Visible religious signifiers, not watchlists, trigger women’s airport profiling

Evidence

Talking to Muslim men and women who traveled after 9/11, it became clear they were surveilled differently. Muslim American women’s experiences varied based on whether or not they wore religious signifiers, such as the hijab and jilbaab (a loose garment many Muslim women wear over their clothes to hide their figures). The hijab, the headscarf many Muslim women wear, is one of the most recognizable religious symbols of Islam (Williams and Vashi 2007). Muslim women I interviewed who wore religious signifiers were repeatedly pulled out of security checkpoint lines and subjected to searches of their bodies and their belongings. These Muslim women were not on the Selectee List; rather, TSA agents relied on racial cues to identify potential threats to security and profiled them as a result of these discretionary decisions. All the Muslim women who wore the hijab were consistently pulled out of security checkpoint lines, stopped, and searched. Most were forced to endure a pat down, were swiped with the handheld magnetometer, and had their personal belongings searched. The women who wore the hijab experienced this treatment the majority of the times they flew. — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 210

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines jilbaab and pins the hijab as the operative racial cue — key to how a faith gets racialized via a wearable marker.
• XREF: Gender asymmetry directly answers the reader’s guiding question about men vs. women experiencing surveillance differently; links to the complaint-about-modesty thread (Addendum 2).