Drawing on 75 semi-structured qualitative interviews with Arab, South Asian, and Black Muslim women social justice activists, ages 18–30 years, organizing in the United States and the United Kingdom, I theorize their experiences as the basis of the matrix of gendered Islamophobia. Building upon Jasmine Zine’s concept of gendered Islamophobia, I synthesize this concept with Patricia Hill Collins’s theory of the matrix of domination to give a more in-depth and nuanced structure of how gendered Islamophobia operates and is resisted by Muslim women activists. This article identifies the overlapping configurations of power that affect Muslim women’s lives through structural, disciplinary, hegemonic, and interpersonal domains, countering reductionist accounts of Islamophobia as a universalized, unvariegated social force impacting all Muslims in similar ways (thereby privileging Muslim men’s experiences and subjectivities while contributing to the erasure of Muslim women’s agency). Instead, the matrix of gendered Islamophobia locates Islamophobia within shifting axes of oppression that are simultaneously structured along the lines of gender, race, class, sexuality, and citizenship. The findings of this research reveal a dialectical relationship between Muslim women’s oppression and simultaneous contestation of gendered Islamophobia via their collective remaking of alternative ideas, politics, discourses, and organizing practices.

Drawing on forty semistructured interviews with young Muslim American women, FBI hate crimes data, and civil rights policy reports, this research explores the rise of institutionalized private violence directed at Muslim women. While saving Muslim women from Muslim men through U.S. military invasion remains a dominant cultural ideology and justification for the global War on Terror, I argue that “saving Muslim women” from violence garners significant attention only when foreign Muslim men are positioned as the assailants of such violence. One central form of violence that remains unexamined for Muslim women’s lives is the increased exposure to violence in the public sphere following the rapid securitization of the United States after the bombing of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Of the women interviewed for this study, 85 percent reported experiencing verbal assaults or threats within public spaces, and 25 percent reported experiencing physical violence. This research finds that, although white American men are disproportionately responsible for public forms of Islamophobic violence, the race and gender of these assailants often remain invisible within media accounts.

The sustained fixation on Muslims as the perennial suspects in domestic terrorism is a stereotype that continues to pervade counter-intelligence driven efforts. This research analyzes 113 cases of FBI contact with US Muslims living in Los Angeles, CA. Based upon these cases, this research suggests that every day, normal behavior becomes suspicious only when practiced by US Muslims, which would otherwise be acceptable, mundane, and unremarkable for ordinary white Christians, therefore constituting a form of “racialized state surveillance.” The most prevalent questions asked by FBI agents to Muslims in this study were regarding religious practices or affiliation with religious organizations demonstrating the FBI faultily presumes that Muslim ties to their community and faith is abnormal, and worthy of state surveillance. This research reveals that FBI contact with Muslims is often not reliant upon actual indications of criminal activity, but instead the contact is predicated upon the suspicion of who is engaged in these behaviors. Under racialized state surveillance, these actions become hyperscrutinized and deemed worthy of FBI assessment.

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