Muslim American Protest Iconography and Revisionism: On the Gendered-Racial and Secular Aesthetics of (Neo)Liberal Dissent

Abstract:In this essay, I account for the continuum of inclusion, regulation, and historical revision formative to "Muslim American" iconography in the late war on terror era. In 2017, a poster of a South Asian Muslim American woman wearing a hijab in the style of the United States flag was touted by transnational media as "the face of the Trump resistance" and carried across pro-immigration and feminist protests that imagined a more inclusive state. It was also rebuked by Muslims for desanctifying the hijab through the US flag, perceived as symbol of the state's settler-imperial violence. Tracing the poster's production—from its source artwork to its distinct revisions—and mass circulations, I consider the intersections of race, gender, and secularism in US politics, markets, and aesthetics. I situate the poster within uneven neoliberal art markets that commodify dissent as well as flexible genealogies of secular arts and civil religion, which racially discipline Islam into an aesthetic of the US state and its resistances. I then focus on the poster's mobilization in the Women's March on Washington, where Muslim women, Islam, and transnational solidarities with Palestine became subjects of feminist inclusion and contention. I argue the shifting aesthetics of gendered-racial and secular (neo)liberalism converge on Muslim American iconographies of protest and inclusion while managing the terms of Muslim protest and inclusion.