instrumental in showing us a path that does not require invoking the state and police for protection through programs like Audre Lorde’s Safe OUTside the System, which uses community-based strategies instead of the police to address violence, as well as the narrative interventions by the Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity discussed above.40 ⁴⁰ There is no blueprint to follow, but if we keep the transformative solidarity frame in mind as we engage in our movement work, we are less likely to fight against or shun each other and more likely to build a strong global grassroots movement based on shared principles.

1. This article is based on a transcript of my comments on the “Criminalizing Webs” panel at Invisible No More: Resisting Police Violence against Black Women and Women of Color in Troubled Times, hosted by the Barnard Center on the Research on Women, http://bcrw.barnard.edu/event/invisible-no-more-resisting-police-violence-against-black-women-and-women-of-color-in-troubled-times. Special thanks to Sofia Ali-Khan, Syeda Tasnim, and Marvin Cabrera for their comments.[↑]
2. Andrea J. Ritchie, Invisible No More: Police Violence against Black Women and Women of Color (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2017), 66–7.[↑]
3. Ritchie, Invisible No More, 91–2.[↑]
4. “Bush’s Address to a Joint Session on Congress and American People,” 20 September 2001, https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010920-8.html.[↑]
5. Edward Said, “From Orientalism,” in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 132–49.[↑]
6. Andrew Glass, “President Bush Cites ‘Axis of Evil,’” Politico, 29 January 2002, https://www.politico.com/story/2019/01/29/bush-axis-of-evil-2002-1127725.[↑]
7. Zaid Jilani, “Trump’s Muslim Immigration Executive Order: If We Bombed You, We Ban You,” Intercept, 25 January 2017, https://theintercept.com/2017/01/25/trumps-muslim-immigration-executive-order-if-we-bombed-you-we-ban-you.[↑]
8. Mogahed Dalia and John Sides, Muslims in America: Public Perceptions in the Trump Era, June 2018, https://www.voterstudygroup.org/publication/muslims-in-america#.WxlrNiEi164.twitter.[↑]
9. Lila Abu-Lughod, “Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others,” American Anthropologist 104 (3, 2002): 783–90.[↑]
10. Another gendered aspect of the war on terror that is often obscured is the intentional use of women interrogators in Abu Ghraib prisons to supposedly humiliate Muslim men, as if the torture was not sufficiently dehumanizing. Ramzi Kassem, “Gendered Erasure in the Global ‘War on Terror’: An Unmasked Interrogation,” in Margaret L. Satterthwaite and Jayne Huckerby, eds., Gender, National Security, and Counter-Terrorism (New York: Routledge, 2013), 15–35.[↑]
11. Liz Brody, “This Woman Was Accused of Being a Terrorist – Her Story Is Beyond Important Right Now,” Glamour, 26 September 2017, https://www.glamour.com/story/adama-bah-accused-of-being-a-terrorist.[↑]
12. Nina Bernstein, “Questions, Bitter and Exile for Queens Girl in Terror Case,” New York Times, 17 June 2005, https://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/17/nyregion/questions-bitterness-and-exile-for-queens-girl-in-terror-case.html.[↑]
13. Nina Bernstein, “Young Woman Fears Deportation, and Mutilation,” New York Times, 26 October 2006, https://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/26/nyregion/26suicide.html.[↑]
14. For further discussion of these two cases, see Ritchie, Invisible No More.[↑]
15. “Human Rights Lawyer Sues NYPD,” NBC News: Asian America, 10 September 2014, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/human-rights-lawyer-sues-nypd-after-arrest-blocking-sidewalk-n198211.[↑]
16. “Between 8 July and 26 August, 539 Palestinian children were killed and one Israeli child was killed. 2,956 Palestinian children were injured and six Israeli children were injured.” “UNICEF Bulletin. Children Affected by Armed Conflict,” 2014, https://www.un.org/unispal/document/children-affected-by-armed-conflict-israel-and-state-of-palestine-third-quarter-2014-unicef-bulletin/; “UN Reports Dire Impact on Children in Gaza,” New York Times, 6 August 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/06/world/middleeast/un-reports-dire-impact-on-children-in-gaza-strip.html.[↑]
17. Chaumtoli Huq, “American Devotion to Order Must End,” Al Jazeera America, 25 August 2015, http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2015/8/american-devotion-to-order-over-justice-must-end.html.[↑]
18. M.M. Lee, “Women of Color and the Hidden Trauma of Police Brutality,” Nation, 16 September 2014, https://www.thenation.com/article/women-color-and-hidden-trauma-police-brutality/; Zenobia Warfield, “Why Police Violence against Women of Color Stays Hidden,” Yes! Magazine, 10 August 2017, https://www.yesmagazine.org/peace-justice/why-police-violence-against-women-of-color-stays-hidden-20170810.[↑]
19. Eric Levitz, “Noor Salman, Omar Mateen’s Widow, Acquitted in Pulse Shooting,” New York Magazine, 30 March 2018, http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/03/noor-salman-omar-mateens-wife-acquitted-in-pulse-shooting.html.[↑]
