Sexual desire and Islamophobic violence are entangled in the same fetishizing gaze.

Evidence

As part of the Doll’s special act for visiting U.S. marines, she performs in the guise of the “Black Widow”: “she would appear in a long black dress and hijab, then slowly strip to crotchless black knickers and an open cup black bra.… And as she did so Ferdy [the owner of the club], using a data projector, would cover her flesh with swirling Arabic lettering which he claimed to the audience was ‘the Black Widow’s most sacred book,’ the Koran” (41). This seedy display, which in its calligraphic details recalls Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Theo van Gogh’s controversial film Submission (2004), reveals the fetishization of the female Muslim Other as object of military intervention—the performance is accompanied by “explosions, screams and a thudding rhythm” (40)—and as veiled and thus all the more alluring focus of sexual fantasy. Never was racism’s flipside in desire illustrated so starkly as in this show for the club’s paying punters. — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 362

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in how novels visually stage Islamophobia — the strip-as-unveiling motif resonates with the dress/undress dynamics central to their own two novels.
• BMF: The pole-dancer who strips to reveal the Koran in Arabic lettering across her skin evokes the undercover-cathexis dynamics in Home Boy — the way sexualized intimacy and state surveillance both claim to ‘know’ the Muslim body. Not exact, but the cross-domain jump from erotics to security apparatus runs parallel.