Pinkwashing the “Honor Crime”: Murdered Muslim Women and the Politics of Posthumous Solidarities

Abstract

This article explores media constructions of the 2007 murder of a Canadian teenager named Aqsa Parvez as a case of an honor killing that shocked Canada. While much has been written about her story in the Canadian press, considerably less attention has been paid to the ways in which this murder resonated far beyond the borders of the Canadian state. This article thus traces the travels of the narrative of Aqsa Parvez’s murder from Canada to the United States and then to Israel in order to show not only how stories of death gain meaning but also how they make meaning by reproducing national boundaries and by reconfiguring relations of dominance, resistance, and power. By charting the transnational routes of honor-related violence as they are exemplified in the Aqsa Parvez murder, the narratives or stories it generated, and the right-wing activism it mobilized, I aim to reveal connections between the discursive and political configurations of this crime. In mapping these stories’ movements and travels, as well as their tensions and contradictions, I show how the murder of (certain) Muslim women in crimes that become known as honor crimes is interpreted and deployed in a number of interconnected geopolitical sites and registers. Utilizing critical race and queer scholarship on the phenomenon and practices of pinkwashing, I argue that the production and commemoration of the honor crime as an instance of exceptional violence help authorize posthumous solidarities that serve to buttress right-wing forms of political activism.