Thinking Materially about the Muslim Right

• In Event: Sexual Policing from Colonial Wars to Culture Wars: A SWANA Feminist Approach

Abstract

From “Mincels” to “Muslims for Trump,” the second and third decades of the 21st century revealed increasing state and media visibility for Muslim communities in the United States who assimilate so-called Culture War projects and form ideological or political alliances with the white Christian right. Popular and academic critique of these convergences often struggle against racial discourses of capture—such as securitized and sexualized conceptions of Muslim difference or a liberal recourse into secular redemption. What can reinforce this bind is an overemphasis on symbolic relations, whether real or imagined, between a Muslim and Christian rightwing, which often mobilize analogical categories of analysis like “moral panic” or “religious conservatism,” and expansively policed ones like “extremism,” all often premised on presumably shared notions of gender and sexuality. This paper begins with such epistemic and political questions within securitized academic studies; it then uses research with US-based Muslim abolitionist organizers to argue that we (re)turn to materialist analyses of race, gender, and the secular as forms of property in the imperial US, which may attend to how neoliberal privatization and capital form a convergent (however highly differentiated) and transnational battleground for the “Culture Wars” and the multiracial, multireligious right.

Author

• Najwa Mayer, University of California-Davis