Decoding Dress: Countersurveillance Poetics and Practices Under Permanent War

Abstract

In the wake of renewed attacks on both Muslim and Sikh communities, the hijab and turban continue to be enveloped as important material objects in the racialization of Muslim and Sikh bodies. Analyzing contemporary visual culture as both testament and counter-archive to a geopolitical project of Islamophobia, this article moves to both assemble and update how these unsettling figures are read and apprehended by statist forces and how they inventively resist such forms of scrutiny. Comparative in scope, I look at the racial, gendered, and queer configurations that the religious symbols and objects of hijab and turban provide. Specifically, this article examines the twinned contradictions in arguments around religious freedom, as well as the imperialist discourses of security and insurgency in the ongoing Global Wars on Terror. Through readings of recent events, ephemera, and visual culture, this article argues that the aligned politics of recognition of these two bodies has important effects for the racial, gendered, and sexual politics of American empire.