Muslim women are central to Islamophobia as both targets and producers of it

Evidence

More specifically, by focusing on women, I advance several interconnected arguments, focusing on Muslim women as objects of Islamophobic discourse; women as producers of Islamophobic discourse; and on some of the complications involved in delineating where Islamophobia begins and ends. I argue that Muslim women occupy “center stage” in Islamophobic discourse in two distinct and contradicting ways: As objects of hate crimes and discrimination, Muslim women have Islamophobia mapped onto them directly and as representations of Muslims in American society; as objects of anti-Islamic discourse Muslim women are represented as victims of their religion, culture, and Muslim men, and thus in need of saving, liberation, and intervention. Women as producers of Islamophobic discourse, both non-Muslim and Muslim, justify the second set of discourses in the service of a range of political goals, and, their own gender matters for the effectiveness and impact of their arguments. — Carl W. Ernst, Islamophobia in America_ The Anatomy of…, 492

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• DEFINE: Establishes the chapter’s two-part anatomy: women as objects and as producers of Islamophobic discourse.
• XREF: The ‘victims in need of saving’ framing connects to the reader’s broader project on how the fearer constructs the feared subject.

Related

• Gender is a central axis along which Islamophobic discourse operates (similarity 0.93)
• Islamophobic rhetoric uses Muslim women’s oppression to justify war (similarity 0.89)
• Islamophobic discourse addresses Muslim men while reducing women to objects (similarity 0.87)
• Analyzing gendered Islamophobia through women alone leaves male-centered work undone (similarity 0.87)
• Islamophobia discourse weaponizes Muslim women’s oppression for a neoconservative agenda (similarity 0.85)
• Islamophobia against women ties into racism and fear of nonwhite minorities (similarity 0.85)
• Islamophobic rhetoric becomes hardest to challenge when feminist spokespersons adopt it (similarity 0.85)
• The Muslim-man-violent and Muslim-woman-oppressed stereotypes are mutually reinforcing. (similarity 0.85)
• Coopted Muslim women blur the line between willing and unwitting Islamophobes. (similarity 0.85)
• Muslim women are simultaneously attacked and pitied as victims needing rescue (similarity 0.84)
• Gender has been severely neglected in Islamophobia scholarship (similarity 0.84)
• Every topic studied, including Islamophobia, is inherently gendered. (similarity 0.84)
• Feminist discourse becomes Islamophobic when it abandons critique for rescue (similarity 0.84)
• Islamophobic discourse weaponizes Muslim women’s oppression to mark Islam as foreign and threatening (similarity 0.84)
• Islamophobia fuses religious bigotry, racism, and gender stereotypes (similarity 0.83)