The Weight of the Hyphen: Freedom, Fusion and Responsibility Embodied by Young Muslim-American Women During a Time of Surveillance

Abstract

This article reports on a qualitative investigation of 15 young Muslim-American women living in New York City, after 9/11 and in the midst of the Patriot Act. Participants completed surveys about identity, discrimination, and coping; drew “identity maps” to represent their multiple identities and alliances; and participated in focus groups on several college campuses in the New York metropolitan area. Focus groups were conducted to investigate collectively their sense of hyphenated identities, their experiences of surveillance and their responses to scrutiny in families, communities, on the streets and in the political public sphere. Implications for the theoretical and empirical study of immigrant youth “under siege” are developed, with a particular focus on the burdens and responsibilities embodied by daughters of the second generation of Muslim-Americans.

We thank our colleagues, particularly Madeeha Mir, Nida Bikmen, and Selcuk Sirin for their support. We are grateful to many anonymous reviewers who provided us with constructive comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

Notes

¹The Panapticon is an architectural design for a prison, which allows prisoners to be observed at all times without knowing when they are being watched. Foucault uses the term metaphorically to refer to the spaces and structures in which people are being surveilled and the ways people begin to monitor themselves even when they are not being watched (Foucault, 1977/1995).

²Originating from the Northern Caucus.

³The New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (2004) which provides a detailed description of the policies and practices it deems as areas for concern states that, “the surveillance of religious and political organizations—measures targeted at particular racial and ethnic populations—have violated the civil rights of members of Muslim, Arab, and South Asian communities in New York” (p. vii). In their report, Civil Rights Implications of Post-September 11 Law Enforcement Practices in New York (2004), the committee calls for a revamping of “broad-based practices of racial profiling” (p. 26), such as the ones described and experienced by the young women in this study.