Consular staff read Islamic dress as evidence of gender oppression, ignoring countervailing facts

Evidence

This interaction illustrates a number of points, including, again, the assumption that gender oppression can be interpreted from Islamic dress and cultural practices such as marriage. The consular o≈cials constructed Amina as an imperiled woman, even though she was defiantly feminist in her own right, as she argued to me. Amina and Waqas were nonetheless read as ‘‘uncivilized” because she wore the full veil and he wore traditional Pakistani clothing and had a full beard. Bodily comportment and mannerisms also presented Amina as a particular kind of racialized and gendered figure constructed through the stereotype of the domination of Muslim women under Islamic patriarchy. Waqas was seen not only as a conservative Muslim man but also as lacking class status and education because he did not speak English. This inference translated to Amina, as well, who earned a bachelor’s degree in accounting in the U.S. and was the primary breadwinner of the couple. To add to her ongoing disruption of stereotypes of the oppressed, veiled Muslim woman, Amina often acted as a translator for her husband. This behavior complicated the consular o≈cials’ attempts to force Amina into ready-made categories such as ‘‘imperiled woman” (Razack 2008). — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 867

Categorization

• XREF: Directly instantiates Sherene Razack’s ‘imperiled woman’ framework the author cites; also connects to the ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ article where dress is read as identity/political signal.
• DEEPTHINKING: The racialized-gender inference chain — that Waqas’s lack of English marks him as low-class and uneducated, which then transfers to his US-educated breadwinner wife — is a dense, non-obvious mechanism worth sitting with.