From the Streets of Peshawar to the Cover of Maclean's Magazine: Reading Images of Muslim Women as Currere to Interrupt Gendered Islamophobia

Abstract

The mass media acts as a powerful informal curriculum on otherness, with Muslims currently in the starring role. This auto/ethno/graphic bricolage juxtaposes theory, personal narrative and photographs, and readings of media images by young Muslim females, to provoke thought on how visual media discourses constitute our subjectivities. Drawing from postcolonial feminist theory, cultural studies, and post-conceptualist curriculum theory, links are made between photographs of covered Muslim women in Iran and Pakistan and images appearing in the print media, to deconstruct the self and broader cultural and political discourses. How are we all being educated and positioned by what we see and hear in the media, and what might be the local and global effects in the post 9/11 context?