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97 9 Quandaries of Representation Mona El-Ghobashy Observant or not, Muslim women face a host of well-known stereotypes: that they are dependent, shackled by the strictures of their religion, and all-around unfree. Such stereotypes are compounded by the many “representational entrepreneurs” in today’s media who are eager to speak for and about all Muslim women. The author discusses her experiences with the sometimes humorous, sometimes sobering expectation that she represent and embody the category of the Muslim woman. Rather than speak for all or even some Muslim women, she argues that she can speak only on her own behalf. Ever since I was fifteen, I have been trailed by curiosity. Once in tenth grade, while waiting in my high school guidance counselor’s office, an elderly secretary got up from her desk and came over to where I was sitting to ask me, in a toogood -to-be-true New York accent, “Excuse me, deah, are you in religion?” Perfect strangers have been no less inquisitive about my head scarf. “Excuse me, does your family come from the Caucasus?” asked an extremely solicitous and almost apologetic fellow passenger on a New York City subway car several years ago. She seemed to slink away in embarrassment as I shook my head and smiled, and I remember thinking that her demeanor suggested an academic elated at identifying a potential research subject. Now that I reflect on it, the subway has been an especially rich space for strangers to graft onto me their passions, queries, and memories. Once, as I sat impatiently in a delayed subway car on the way to college one late morning in the early 1990s, a young African American man abruptly took off his massive headphones and turned to me, “Excuse me, can I read you a poem?” “Okay,” I ventured hesitatingly, relieved that the train car was entirely empty save for him and me and a snoring man in the far corner. He unfolded a white piece of paper and began to passionately read its typed contents, an endearing ode to Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Then he folded the paper and carefully returned it to his pocket, 98 | Defying Categories explaining to me how it was wrongheaded to argue which leader was better, that both of their strategies were needed and had their place. He looked at me intently for affirmation, and I nodded smilingly. “Thank you, sister,” he said, and then returned to complete absorption in the music piped through his headphones. Once, in a subway car crammed with commuters returning home from work, an elderly Asian man got up from his seat and negotiated his way to where I sat. He leaned down to me and put his finger on the word “contrition” in the New York Times article he was reading. “Excuse me, can you explain to me the meaning of this word?” I was happy to oblige, as other passengers sneaked glances at us from behind their books and newspapers. Once, on the N Train, an elderly olive-skinned man who had been eyeing me shyly gingerly volunteered that he was raised in Iran. I forced a polite smile; I was half-asleep and extremely fatigued from staying up all night to finish a paper. He said that he was Jewish, and that when he was a boy in Iran he memorized all of the Quran in school, and that his mother covered her head, “like you,” making a hand gesture that framed his face to mimic a head covering. Perhaps he sensed some doubt in my eyes, perhaps he could not resist reminiscing about his childhood, but he then reached for his black wallet and carefully pulled out a remarkably well-preserved, sepia-toned photograph of a young, angelic-looking woman in a white head scarf. I leaned forward to look at the photograph, which he delicately placed in my hand. Its rippled edges were only slightly creased, and I was overcome by its beauty. He was positively beaming at me, and I beamed back at him. Other encounters can only be described as bizarre, ranging from annoying but harmless quotidian intrusions to darker experiences that every woman faces in slightly different forms. On the extremely snowy Christmas Day of 2002, I made my way to Queens to meet my best friend who was in town for a short visit. Lost in a neighborhood suddenly made unrecognizable by mounds of snow and shuttered storefronts, I ducked...

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