Baboolal, A. A. (2023). (Under)cover and Uncovered: Muslim Women’s Resistance to Islamophobic Violence.

Victims & Offenders 1-21.

After 9/11, research highlighted how Muslim communities endured discrimination,

surveillance, and violence. In recent years, few studies have critically assessed how
gender-based harassment of Muslim women is simultaneously linked to
hypervisibility (veiling), while “invisible” (non-veiled) Muslim women remain
susceptible to verbal harassment and physical violence in the public sphere. Drawing
from qualitative in-depth semi-structured interviews with Muslim women (n = 27)
across racial/ethnic and immigrant identity, this article examines the unique
vulnerability of Muslim women during the Trump presidential administration,
including covert and overt forms of violence. Findings indicate myriad forms of
violence as veiled women navigate harassment at the axes of racialized Muslim
identity and social categorization as immigrants (twice-racialized intersectionality).
Yet, Black Muslim women’s experiences are further complicated by anti-Black racism.
Muslim women navigate gender-based anti-Muslim bias by disrupting notions of
passive victimhood by leaning into invisible or hypervisible markers, revealing or
concealing their ethnoreligious identity through racial ambiguity, and engaging in
advocacy.