Hijab-wearing American women are seen as both oppressed and dangerous

Evidence

While Muslim women abroad have been constructed as in need of saving, the narratives that surround Muslim women’s bodies in the United States are more complicated, constantly shifting depending on the agenda of the state. Muslim women in the United States who wear the hijab represent an invasion of Islam in the United States. Cainkar (2009) shows in her study how Muslim women who wear the hijab encounter hostility and stares because they represent a violation of the moral fabric of American society. As my interviews suggest, Muslim American women are simultaneously treated as if they are oppressed and as a danger to society for offending Western values. Since 9/11, Muslim men and women are six to nine times more likely to experience anti-Muslim violence (Abdelkader 2016). — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 38

Categorization

• XREF: Directly addresses the reader’s guiding question about how surveillance/racialization lands differently on men vs. women — this is the women’s side of the double-bind.
• SEED: Essay angle: the ‘oppressed or dangerous’ double-bind as a distinctly female racialization mechanism — women surveilled via visibility of bodies (hijab) rather than via association.