Graphic Muslimah in Circulation: Considering Contemporary Graphic Images of Muslim Women in Popular Protest

• In Event: Circuits of Graphic Protest

Abstract

Widespread and variously politicized images of Muslim women have overwhelmingly contributed to a visual vocabulary of Islamic pedagogy for non-Muslim and Muslim audiences in North American and European nations. Indeed, they not only visually narrate what it means and looks like to be Muslim but attention to their mediated circulations reveals the particular interests in certain racialized, gendered, or nationalized Muslim representations over others. While the visual cultures of the War on Terror have certainly and variously instructed American audiences to receive the burqa-draped Muslim woman as an object of victimhood, false consciousness, and/or latent terror, the mainstream iconography of Muslimah in Western nations has also incorporated dissenting imagery in this same period—with varying political investments.

This paper will place into conversation three recent representations of Muslim women, which have received popular circulation in the context of North American protest cultures. The first image is a 2010 photograph of a young Muslim punk woman modeling a Mohawk-topped hijab, which found extensive reproduction across digital media—including pedagogical websites deconstructing the subjective alterities of hijab orientations and styles as well as forums celebrating embodied resistances in punk Islams and Islamic fashions. The second image considered is the cartooned figure of the first Muslim American superheroine, Ms. Marvel (a.k.a Kamala Khan, introduced in 2013). This paper will attend specifically to the re-appropriation of Ms. Marvel’s image by San Francisco street artists and activists who, in early 2015, covered anti-Islamic ads on city buses with both the superheroic figure and teaching messages like “free speech isn’t a license to spread hate.” The final image addressed is the photograph-turned-graphic of a Muslim woman draped in a flag hijab that became one of the most prevalent posters of dissent and multicultural nationalism during nationwide protests against the presidential inauguration of Donald Trump this year.

Whether intended to revise the representational limitations of Orientalist and Islamophobic lexica of Muslimah or to politically mobilize certain subjectivities of Islam over others, these images may serve to depict the (already) plural representational grammars of Muslim-being. But, importantly, their transgressive associations also guise the histories of and interests in their formations. The task of bringing these images, and their specific circulations, into conversation will be to consider their lessons but also to critically scrutinize their cultural conscriptions and visual histories. While each of these representations becomes graphically enmeshed in various and potentially redressive cultural projects, the narratives behind their production reveal more complex concerns regarding the imbrication of symbolic Muslimah (and the restriction of actual Muslimah voices) in West-centric Islams, ahistoric American nationalisms, and capitalist commodity feminisms.

Author

• Najwa Mayer, Yale University