The representation of Muslim women in the post-9/11 cultural products

In meiner Diplomarbeit untersuche ich wie muslimische Frauenfiguren in den folgenden Kulturprodukten Yasmin, Little Mosque on the Prairie und Nazrah nach 9/11 repräsentiert werden. Mein Ziel ist es zu zeigen, dass die Darstellung der muslimischen Frauen in diesen Kulturprodukten sich von den westlichen Mainstream Medien, in denen muslimische Frauen als Opfer gekennzeichnet sind, unterscheiden. Um zu illustrieren, in welcher Art und Weise die Darstellung der muslimischen Frauenfiguren in Yasmin, Little Mosque on the Prairie und Nazrah die Stereotypen dekonstruieren, stelle ich zuerst frühere Darstellungen von muslimischen Frauen in der westlichen Literatur und Kunst vor. Im Bezug auf Edward Saids Orientalism und Meyda Yegenoglus Colonial Fantasies erkläre ich, dass der Mythos von der passiven und gehorsamen muslimischen Frau aus dem Orientalismus stammt. Said definiert den Orientalismus als eine Beschäftigung mit dem Osten, das einen Diskurs über den Orient produziert. Er behauptet, dass der Orientalismus, der die Welt als in „West” und „Ost”, „zivilisiert” und „barbarisch” kategorisiert, “ein westlicher Stil der Beherrschung, Widerherstellung und dem Besitz von Autorität über den „Orient” ist. In diesem Sinn spielt die Vorstellung der muslimischen Frauen als Sklaven der muslimischen Männer in Kunst und Literatur des 18. Jahrhunderts eine wichtige Roll um die Überlegenheit der westlichen Zivilisation zu beweisen. Ich betone, dass nach dem 11. September 2001 die orientalische Darstellung der muslimischen Frauen als Gefangene der muslimischen Männer wieder entdeckt und neu produziert worden sind. Die Bilder von afghanischen Frauen in der Burqa dominieren die Medien und dadurch wird das Klischee der unterdrückten muslimischen Frauen verstärkt. Die Frage, die ich behandle, ist, ob die westliche Intervention den afghanischen Frauen eine Stimme gibt oder nicht. Im Bezug auf die Vorstellung der afghanische Frauen und der Frage nach der Burqa sagt Bina Sharif, eine afghanische Verfasserin, dass das Problem von Frauen in Afghanistan nicht die Burqa ist, sondern die westliche Politik und die Taliban Regime, die die Stimme der afghanischen Frauen ignorieren. Nach der Erklärung, wie der hegemoniale westliche Diskurs die unterdrückte muslimische Frau konstruiert und wie dieser Diskurs alle muslimische Frauen zur einer fixen und singulären Kategorie beschränkt, zeigt meine Arbeit, dass Yasmin, Little Mosque on the Prairie und Nazrah, ein TV Drama, eine TV Serie und eine Dokumentation, ein ganz anderes Bild im Bezug auf muslimische Frauen bieten. In diesen Kulturprodukten sind die muslimischen Frauen selbständig, kämpferisch und selbstbewusst dargestellt. Zum Beispiel ist im britischen Film Yasmin die muslimische Frauenfigur als Siegerin dargestellt und ist kein Opfer. Die Protagonistin kämpft nicht nur gegen den hegemonialen westlichen Diskurs sondern auch gegen die östlich patriarchale Kultur. Ebenso repräsentiert Little Mosque on the Prairie, die weiblichen Charakterinnen wie Rayyan und Fatima als aktive Mitglieder der Gesellschaft. Die muslimischen Interviewpartnerinnen in Nazrah werden auf ähnliche Weise als aktive Frauenfiguren vorgestellt. Darüber hinaus gehe ich in meiner Arbeit der Frage nach, ob die muslimischen Frauenfiguren in Yasmin, Little Mosque on the Prairie und Nazrah als vielseitige und dynamische Frauen dargestellt sind oder nicht. Auf Stuart Halls Konzept von kultureller Identität bezogen, demonstriere ich, dass diese Kulturprodukte muslimische Frauenidentitäten als multiplen, veränderbaren und historischen Konstrukts definieren. Zusätzlich zeige ich auf, auf welche Art und Weise das Kopftuch oder der Schleier in diesen Kulturprodukten eingesetzt werden. Im Westen werden das Kopftuch und der Schleier als ein Zeichen der „barbarisch“ islamischen Zivilisation und ein Symbol von Unterdrückung der Frauen gesehen. In Yasmin, Little Mosque on the Prairie und Nazrah ist das Kopftuch als eine Metapher von Freiheit und Identität definiert. In diesem Sinn, sind diese Filme sehr dekonstruktiv. Zum Schluss, behaupte ich, dass in den Werken Yasmin, Little Mosque on the Prairie und Nazrah die muslimischen Frauenfiguren sich selbst ohne Einfluss der westlichen und islamischen Diskurse frei definieren und somit einen wesentlichen Beitrag zur Selbstdefinition von muslimischen Frauen darstellt.Since the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 a great deal of attention has been paid to the Muslim World. The images of Muslim women in the veil or in the burqa have circulated in mainstream Western media, which report on Muslim communities. Many writers such as Jasmin Zine and Kristan Hunt claim that the images of veiled Muslim women in the post-9/11 media have reinforced the clichéd notions about the “Muslim woman” as silenced and oppressed victims of Islamic culture. In my thesis I am going to analyze three post-9/11 cultural products namely Yasmin, Little Mosque on the Prairie and Nazrah, which can be categorized as a TV drama, a sitcom and a documentary film respectively. By using the methods of post-colonialist and feminist theories, I aim to show in what ways the representations of Muslim women in these cultural products deconstruct the conventional image of the “Muslim woman”. In order to examine how these cultural products challenge the depiction of the “victimized Muslim woman”, it is essential to investigate how and when the portrayal of the “Muslim woman” as submissive was constituted. In Chapter 2, I will demonstrate that the representation of the “Muslim woman” as victim dates back to the eighteenth century when the West became economically, militarily and politically superior to the East and started to colonize the Muslim World. Colonization, military and economic power, enabled the West to produce the knowledge of the “Orient” that led the West to define itself by categorizing the world into the following binary oppositions such as, “the Occident” and “the Orient”, “the West” and “the East”, and “us” and “them”. According to Edward Said, Orientalism [the study of the Orient] is ‘a Western style for dominating, restructuring and having an authority over the Orient’. In this regard, it can be said that since the Enlightenment Muslim women have been an important part of the construction of the Orient because of their ways of clothing and living. The veil and the harem have been used as means of othering Muslim women. As Kahf indicates, the idea that Muslim women are oppressed and imprisoned in Islamic culture was ‘manifested in a kind of narrative shorthand by the veil and the harem’. In many books and paintings produced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Muslim women were portrayed as passive, submissive and exotic. They were represented as the opposite of Western women, who were regarded as free. However, in these works Muslim women are silenced. It is not Muslim women who speak for themselves but Western travelers, writers and painters. As Said puts it, the Oriental woman depicted in Flaubert’s Kucuk Hanim does not represent her emotions, presence and history but she is represented. In Chapter 3 I am going to demonstrate how gender plays a crucial role in reinventing the notion that Muslim women are oppressed by their Islamic culture in post 9/11 media coverage. Burqa-clad Afghan women represented in mainstream Western media reinforce the hegemonic discourse of Orientalism on Muslim women and evoke the idea that Muslim women victimized by their men are in need of Western “civilization”. According to many writers, such as Zillah Eisenstein and Jemima Repo, the portrayal of Afghan women in the burqa functions as the demonization of Muslim/Afghan men whereas this portrayal hypermasculinates Western men. In doing so, the war on the Taliban is justified. However, after the 9/11 attacks and its aftermath, a counter-discourse has been produced against Western hegemonic discourse. The film Yasmin, the comedy series Little Mosque on the Prairie and the documentary film Nazrah challenge the dominant discourse of Orientalism which reduces Muslim women to a singular and stable category. In the second part of my thesis, I will place my focus on an analysis of the ways in which Muslim female characters in Yasmin, Little Mosque on the Prairie and in Nazrah are represented. I will show how the portrayal of Muslim women in these cultural products is similar to or different from the monolithic portrayal of the “Muslim woman” in Western literary texts, paintings and films. In my analysis, I will also show how the Muslim female characters who are stuck between Western and Eastern cultures construct their identities in the post-9/11 world. In Yasmin, Little Mosque on the Prairie and in Nazrah the Muslim female figures fight against both imperialist Western discourse that represents Muslim women as oppressed women who need to be rescued and also against patriarchal Eastern culture that reinforces traditional gender roles on them. Then, I will also analyze whether the Muslim female characters in Yasmin, Little Mosque on the Prairie and in Nazrah are manifested as multi-layered or not. Relying on Stuart Hall’s concept of cultural identity, I am going to show that there is not a fixed and singular Muslim female identity. Especially Little Mosque on the Prairie and Nazrah illustrate the fact that there is a wide range of variety among Muslim woman characters depending on their cultural, religious, national and educational background. Referring to Homi Bhabha’s concept of hybridity, I am going to present that in these cultural products hybridity is shown as part of Muslim life which brings joy to life than chaos. Additionally, I am going to explore the ways in which the veil and the hijab are represented in Yasmin, Little Mosque on the Prairie and in Nazrah. As I have indicated before, the stereotypical representation of the “Muslim woman” in Western culture is a heavily veiled woman who lives in a harem. Muslim women cannot be defined without these two concepts in the West. However, the monolithic representation of the veil and the harem reveals ‘the myths and stereotypes of Orientalism’ rather than the true state of Muslim women’s lives. Regarding the distorted image of the harem and the veil, Sarah Graham-Brown states: Fantasies about harem life pervaded the Orientalist imagination and did much to cloud understanding of social, domestic and sexual lives of women in Middle East. The power of the harem imagination lay in the notion of a forbidden world of women, of sexuality caged and inaccessibility at least, to Western men, except a heap of imagination. It was this heap of imagination that shaped the literature, paintings […] (Graham-Brown, 2003: 502) The veil or the hijab can be seen as an extension of the harem that functions as a barrier between Western men and Muslim women. In this respect, the veil, associated with the excitement of sexuality in the harem in the Western imagination, evokes a feeling of fantasy and fear. In Yasmin, Little Mosque on the Prairie and in Nazrah, the myth of the veil and the veiled woman are subverted. The female characters see the veil as a marker of liberation and statement of their identities rather than as a symbol of Islamic oppression or backwardness of Islamic culture as represented in Western literary texts and arts. Moreover, the portrayal of the veiled Muslim woman as licentious is reversed in Yasmin and Little Mosque on the Prairie because the female characters’ private lives are revealed in them. The veiled female figures in these cultural products are shown without the hijab/ headscarf. In doing so, a Muslim woman’s lifestyle at her home is exposed without eroticizing her. In this way, the concept of the harem and the veil lose their mystery/attractiveness. Finally, I will seek an answer to the question of whether Yasmin, Little Mosque on the Prairie and Nazrah destabilize the binary between the East and the West and I will explore whether in these cultural products multiculturalism is promoted or not