Desiring Empire: The Colonial Violence of “Hijab Pornography”

Abstract

The exploitation of the hijab in fetish images and pornographic films invites the consumer to explore their colonial fantasies and to ponder the raced conceptions of Muslim women and men. The fetishization of the hijab, niqab, and burqa signals this racialization; this new racism depends not only on epidermalization, but on ethnicity, geography, and culture. It is these fetishized forms of religious symbology which invite the epistemic violence of the imperial gaze, as they do with their facilitation of the male gaze. This work seeks to uncover the imbrication of the manufacture of desire in globalist politics, while also confronting the gendered, classed, and raced dimensions of the colonial imaginary. It examines how pornographic images and film equally exploit the violent Muslim man trope and, its converse, the emancipated Muslim woman trope to perform submission for the Western consumer, and subjugate Muslim bodies, minds, and labor.