As part of the Doll’s special act for visiting U.S. marines, she performs in the guise of the “Black Widow”: “she would appear in a long black dress and hijab, then slowly strip to crotchless black knickers and an open cup black bra.… And as she did so Ferdy [the owner of the club], using a data projector, would cover her flesh with swirling Arabic lettering which he claimed to the audience was ‘the Black Widow’s most sacred book,’ the Koran” (41). This seedy display, which in its calligraphic details recalls Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Theo van Gogh’s controversial film Submission (2004), reveals the fetishization of the female Muslim Other as object of military intervention—the performance is accompanied by “explosions, screams and a thudding rhythm” (40)—and as veiled and thus all the more alluring focus of sexual fantasy. Never was racism’s flipside in desire illustrated so starkly as in this show for the club’s paying punters.

Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, loc. 362