Week 7: Femininity, Masculinity and Modernity

This week’s readings looked at assumed and practiced gender roles and how they affect one’s treatment in society. Certain roles are ascribed to Arab and Muslim men and women, which determine their treatment in society. The first article looked at how perceptions of Arab/Muslims affected their treatment in American society post-9/11, specifically in the South West suburbs of Chicago. Women were the primary victims of harassment and attacks, and reported experience hate encounters twice as much as men. Men were more likely to experience discrimination from government officials as they were seen as terrorists, though inconvenient, so long as they avoided these sites such as airports and border crossings they felt relatively safe in their day-to-day lives. While women were seen as violators of American values, it was in public, day-to-day encounters they felt most unsafe and threatened. Women who choose to wear the hijab or veil (as opposed to women who are “forced” by their husbands) were seen as more of a threat because they were willingly ascribing to values and norms that are un-American.  Regardless of whether these women were immigrants or American born, they were viewed as foreigners in their own neighbourhoods, producing the notion that one cannot be American and Arab or Muslim at the same time.

The second article challenged some of the common notions that the internet provides an outlet for the free, liberated individual. The writer looks at the phenomena of Weblogistan, which refers to the splurge of Persian-language blogs since September 2001. “The large number of Persian-language weblogs came to be known as Weblogistan, the Iranian blogosphere, which by now includes an estimated 700,000 Persian-language blogs” (p. 8). Weblogistan produces gendered subjects, where men are seen as violent and women sexually liberated. Whether it is mere coincidence that as a result of Weblogistan emerging around the same time the “war on terror” began, it has “subject[ed] Weblogistan to the historical and political civilizational discourses and practices that give it meaning in the context of the ‘global war on terror’” (p. 10). Discourses of militarism and neoliberalism are expressed, and the producers are represented as a gendered neoliberal subject. While presented by the West as a positive advancement as a result of the growth of technology “My caution in joining the cyber-enthusiastic accounts about Weblogistan is this medium’s implication in neoliberal, nationalist and militaristic discourses” (p. 21). Voices that are not heard are bloggers that don’t reflect these Americanized ideals, though they are out there, they’re blogs are unnoticed by Western, mainstream populations. Instead what is stressed is the fact that through blogging, repressed people are able to speak out and represent the American ideals we “all” wish to possess, militarism, freedom, and neoliberalism.

I hadn’t known just how much discrimination Muslim and Arab women faced post-9/11 in the United States. It seems like such a contradiction that women who choose to wear the veil freely are seen as ascribing to un-American values. If freedom is one of the tenets of what it means to live in America, shouldn’t freedom to dress however one chooses be included in this definition? Interestingly as shown in the second article, what is seen as a truly liberated woman through such terms is a sexually active one, suggesting that women define their freedom solely through their appearance and sexuality. This definition of female freedom is problematic, and yet women are more often than not defined through these terms alone and all other aspects of their identity are ignored.