Commercial publishing mass-produces formulaic Muslim women’s misery memoirs

Evidence

There is, in fact, a host of such Muslim misery memoirs on the market. Dohra Ahmad refers to the seamier examples as “pulp non-fiction” (“Not Yet Beyond the Veil: Muslim Women in American Popular Literature,” Social Text 27, no. 2 [Summer 2009): 105–31). Lila Abu-Lughod describes how mass-market commercial publishing is obsessed with them: “This industry commissions and promotes a genre of books that one can identify, and judge, by their covers. We see them at airport bookstores. The copycat images are of women wearing black or white veils, showing only their eyes—or sometimes one eye. The titles are variations on a theme: A True Story of Life Behind the Veil in Saudi Arabia; Sold: One Woman’s True Account of Modern Slavery; My Forbidden Face; Without Mercy; Burned Alive; Married by Force. They are often personal stories ‘as told to.’ Disdained by respectable writers … this genre underwrites their work” (Do Muslim Women Need Saving? [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013], 79). — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 707

Categorization

• SEED: The pulp non-fiction genre with copycat covers and formulaic titles is an essay-worthy analytic object in itself — how format enforces ideology.
• XREF: connects to: Misery memoirs make Muslim women legible only through an American feminist lens — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 211; The Muslim misery memoir genre gains authenticity precisely by reinforcing Western moral claims — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 67; Muslim misery memoirs reduce whole cultures to essentialized details of suffering (+4 more)
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Misery memoirs make Muslim women legible only through an American feminist lens — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 211; The Muslim misery memoir genre gains authenticity precisely by reinforcing Western moral claims — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 67; Muslim misery memoirs reduce whole cultures to essentialized details of suffering (+4 more)