Arabs and Muslims in the Media: Race and Representation after 9/11

3 Evoking Sympathy for the Muslim Woman

71 3 Evoking Sympathy for the Muslim Woman Without the assault on the senses, it would be impossible for a state to wage war. —Judith Butler, Frames of War It is not possible to write about representations of Arabs and Muslims since 9/11 without addressing the quandary of Arab and Muslim women. In innumerable ways, and from both ends of the ideological spectrum, these women have been represented as veiled, oppressed, and in need of rescue. The government and commercial news media have been central to the circulation of stories about the “oppressed Muslim woman” and the imperative to “save brown women from brown men.”1 Yet the figure of the oppressed Muslim woman has not been prominent in post-9/11 TV dramas, which tend to focus on Arab/Muslim American patriots, victims of hate crimes, and Arab/Muslim terrorists. When Arab/Muslim women were represented in TV dramas, like their male counterparts, they tended to fall within these three categories.2 For example, 24 portrayed an Arab/Muslim female terrorist (the character Dina Araz) and an Arab/Muslim American patriotic government agent (Nadia Yassir). While these characters do not wear the hijab (headscarf), a few women wearing a hijab did appear on occasion in TV dramas, usually as victims of post-9/11 hate crimes. Two episodes of 7th Heaven represent hijab-wearing Muslim girls and women as Americans who were subject to post-9/11 harassment. Similarly, on The Education of Max Bickford, a Muslim female student at the college receives a death threat. Perhaps the effort by TV dramas to create more complex characters led to complex terrorists but not complex victims. While “the oppressed Muslim woman” did not make compelling prime-time dramas, it did make for compelling news. This chapter continues to outline post-9/11 representational modes and the role of emotion in representations of Arabs and Muslims after 9/11. It explores how affects evoked by stories about Arabs and Muslims can also contribute to such exclusionary logics. Arab and Muslim victims emerge as particularly important to simplified complex representations because they allow viewers to feel for a certain character type—a person who formerly was not seen as deserving of human feeling. The growth of this affect in turn comes to symbolize multicultural progress. Here, I examine another rendition of the victim: a Muslim woman who is brutalized by a patriarchal culture and needs to be saved. 72 Evoking Sympathy for the Muslim Woman A Vanderbilt Television News Archive search reveals dozens of news stories on Muslim women within a year after 9/11. A LexisNexis search reveals thousands of articles on Muslim women published within a year after 9/11 in major U.S. and world publications and thousands more during the subsequent seven years of the Bush administration’s War on Terror. These stories include accounts of unbearable oppression, of the Arab and Muslim American plight as victims of hate crimes, and attempts to explain to Americans the veil and the status of women in Muslim societies.3 Some stories sought to challenge the overwhelming focus on “the extreme cases of oppression against Muslim women” and to reveal that “there’s another world out there.”4 Whether advancing or actively seeking to challenge the oppressed Muslim woman story, this narrative was repeatedly circulated after 9/11, and none was more powerful than this one. Despite an array of stories on Muslim women, the oppressed Muslim woman narrative derives its power from the strong emotions it provokes—pity and outrage. Representations of the oppressed Muslim woman rely on an excess of affect—an explicit expression of outrage and sympathy—and representations of alleged terrorist men rely on the regulation of affect—a withholding of sympathy . The news media participates in policing the boundaries of feeling differently in the case of Muslim women and men in the War on Terror, resulting in a hierarchy of human life. Sympathy is a key emotion that emerged in relation to Arabs and Muslims after 9/11. It is a key post-race emotion, as it importantly signals a capacity to have nuanced emotions toward the designated enemy. Rather than demonize all Arabs and Muslims, having sympathy for some of them illuminates an enlightened culture that can distinguish between the “good” and “bad” ones, the perpetrators and the victims. Sympathy can be manifested as the benevolent emotions explored in chapter 2—remorse and mourning—or as more active iterations of benevolent emotions—pity and...