Wrapped in Controversy: Hijab, Playboy, and Modes of Self-Representation

• In Event: Visualizing Indigenous, Black & Asian American Dissent

Abstract

In Playboy’s October 2016 issue, Muslim American journalist Noor Tagouri was featured in the magazine’s special feature, “Renegades of 2016,” making her the first hijab-wearing woman to be featured in the magazine since its first issue in 1953. The feature itself – titled, “Media Wunderkind Noor Tagouri Makes a Forceful Case for Modesty” – included two photographs of Noor, fully clothed and in hijab, and a short interview. The presence of a hijab-clad woman in the magazine was highly controversial within the Muslim American community, inspiring numerous opinion pieces across the internet on both popular and niche websites. Conceptually, hijab and Playboy are antithetical and thus in tension with each other. The opinion pieces produced in response to the feature are representative of how different Muslim Americans are reading this tension. This paper evaluates how the instance of a hijabi in Playboy is illustrative of how individual Muslim Americans are working to represent themselves in the mainstream through various media modalities. Additionally, this paper explores how four different members of the Muslim American community responded to this instance in opinion pieces online. These responses are emblematic of an intra-community discourse working to conceptualize ‘appropriate’ forms of representation that counter dominant images of Muslims in the Western mainstream media, and determine worthy sites for counter-representation.

Scholars that have studied representations of Muslims in the media have almost exclusively focused on those representations produced by Western media that relegate Muslims into tropes that deny the group’s heterogeneity. These tropes range from the oppressed Muslim woman to the oppressive Muslim man to the patriotic American Muslim combatting ‘radical Islam.’ Many Muslim Americans are acting to counter these tropes through different modes of self-representation and working to offer alternative images. Noor’s choice to be featured in Playboy is just one example of that, and a highly controversial one within the Muslim American community. This indicates a complex relationship between mainstream representations of Muslims, its impact on Muslim Americans, and the community’s efforts to define itself in the public – a complex relationship that needs to be highlighted.

The visual elements of the feature’s photographs and the tension between hijab and Playboy are the sources of controversy for these Muslim American writers whose primary critiques of Noor’s choice was grounded in her religious and/or social identity as a practicing Muslim American woman. The distinction between these criticisms vis-à-vis these facets of identity draws out the nuanced nature of the Muslim American identity as one that is not only religious, but gendered, racialized, and uniquely constructed within the United States. I contend that Noor’s gender, hijab, and public status position her as someone both bearing the responsibility to represent the greater Muslim American community and as someone more vulnerable to its criticisms.

Author

• Belquis Elhadi, University of Michigan