Picturing Islamophobia: gendered anti-Muslim racism in contemporary US media

Muslim, Arab, and Middle Eastern women are frequently in focus in popular US media, signaling that mainstream US audiences are eager to consumer their stories. This project explores how race and gender matter in contemporary discussions of these women, and how US audiences use public discussion about them to better understand themselves and their values as they relate to diversity and the nation. This process is often assisted by the use of compelling images that drive these stories in popular media.

I build a foundation to better understand this coverage in my introductory chapter. Then, I use chapter two to develop a history of Muslim, Arab, and Middle Eastern representation in the US, spanning from the inception of formal nation-state until the modern era. My subsequent chapters interrogate the shifts and continuities in these representations across the past decade. Chapter three examines media coverage about the barring of two veiled Muslim women from the background of a 2008 Obama campaign speech. In chapter four, I examine how the trope of the “badass woman” is used to frame media coverage of various groups of Kurdish women combatants, often in ways that obscure their political motivations and unique histories. My fifth chapter centers Shephard Fairey’s widely-circulated protest poster of a veiled Muslim woman in order to explore questions of allyship and inclusion in the United States. I conclude by discussing recently-elected Muslim Congresswomen Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar to highlight future directions in public discourse.