Negotiating the Hyphens in a Culture of Surveillance: Embodied Surveillance and the Representation of Muslim Adolescence in Anglophone YA Fiction

Abstract:In the era defined by the war on terror, border security, and increased Western cultural anxiety, the discourses of politics, race, and gender influence the representation of non-normative bodies, notably in the signification of female Muslim adolescent bodies as sites of political, racial, and cultural contestation within a culture of surveillance. Mirroring Western society, Anglophone YA fiction typically privileges white normative portrayals of Western adolescence. Fostered in a culture of suspicion, the revitalized orientalist tropes depict Muslim adolescent girls as bodies to “save,” “fear,” and “Westernize.” An emerging group of YA novels presents a substantive challenge to this tradition by seeking to disrupt patriarchal, white normative conceptualizations of Western adolescence. Through an analysis of Randa Abdel-Fattah’s When Michael Met Mina and S. K. Ali’s Saints and Misfits, this article explores the ways in which the female Muslim adolescent body is constructed as a product of surveillance, problematizing the experiences of embodied surveillance and the complexities of being identified as a part of racialized surveillant assemblages.