Private citizens’ surveillance creates gendered exclusion of Muslims from public space

Evidence

When private citizens participate in the hypersurveillance of Muslim Americans, they create an environment of exclusion. Public spaces are not welcoming ones for Muslim Americans. This private surveillance of Muslim Americans is guided by gender. Muslim women who wear the hijab are open targets for the public. They are subjected to verbal abuse and threats of violence. Muslim American women are treated as though they are a danger to American cultural values in a myriad of ways, like having their beauty contested or being told they are no good for society. Private citizens surveil their fellow Muslim citizen when they continuously question them about their nationality. When Muslim Americans, particularly Muslim women who wear the hijab, are yelled at to “go back home,” they are stripped of their status as American citizens. — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 345

Categorization

• XREF: Prime visceral material the reader wants — the interior/exterior experience of being watched. Connects to the ‘go back home’ citizenship-stripping mechanism. — connects to: Mass state surveillance laws target white citizens and Muslims with unequal public scrutiny — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 570
• SEED: The gender asymmetry in how surveillance lands (women attacked on cultural/beauty grounds, men as looming violent threats) could anchor a piece on how racialization is always gendered.