Veiled aggression: Saudi women international students’ experiences of microcolonization in the United States

Abstract

The 2016 presidential election in the United States entailed presidential candidates warning of ‘radical Islam,’ ‘Jihadist violence,’ and ‘refugee terrorism.’ At the same time, random and targeted violence against Arab Muslims has soared since the election. In everyday encounters at school, work, or in casual conversations, Islamophobia is enacted through microaggressions. This narrative inquiry study examined the ways in which Saudi women graduate students studying in the US experienced and negotiated instances of microaggression at the intersection of ethnicity, religion, and gender. Data was collected through unstructured in-depth life-story interviews and transcripts were analyzed using narrative analysis, with specific readings for moments of microaggression. Findings yielded that participants encountered various forms of microaggressions on a daily basis from faculty, classmates, and strangers. We propose microcolonization as a subcategory that addresses the women’s specific lived experiences within the niches of larger neo-imperialist contexts.

Keywords:

• Microaggression
• Islamophobia
• narrative inquiry
• postcolonial feminism

Notes

Notes

1 Hijab: For Muslim women, it is typically a veil covering the head, hair, and chest. Colors, styles, and manner of wearing vary according to location, season, fashion trends, religious interpretation, and other factors.

2 Abaya: a loose over-garment covering the entire body except for head, hands, and feet. Together with hijab, it is mandatory clothing for women in public places in Saudi Arabia and is usually made from a lightweight and airy material that can show fashionable embroidery.

3 Om Talah interviewed for the graduate position a year in advance. She had her baby in Saudi Arabia before moving to the US to complete her degree. The baby stayed with her mother and husband in Saudi Arabia during the two years it took for her to complete her degree.

4 The phenomenon of comparing the women’s ontological venture points and their religio-cultural practices to Western reason and logic will be discussed in greater detail in the section “From Microinvalidation to Microcolonization.

5 Universities routinely charge international students more than, both, in-state and out-of-state college students who are US citizens (Loudenback, September 16, 2016). During the interviews, all participants shared that they were confident that Saudi international students’ tuition was even higher than non-Saudi international students’. According to conversations we held with several faculty, tuition fees for Saudi students were indeed three times higher than for other international students, revenues that were often calculated into a department’s annual budget.

6 We did not ask participants’ racial identity, partly because in experience, US ideation of racial identity differs outside the North American context. As problematic and complex as it is, it seems that the women we interviewed could ‘pass’ as white in light of US racial standards. These observations are in line with Hassan’s (2002) and Ajrouch and Jamal’s (2007) discussions on Arab and Middle Eastern people’s racial classification within a US context.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Katharina A. Azim

Katharina A. Azim is Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University at Buffalo (SUNY). She has an MEd in German language and literature from Fontys University Tilburg, an MA in English language and education from Utrecht University, an MA in Education and Media from FernUniversität Hagen, and a PhD in Educational Psychology from University of Memphis. Her academic interests center on ethnic identity and Middle Eastern-North African/Arab/Muslim psychology, on the one hand, and women’s reproductive health, agency, and rights in the USA, on the other. Methodologically, she uses postcolonial feminist and poststructural theories, narrative inquiry, and autoethnography.

Alison Happel-Parkins

Alison Happel-Parkins is Associate Professor in the Department of Counseling, Educational Psychology and Research at the University of Memphis. She has an MA in Cultural Anthropology from the California Institute of Integral Studies, and a PhD in Educational Policy Studies from Georgia State University. Her empirical work centers around women’s health and reproductive rights, and her theoretical work uses ecocritical and ecofeminist frameworks to interrogate K-12 public school curriculum and practices in the USA