Diasporic youth fear failing to perform Iranianness more than adhering to hijab
Evidence
Boys were highly aware of what they carried, wore, and said to security officials as they crossed borders. They did not want to be perceived as too Iranian. For girls, the enforced requirement to wear the hijab once in Iranian airspace made some nervous simply because they thought they would fail at it and be exposed in the moment as American. Their stories offer a slightly different angle to scholarship on Islamophobia, which is rightly critical of the overdeterministic and problematic academic obsession with hijab. While the rules of hijab are a relevant topic for secular diasporic travelers, second-generation youth were far less concerned with having to adhere to Islamic standards of dress than with their perceived inability to perform Iranianness (inclusive of hijab) correctly. — Neda Maghbouleh, The Limits of Whiteness, 419
Categorization
- XREF: Reframes the hijab-as-oppression framing found in general Islamophobia scholarship; connects to a more performative view of identity like Goffman’s presentation of self.
- SEED: Article angle: the anxiety of diaspora is about performing belonging correctly, not about the content of the practice itself — how second-generation kids fear ‘doing Iranian wrong’ more than being un-Iranian.