Flanagan connects gendered scapegoating to Muslim demonization across history

Evidence

On her journey, the Doll comes to a realization of her position on a historical continuum of gendered scapegoating and sanctified retribution. In Frank Moretti’s library, she finds in a book a photograph in which a French female collaborator at the end of the Second World War is getting her head forcibly shaved as a mark of shame, to the delight of laughing, mostly female onlookers (174). Later, a cable-channel documentary records the discovery of a preserved three-thousand-year-old female body in a Swedish peat bog: “The fossil woman had been drowned, weighed down with stones tied to a noose around her neck, Her head had been shaved. A ritual death, a German expert said, for some crime that no one could know” (199). Feeling a sense of kinship with these historical female outcasts, the Doll makes preparations for her own ritual death by shaving off her hair before embracing her position as the blood sacrifice this warped society demands. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 374

Categorization

• XREF: The ritual-death-as-scapegoat continuum resonates with the reader’s sacrifice article (ADDENDUM candidate) and with homo sacer framing used across Islamophobia scholarship.
• FICTION: The Doll shaving her own hair to claim her ritual death slot is a striking image of a character willfully stepping into a demonized role — relevant to how Changez in Reluctant Fundamentalist positions himself.