I think what shocked me most about "Gendered Nativism, Boundary Setting, and Cultural Sniping" was how true it was. How, after 9/11, the impetuses for hateful acts and sentiments towards Arab American were already planted. How 9/11 itself did not shape the hatred of Americans toward Arab and Muslim Americans, it just gave the already imbedded hatred an excuse to be released. I was surprised to read that the majority of hate crimes and attacks committed in the Southwest suburbs were against women, but Cainkar's explanations make sense: "Women in hijab symbolized and embodied the perceived threat to the neighborhood's moral fabric" (230). This article was an interesting continuation of our discussion of the hijab. It's true that westerners really do have an obsession with it, that they focus on it and have molded it into a symbol of a break from hegemony. They have manipulated it to be "an act of oppression enforced on Muslim women by Muslim men" (241). But unlike Abu-Lughod's articles, here, the hijab is not an excuse to save Muslim women. It is an excuse to demonize them.
Shakhsari's article reminded me of a Hamid Narficy's recent lecture at the Buffett Center about Iranian youth and media. Interestingly, a lot of his lecture focused on Iranians in diaspora, especially in Canada. But the only gender-related aspect of his lecture that I can recall is in the music video of an Iranian-Canadian band. Their video was a criticism of ultraconservatism in Iran, and at the end featured a young woman pulling off her hijab. But women's agency in Iran extends far beyond their dress or their sexuality. The interview with Iranian blogger Ava was revealing, both in its content and in its lack of content. I was disappointed that the film Shakhsari discussed (Blogger Wars) depicted women's resistance and agency simply in terms of their sexuality, and men's resistance and agency in terms of their political involvement.
Though these articles were very different in their topics, they both focus on the skewed perception of Muslim women by westerners. The more we do these readings, the more I continue to reevaluate my own world views.
This week’s reading exposed the hardships of women in hijab post 9-11 in southwest Chicago. I was disconcerted by the neighborhood defense theory, which justified this nationalistic and nativist attitude. The writer does a commendable job of putting the treatment of women and men during this time into perspective. I would say this one sentence encapsulates the spirit of fear and justification for a persistent pattern of hate acts : “When nationalism is mobilized, such in the time of crisis, men and women are expected to conform to hegemonic definitions of masculinity and femininity.” The fact is that women in hijabs represent, according to the author, a cultural threat, which produces this image of foreignness and disloyalty(who we are not), a symbol that cannot be ignored.
ReplyDeleteWhile this flagrant injustice has found defenders, many use this “new security concern” to their advantage, providing expertise as in the case of Iranian Weblogistan. In fact, Shakhsari points to this global citizen without borders connecting with the world through this new public sphere, though discounting technology and internet for being the sole reason behind this paradigm shift and knowledge of production.