Transnational Feminist Approaches to Anti-Muslim Racism

Abstract

This special issue brings together feminist scholars to theorize antiMuslim racism. It specifically attends to an understanding of anti-Muslim racism as transnational, proliferating, and linked to other racisms and projects of rule. Three key questions are addressed: How do we understand global circuits of power as they travel and shape local contexts in which anti-Muslim racism operates, including contexts in whichMuslims are the majority? How is global anti-Muslim racism a gendered phenomenon? What is a revolutionary politics in which resistant forms of Muslimness imagine another world?With its emphasis on the transnational, the special issue assembles scholars whose work on the regional contexts of Turkey, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Iran, the Middle East, Europe, Canada, and the United States, among other nations, reveals the global circuits along which anti-Muslim racism travels. Their explorations of how the global and the local are intertwined pay special attention to howdiscourses of anti-Muslim racism install white, Western subjects as superior and the heteronormative white family as the basis of political life. This is a racism that morphs as it travels transnationally and attaches itself to supremacist, colonial, and imperial projects everywhere. The special issue offers an explicit feminist analysis, paying attention to how racial discourses are gendered and sexualized and how thosewho are the targets of anti-Muslim racism articulate their gendered dreams of an alternative lifeworld in the face of their marginalization.