‘I’m not a Muslim. In fact, my name is Katie.’: Muslim-drag in the C4 documentary My Week as a Muslim

ABSTRACT

In the UK Channel 4 documentary, My Week As a Muslim, an English, white woman named Katie donned a hijab, a prosthetic nose and copious amounts of brown foundation to disguise herself as a Pakistani Muslim so that she could spend a week experiencing Muslim culture and appreciate her position of white privilege. Although My Week as a Muslim was attempting to challenge many of the dominant stereotypes of Muslim women found in much of Western media, it was highly problematic in the way the entire experiment echoed the narrative conventions of cross-dressing comedy films. The documentary concluded with a final ‘reveal’ sequence where Katie removed her hijab, prosthetic nose and wiped off brown make-up to show her new Muslim friends that she merely had been performing Muslim-ness for the past week. Not only did this reinforce misconceptions that there are significant differences between British people and Islam (Katie could only pass as Muslim through the use of prosthetics and elaborate make-up) but the ‘hilarious’ reveal of the cross-dressing narrative also suggested the superiority of the Muslim-drag performer in comparison to the foolish people who were deceived by the act.

KEYWORDS:

• Drag
• cross dressing narrative
• Muslim women
• postfeminist islamophobia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Film and television texts

Extremely British Muslims (2017) C4. UK.

First Dates (2013 -) C4. UK.

Grease (1978) (dir: Randal Kleiser) USA.

It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) (dir: Frank Kapra) USA.

Make Me a Muslim (2014) BBC. UK.

Mrs Doubtfire (1993) (dir: Chris Columbus) USA.

My Week as a Muslim (2017) C4. UK.

Muslims Like Us (2016) BBC. UK.

Newsnight: ‘LGBT Teaching Row: MPs Call for More Support in Schools’ (8 July 2019) BBC. UK.

Sex and the City: The Movie 2 (2010) (dir: Michael Patrick King) USA.

Some like it Hot (1959) (dir: Billy Wilder) USA.

The Muslim Pound (2016) BBC. UK.

The Notebook (2004) (dir: Nick Cassavetes) USA.

Tootsie (1982) (dir: Sydney Pollack) USA.

Notes

1. One of the early sequences, represented Katie’s house in a leafy suburb, showing her spending time with her husband and daughter and going about her daily chores such as ironing and preparing meals. The narrator explained that Katie now works as an administrator for the NHS, while previously having served many years in the RAF, in order to stress that Katie should be read by the spectator as a respectable member of UK society.

2. Islamophobia has been described as ‘a dread or hatred of Islam and therefore a fear or dislike of Muslims’ (Sheridan, 2006, p. 317; see also Halliday, 1999). Arguably, underpinning this (and furthered by media stereotypes) is ‘latent Orientalism … .condoned and justified by the threat of terrorism’ (Edwards, 2010, p. 137; see also Brayson, 2019).

3. In these documentaries the heroine is usually coded as a young, postfeminist women who is keen to embrace Western fashion and a freedom of sexual expression. She rejects the repressive ideologies of Islam which are usually articulated and enforced by older men.

4. For detailed analysis of how the veiled Muslim woman has become the symbol of Islam in Western media discourses, see Chakraborti and Zempi (2012).

5. The Manchester Bombing was a suicide bombing which took place at the Ariane Grande concert in the Manchester Arena on 22 May 2017.

6. Often the two stereotypes of the Muslim woman – ruthless terrorist and subservient ‘bundle in black’ – are conflated in film narratives as it is often a plot twist that the assumed subservient Muslim woman is really an evil terrorist. In this respect, Muslim women’s iconography can be coded – paradoxically – as both a source of pity but also fear.

7. Some feminist critics have shifted the discussion to argue that the problem is not Islam but all fundamentalist interpretations of the Abrahamic religions (Ahmed, 1992; Keddie, 1991; MacDonald, 2006) and most recently a number of more anthropologically focused feminist scholars – most notably Katherine Bullock (2003) – have stressed the importance of engaging with situated practices of Islamic dress.

8. The terms ‘secular’ and ‘multicultural’ refer to different ideologies but, as Bhandar (2009) explains, they ‘broadly share the same political and philosophical logic’ (308). While secularism was a political doctrine that emerged in the eighteenth century, multi-culturalism was a twentieth century philosophy which developed from Hegelian concept of recognition which, likewise, was influence by Lockean arguments about the importance of tolerance (Bandhar 306). However, the connection between the two ideologies is their relationship to post-enlightenment thought. While secularism denotes the progression of a society from feudalism to secular, liberal democracy it is still coloured by its response to Christianity. Likewise, multiculturalism’s focus on respect and tolerance is one of the key tenets of Christian doctrine (Bandhar 305–306). Therefore, while secularism and multiculturalism may appear to be different ideologies, it can be argued that they perform the same overall effect in that they ‘hold in place a unitary, sovereign political subjectivity’ (Bandhar 304). In this respect, both secularism and multiculturalism assert that ‘difference is fine, as long as it exists as a differentiated unity, with the unitary whole being disciplined into shape by a sovereign juridical order which itself emerges out of a Christian political heritage’ (Bandhar 315).

9. Recently, some critics have argued that other identifications, such as age (Richardson, 2019; Zaborskis, 2015) and ethnicity (Seig, 2009) can also be deconstructed via drag style performances (see also Greenhill & Tye, 2014).

10. Kimberley Brayson argues that this discourse underpins the ban-the-Burkini controversy in France in 2016 in which a constructed narrative about national safety and its relation to religious iconography disguises the ‘epistemic lens of colonialism’ (Brayson, 2019, p. 82).

11. Lila Abu-Lughod has analysed the discourses in Western media which code secular interventions into Islamic countries (even to the extent of utilizing military action) within the rhetoric of ‘saving Muslim women’. Not only is this often an insincere co-option of women’s rights but, as Abu-Lughod emphasizes, ‘projects of saving other women depend on and reinforce a sense of superiority, and are a form of arrogance that deserves to be challenged’ (2013, p. 47).

12. A much quoted Biblical passage from Deuteronomy 22:5 reads ‘A woman shall not wear a man’s garment, nor shall a man put on a woman’s cloak, for whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord your God.’

13. Popular examples in which the teenage romance is ‘enhanced’ by the consumption of ice-cream include It’s a Wonderful Life, Grease and The Notebook.

14. An important aesthetic of Heritage cinema/television is its unanchored point of view shot of a grand building or stately house. This offers a type of pictorialist pleasure to the spectator (Higson, 2003) but also anticipates the discourses and ideologies of that specific time period.

15. Katie/Kawlah even says that Khadija reminds her of her grandmother.

16. There is a zinging line in television sitcom Absolutely Fabulous where Edina identifies scandalous, sexual impropriety in her mother’s generation as being ‘woman shows ankle to chimney sweep’.

17. For example, the BBC Newsnight report on the protests taking place outside Parkfield Primary School in Birmingham by (predominantly – but not exclusively) Muslim parents about the inclusion of LGBT relationship education, opened with a shot of a Muslim woman wearing a niqab. Yet again, the Muslim women’s iconography becomes the dominant symbol of a faith that is supposedly incompatible with contemporary Britain.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Niall Richardson

Niall Richardson lectures in film studies at the University of Sussex where he convenes MA Gender and Media. He is the author of the monographs The Queer Cinema of Derek Jarman (2009), Transgressive Bodies: Representations in Film and Popular Culture (2010) and Ageing Femininity on Screen: The Older Woman in Contemporary Cinema (2018).