Resistance and Self-discipline: Responses by Muslim Americans to Their Surveillance

• In Event: 484 - Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities Paper Session. The Ethnographic Problematic: Race and Ethnicity in 21st Century Ethnography

Abstract

In this presentation, I outline how Muslims are racialized in the United States through their surveillance by both the state and private citizen. I briefly go over the policies that have lead to the increased surveillance that specifically target Muslim Americans, demonstrating how surveillance is not colorblind. I also show how racialized surveillance of Muslim American men and women is gendered. In other words, Muslim American men and women are surveilled differently and therefore their response to surveillance varies. I interviewed 48 Arab and South Asian Muslim Americans between 2009 and 2012 in the Chicago, Illinois and the Dallas/Ft. Worth, Texas area. Both Muslim American men and women tend to self-surveil in public, but they do it for different reasons. I argue that Muslim American women who wear the hijab respond to their surveillance by altering their behavior under the gaze of the public in order to resist the narrative that has been created about Muslims as dangerous, misogynistic and un-American. Muslim American men imposed upon themselves a form of self-discipline in order to avoid further surveillance by the state because they feared the consequences of state surveillance. This presentation examines the impact that hyper surveillance of Muslims in the War on Terror has had on the everyday lives of Muslim Americans.

Author

• Saher Farooq Selod, Simmons College