Using Muslims as hypothetical archetypes reinscribed their liminality in public imagination

Evidence

“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 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim
• XREF: connects to: Muslim characters can break stereotype when faith is incidental to personality — Green, Todd H, The Fear of Islam_ An Introduction to…, 537; Monsters reveal the discursive practices defining normative humanity.; History invents phantasms — fantasies attached to Muslim bodies — that remain powerful (+8 more)

Related

• Circulating veiled-woman imagery deadens Westerners’ sense of Muslim women’s diversity (similarity 0.89)
• Sexual objectification of Muslim women fuses desire and military intervention fantasy (similarity 0.87)
• Changez’s secular framing makes his critique palatable to liberal Westerners (similarity 0.86)
• The Muslim woman functions as a fixed stereotype absorbing cross-discourse readings (similarity 0.82)
• Gendered Islamophobia imposes the most distorted stereotypes on veiled Muslim women. (similarity 0.81)
• Islamophobic stereotypes of Muslims form a closed gendered loop. (similarity 0.80)
• The modern Muslim caricature is a centuries-old phantasm, not a recent development. (similarity 0.80)
• Muslim characters can break stereotype when faith is incidental to personality (similarity 0.79)
• The perceived threats posed by female Muslim converts challenge false stereotypes about oppressed Muslim women and create fear for nationalists by challenging Western societal norms of… (similarity 0.79)
• Award-winning depictions of Muslim monsters are familiar, not exceptional, to Western audiences. (similarity 0.79)
• Changing European society, not Muslim women, drove the oppression image (similarity 0.79)
• Western media depicts Muslim women solely as passive victims stripped of agency (similarity 0.79)
• Western women’s post-feminist agency is constructed against the figure of the oppressed Muslim woman. (similarity 0.79)
• The acceptable Muslim stereotype demands Sufi, peaceful, feminist, moderate, non-Arab traits (similarity 0.79)
• Gendered Islamophobia assigns opposite tropes to Muslim women and men (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Circulating veiled-woman imagery deadens Westerners’ sense of Muslim women’s diversity #expands (0.70) — Arsalan Iftikhar, Fear of a Muslim Planet_ Global…, 394
• Islamophobic tropes become real violence through perceived enemy images #expands (0.60)
• The flip-side image of Muslim-as-friend is equally coercive and nuance-blind as enmity #complicates (0.40)