Document Type

Contribution to Book

Publication Date

2021

Publisher

Syracuse University Press

Source Publication

Arab American Women: Representation and Refusal

Source ISSN

9780815636847

Abstract

VERBAL AND PHYSICAL EXPRESSIONS of public animosity toward Arab and Muslim Americans surged in the United States in the first months after the attacks on September 11, 2001 (9/11), and then quelled to highly varying degrees afterward, depending on place (Levin 2017). This pattern was unlike punitive government actions, which continued nationwide at high levels for years (see Cainkar 2009). My ethnographic and sociological study of the impacts of 9/11 on Muslim Arabs in metropolitan Chicago, involving field research conducted between 2002 and 2005 and in-depth interviews with 102 Arab Muslims (45 percent of whom were women), found that women endured far more hate acts and harassments than men. Indeed, women reported experiencing them at a rate more than double that of Arab Muslim men. The study also found that the overwhelming majority of women experiencing hate acts were either wearing hijab (modest clothing, especially a head scarf) or in the company of women wearing hijab when victimized, as too were many of the men.

Comments

"Dangerous Women/Women in Danger: Gendered Impacts of the September 11th Attacks" in Arab American Women: Representation and Refusal. Eds. Michael Suleiman, Suad Joseph and Louise Cainkar. Syracuse NY: Syracuse University Press 2021: 432-461. Publisher link. © 2021 Syracuse University Press. Used with permission.

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