Chadors, Feminists, Terror

Sylvia Chan-Malik

The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2011, vol. 637, issue 1, 112-140

Abstract: On March 8, 1979, Iranian women took to the streets of Tehran for International Women’s Day. This article examines American media representations of the weeklong protests and explores how the event occasioned the emergence of a distinctly American—and deeply racialized—“discourse of the veil,†in which “Islam†was rendered a national catchphrase for terror and the figure of the “Poor Muslim Woman†entered U.S. cultural discourse as a symbol of a new world order. Through analysis of U.S. media coverage, this piece tracks how discourses of second-wave feminism, a post–civil rights rhetoric of racial and cultural pluralism, and late–Cold War logics of secularism and liberal democracy intersected to create a racial-orientalist discourse of the veil, which would subsequently be deployed to justify U.S. military aggression in the Middle East while perpetuating state violence against women, immigrants, and people of color throughout the 1980s and into the post-9/11 era.

Keywords: Islam; Iran; race; feminism; Muslim women; U.S. media representations; “discourse of the veil†(search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2011
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0002716211409011 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:anname:v:637:y:2011:i:1:p:112-140

DOI: 10.1177/0002716211409011

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().