The aim of this research project is to investigate how Muslim-American undergraduate women experience racialization in public and private spaces, examine whether those experiences give rise to a racialized identity, and highlight how they resist and cope with their racialization. The recent application of the term racialization to discuss the Muslim experience in the west has encouraged scholars such as Leon Moosavi, Saher Selod, Mythili Rajiva, Ming H. Chen and others, to engage in critical discourse within the scholarship of race and ethnicity regarding this often-neglected population. It is due to the unique, and gendered relationship that the female Muslim-American population has with the United States, particularly as a result of 9/11 and the label of 'oppressed' being imposed upon them, that it is important to comprehend how specifically Muslim-American women experience racialization. While these studies have broadened the understanding of how Muslims are, and continue to be othered, few studies have focused on the specific areas within public and private spaces where this marginalized group is racialized. This study attempts to fill this gap in existing research by examining how peers, mass media, educational institutions, law enforcement, family, and religious communities racialize Muslim-American women, and how these gendered experiences shape their racialized sense of self. In doing so, it also examines the impact of religious, racial, ethnic and cultural signifiers on the female Muslim-American experience of racialization, and demonstrates how these women employ certain strategies of resistance and coping mechanisms to deal with their racialization. / Master of Science / The aim of this research project is to investigate how Muslim-American undergraduate women specifically experience racialization in public and private spaces, examine whether those experiences give rise to their sense of self as the other, and highlight how they resist and cope with their experiences of racialization. The term racialization, understood by Barot and Bird (2010) as a process that ascribes physical and cultural differences to an individual or group(s) in order to define the other, has only recently been applied to understand and discuss the Muslim experience in the west. Due to the unique relationship that the Muslim female population has with the United States, particularly as a result of 9/11, and the label of ‘oppressed’ being imposed upon them, it is important to understand how specifically Muslim-American women experience racialization. While previous studies on racialization have broadened the understanding of how Muslims are, and continue to be othered, few studies have focused on the specific areas within public and private spaces where this marginalized group experiences racialization. This study attempts to fill this gap in existing research by examining how peers, mass media, educational institutions, law enforcement, family, and religious communities racialize Muslim-American women, and how these gendered experiences shape their sense of self as the other. In doing so, it also examines the impact of religious, racial, ethnic and cultural signifiers on the female Muslim-American experience of racialization, and demonstrates how these women employ certain strategies of resistance and coping mechanisms to deal with their racialization. This study finds that participants do in fact, experience othering in both public and private spaces. Within public spaces, participants reported experiencing the most othering in the media and in educational institutions, with the least in their neighborhoods. In private spaces, participants reported experiencing the most othering at the hands of the family and their religious communities, with the least othering by their peers. This study also finds that as a result of their racialized experiences, participants do possess a sense of self as the Other, albeit this changes according to the different spaces they occupy.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/77658 |
| Date | 15 May 2017 |
| Creators | Islam, Inaash |
| Contributors | Sociology, Brunsma, David L., Samanta, Suchitra, Graves, Ellington T. |
| Publisher | Virginia Tech |
| Source Sets | Virginia Tech Theses and Dissertation |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | ETD, application/pdf |
| Rights | In Copyright, http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ |
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