For Rana, this Muslim terrorist identity is also clearly gendered in that it is not applied to Muslim women in the same way that it blankets Muslim men’s bodies. However, Muslim women are certainly caught up in this construction of Muslim men as potential terrorists. According to Rana, “Boundary making through gendered frameworks is enacted through notions of racialized masculinity and patriarchy and the concept of racialized Muslims. In both concepts, it is women who are made vulnerable in the active practices of racializing Muslims via assumptions about Islamic patriarchy and narratives of the victimization of the imperiled Muslim woman by the dangerous Muslim man (Razack 2008)” (Rana 2011: 169). In the chapters that follow, I show how Muslim American men have been placed on terrorist watchlists and on lists in U.S. airports because they have been racialized as terrorists. They are surveilled by the government and their fellow citizens in unique ways because of this association with terror. Muslim women who wear the hijab have also come to symbolize the threat of terror but are also constructed as antimodern and anti-Western.

XREF: Connects to critical race theory and feminist work on gendered racialization, and media/counterterrorism studies on profiling.

Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, loc. 34