The Cultural Politics of Islam in U.S. Reality Television

Abstract

To a limited extent, post-9/11 U.S. media has begun to accommodate Middle Eastern identities that go beyond Orientalist binaries common to American film and television. By exploring 2 reality television shows, All-American Muslim and Shahs of Sunset, this article asks: How can we understand this increase in representations of Arabs, Iranians, and Muslims within U.S. popular culture? Examining how Islam is represented (or not represented) in each show provides a window onto different media representational strategies, highlighting the possibilities and limitations of inclusion afforded by liberal multiculturalism and revealing the still-thorny cultural politics of Islam in a post-9/11 context.

Making Space in Social Media: #MuslimWomensDay in Twitter

“…Writing of the Mipsterz 3 video that went viral in 2013, Saeed (2013) shared her worry that Muslims might be trading one hardened representation for another.What we as Muslim women don’t need in trying to own our spaces in our small and large communities is the use of our image for the purposes of fixing our image . More specifically: we don’t need to use a (“positive”) superficial representation of us to combat other (“negative”) superficial representations … The formula for creating stereotypes, mainstream tropes of assimilation and “good” vs “bad” should not be our formula for fighting against those very things.Alsultany (2016) suggests that “a negative stereotype is defused not with a ‘better’ stereotype, but with a diverse field of images” (p. 60) There seemed to be some concern on #MuslimWomensDay that the story of the experience of Muslim women in America might become sanitized in order to make Muslims feel safer to American audiences. Some Muslim contributors expressed their concern that the image of the All-American Muslim woman that might appear in the #MuslimWomensDay hashtag would ignore Muslims of color or lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Muslims.…”

Untitled

“…As such, researchers have turned to understand how these shows mediate personal identities (Turner, 2010, pp. 33-70), including aspects like race, urbanism and wealth (Dominguez, 2015;Kraszewski, 2009;Skeggs, 2009), gender (Gray, 2009), production and consumption (Cox & Proffitt, 2012;Cox, 2014;Hearn, 2017), religion (Alsultany, 2016), as well as spaces and place (Lukinbeal & Fletchall, 2013;Kraszewski, 2017). Despite the acknowledgement of the format's mediation, the idea of authenticity of the show remains potent for viewers (Rose & Wood, 2005) and which may have to do with a desire for "authenticity" within consumption (Pine & Gilmore, 2007).…”