Sexual objectification of Muslim women fuses desire and military intervention fantasy

Evidence

Gendered Islamophobia theory holds that state and societal tropes ascribed to Muslim women are oppositional to those assigned to Muslim men. It elucidates how prevailing ideas of “submissiveness” and “subordination” attached to Muslim womanhood, and the grand aim of “liberating Muslim women” that follows, are rooted in an imperial epistemology that caricatures Muslim men as “violent,” “oppressive,” and “tyrannical.” — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 1244 (#expands, via linked claim)

“I would argue that the use of these images [of Muslim women in religious attire] has also been bad for us, in the countries of the West where they circulate, because of the deadening effect they have on our capacity to appreciate the complexity and diversity of Muslim women’s lives—as human beings,” said Professor Abu-Lughod. “Did we expect once ‘free’ from the Taliban that they would go ‘back’ to belly-shirts or dust off their Chanel suits?” — Arsalan Iftikhar, Fear of a Muslim Planet_ Global…, 394 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim
• XREF: connects to: The female body’s shaping inverted from seduction into tactical concealment — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 210; Orientalist paintings of Muslim women reveal European male fantasy more than real conditions. — Green, Todd H, The Fear of Islam_ An Introduction to…, 199; History invents phantasms — fantasies attached to Muslim bodies — that remain powerful (+13 more)

Related

• Using Muslims as hypothetical archetypes reinscribed their liminality in public imagination (similarity 0.87)
• Gendered Islamophobia assigns opposite tropes to Muslim women and men (similarity 0.87)
• Gendered Islamophobia names discrimination targeting Muslim women (similarity 0.85)
• Islamophobic discourse uses Muslim women as pawns to serve imperial and domestic agendas (similarity 0.84)
• Circulating veiled-woman imagery deadens Westerners’ sense of Muslim women’s diversity (similarity 0.84)
• Gendered Islamophobia imposes the most distorted stereotypes on veiled Muslim women. (similarity 0.83)
• Terrorist racialization is gendered, targeting men differently than women (similarity 0.83)
• Islamophobic stereotypes of Muslims form a closed gendered loop. (similarity 0.83)
• Bush-era discourse gendered Muslim others as incapable of self-determination (similarity 0.83)
• Changez’s secular framing makes his critique palatable to liberal Westerners (similarity 0.82)
• The Western image of the Muslim woman as oppressed victim is historically recent (similarity 0.81)
• Gendered Islamophobia casts Muslim men as terrorists and women as victims needing saving (similarity 0.81)
• Masculine Islamophobia frames Muslim men as imminent threats of violence (similarity 0.81)
• Changing European society, not Muslim women, drove the oppression image (similarity 0.81)
• French veil laws institutionalize entwined stereotypes of weak women and violent men (similarity 0.81)

Broader Connections

• Gendered Islamophobia assigns opposite tropes to Muslim women and men #expands (0.60) — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 1244
• Circulating veiled-woman imagery deadens Westerners’ sense of Muslim women’s diversity #complicates (0.55) — Arsalan Iftikhar, Fear of a Muslim Planet_ Global…, 394
• Islamophobic tropes become real violence through perceived enemy images #expands (0.50)