Women’s Sartorial Agency

Abstract

After September 11, the world witnessed a rising tide of Islamophobia generally in the West, but more acutely felt in the United States, which had been directly attacked. This fear and hatred of Islam went into overdrive during the presidency of Donald Trump, with his racial and religious slurs directed at Muslims. This section focuses on how Islamophobes frequently target Muslim women in ḥijāb and play up their assumed “victimhood” in order to set up a contrast to “liberated” non-Muslim Western women, creating a “clash of civilizations” discourse that pits a reified “Muslim world” against a reified “West.” The genealogy of this narrative is insightfully explored in this section, revealing its deep historical roots within Orientalism, a phenomenon that has caricatured and demonized the Muslim East, not least through its fetishization of Muslim women and their attire. In the more recent past and continuing into the contemporary period, the clash of civilizations discourse has been deployed to stage the “War on Terror,” which, at least in part, is being waged on the bodies of Muslim women.