20. “Investigators Looking at Whether Tashfeen Malik Radicalized Husband,” Al Jazeera America, 6 December 2015, http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2015/12/6/investigators-looking-at-whether-female-shooter-radicalized-husband.html.[↑]
21. Josh Peter, “Colin Kaepernick: False Rumors of Conversion Tied to Islamophobia,” USA Today, 7 September 2019, https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/49ers/2016/09/07/colin-kaepernick-national-anthem-protest/89975464/.[↑]
22. Rachel Louise Snyder, “The Trial of Noor Salman and Its Shocking Disregard for Survivors of Domestic Violence,” New Yorker, 1 April 2018, https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-trial-of-noor-salman-and-its-shocking-disregard-for-survivors-of-domestic-violence; Deborah Epstein and Kit Gruelle, “Should an Abused Wife Be Charged in Her Husband’s Crime?” New York Times, 12 March 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/12/opinion/noor-salman-vegas-shooting-trial.html.[↑]
23. For more information on criminalization of migrant survivors of violence, see Mizue Aizeki in this issue.[↑]
24. Deirdre Shesgreen and Kim Hjjelmgaard, “ISIS Bride Case: Muthana Lawsuit Should Be Dismissed Trump Administration Lawyers Argue,” USA Today, 26 April 2019, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2019/04/26/trump-administration-seeks-dismiss-lawsuit-hoda-muthana-father-isis-bride/3579664002/.[↑]
25. Ryan Rifai, “Islamophobia Is a Multimillion-Dollar Industry,” Al Jazeera, June 2016, https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/2016/06/report-islamophobia-multi-million-dollar-industry-160623144006495.html.[↑]
26. Sarah Sharma, “Taxi Cab Publics and the Production of Brown Space after 9/11,”
    Cultural Studies 24, 2 (March 2010).
    [↑]
27. See Ritchie, Invisible No More.[↑]
28. For information on Incite!, see https://incite-national.org/history/. For information on Say Her Name Campaign, see http://aapf.org/shn-campaign.[↑]
29. Juliana Morgan- Trostle and Kexin Zheng, The State of Black Immigrants ( BAJI and NYU Law Immigrant Rights Clinic, 2017), http://www.stateofblackimmigrants.com/assets/sobi-fullreport-jan22.pdf. For information on UndocuBlack Network, see http://undocublack.org/.[↑]
30. For information on National Coalition to Protect Civil Freedoms, see https://www.civilfreedoms.org/. Kanya D’Almeida, “Living in the Shadow of Counterterrorism: A Daily Struggle for Muslim Women,” Rewire News, 13 May 2016, https://rewire.news/article/2016/05/13/living-shadow-counterterrorism-daily-struggle-muslim-women/; Mariam Elba, “How Islamophobia Was Ingrained in America’s Legal System Long before the War on Terror,” Intercept, 6 May 2018. [↑]
31. Cyra Choudhury, “Globalizing the Margins: Legal Exiles in the War on Terror and Liberal Feminism’s War for Muslim Women,” International Review of Constitutionalism 9, 2 (2010), https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1571642.[↑]
32. Jaspir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Duke University Press, 2007).[↑]
33. “List of Anti-transgender and Anti-LGBBT Actions by Trump by the National Center for Transgender Equality,” https://transequality.org/the-discrimination-administration.[↑]
34. Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity, “Statement from the Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity on the Shooting at Pulse in Orlando, Florida,” http://www.muslimalliance.org/masgd-speaks/87-response-to-shooting-in-orlando.[↑]
35. Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity, “One Year after Pulse, Statement by Muslim Alliance for Sexual and Gender Diversity,” http://www.muslimalliance.org/masgd-speaks/104-one-year-after-pulse.[↑]
36. Anonymous, “Bangladesh LGBT Open Letter after the Brutal Murders of Xulhaz Mannan, the Founder and Editor of the Country’s First LGBT+ Magazine ‘Roopban,’” May 2016, https://www.youthkiawaaz.com/2016/05/bangladesh-lgbt-rights-activists-open-letter/.[↑]
37. Dina Siddiqui, “Exceptional Sexuality in a Time of Terror: Muslim Subjects and Dissenting/Unmournable Bodies,” South Asia Multidisciplinary Academic Journal, 2019: https://journals.openedition.org/samaj/5069.[↑]
38. Roksana Mun was one of the speakers at Invisible No More and participated in “The Resistance Roundtable.”[↑]
39. It is important that those who are asked to write pieces like this attribute concepts that emerge from conversations and involvement in grassroots movements to groups in those movements. This attribution is another form of solidarity eschewing privileges of those who are able to memorialize movement work. The concept of transformative solidarity or meaning has been articulated by others and I do not suggest that we think of ideas that emerge from collective struggle as intellectual property. I suggest that those who have the privilege to write, to memorialize, should be conscious of voices that get excluded and name them. Desis Rising up and Moving Facebook post, 15 March 2015, https://www.facebook.com/DesisRising/posts/transformative-solidarity-beyond-verbal-solidarity-beyond-transactional-solidari/873958685995736/.[↑]
40. See Ejeris Dixon’s piece, “What Alex Taught Me,” in this issue for further discussion of the Audre Lorde Project’s Safe OUTside the System. See also https://alp.org/programs/sos.[↑]