The misery memoir genre visually signals oppressiveness through veiled-female cover imagery

Evidence

There is, in fact, a host of such Muslim misery memoirs on the market. Dohra Ahmad refers to the seamier examples as “pulp non-fiction” (“Not Yet Beyond the Veil: Muslim Women in American Popular Literature,” Social Text 27, no. 2 [Summer 2009): 105–31). Lila Abu-Lughod describes how mass-market commercial publishing is obsessed with them: “This industry commissions and promotes a genre of books that one can identify, and judge, by their covers. We see them at airport bookstores. The copycat images are of women wearing black or white veils, showing only their eyes—or sometimes one eye. The titles are variations on a theme: A True Story of Life Behind the Veil in Saudi Arabia; Sold: One Woman’s True Account of Modern Slavery; My Forbidden Face; Without Mercy; Burned Alive; Married by Force. They are often personal stories ‘as told to.’ Disdained by respectable writers … this genre underwrites their work” (Do Muslim Women Need Saving? [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013], 79). — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 707

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the ‘Muslim misery memoir’ genre by its market conventions: copycat veiled-female covers, formulaic titles, and ghostwritten ‘as told to’ narratives.
• SEED: A possible essay angle: how the publishing industry’s formula for Muslim women’s memoirs manufactures a genre whose covers do the ideological work before a word is read.
• XREF: Connects to your broader argument about how fiction and memoir both produce and contest Islamophobia; Abu-Lughod’s critique of the genre is a foil for fiction’s more open form. — connects to: The picaresque genre inherently works to make suppressed suffering visible — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 957
• ADDENDUM: Reinforces the cross-cultural moral-panic article’s thread: how commercial genre conventions market a fixed identity image, here veiled Muslim women.