Chadors, Feminists, Terror

The Racial Politics of U.S. Media Representations of the 1979 Iranian Women’s Movement

Bibliographic Data

ID5742413
AuthorsSylvia Chan-Malik (0000-0002-0963-470X, American Institute for Economic Research, corresponding author)
Year2011
Volume637
Issue1
Pages112-140
Publication date2011-09-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueThe Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0002-7162 • E-ISSN: 1552-3349
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/0002716211409011
OpenAlexW2140835093
LanguageEN
Citations received13
References cited35

On March 8, 1979, Iranian women took to the streets of Tehran for International Women's Day. This article examines American media representations of the weeklong protests and explores how the event occasioned the emergence of a distinctly American-and deeply racialized-"discourse of the veil," in which "Islam" was rendered a national catchphrase for terror and the figure of the "Poor Muslim Woman" entered U.S. cultural discourse as a symbol of a new world order. Through analysis of U.S. media coverage, this piece tracks how discourses of second-wave feminism, a post-civil rights rhetoric of racial and cultural pluralism, and late-Cold War logics of secularism and liberal democracy intersected to create a racial-orientalist discourse of the veil, which would subsequently be deployed to justify U.S. military aggression in the Middle East while perpetuating state violence against women, immigrants, and people of color throughout the 1980s and into the post-9/11 era

Feminism · Immigration · Islam · Media studies · Orientalism · Pluralism (philosophy) · Political science · Rhetoric · Secularism · Secularity · Sociology · Symbol (formal) · Theology · Gender Studies · History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Law · Race, History, and American Society · Religious studies · Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and Political Violence

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