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Shabana Mir is currently an assistant professor at Millikin University in Decatur, Illinois, where she serves as Global Issues Coordinator. Muslim American Women on Campus: Undergraduate Social Life and Identity grew out of her dissertation research, which used ethnographic fieldwork to study female Muslim students at Georgetown University and George Washington University, both of which are private schools in Washington, D.C. A native of London and now a naturalized American, Mir spent most of her childhood and her early twenties in Pakistan. Muslim American Women on Campus received the Outstanding Book Award from the National Association for Ethnic Studies and the 2014 Critics Choice Book Award from the American Educational Studies Association. As you read this selection, consider how the situation of Muslim women on campus is like and not like that of other marginalized groups — a point Mir discusses in detail. Similarly, notice the concepts from social theory that Mir uses to help describe and account for those similarities and situations.

Muslim American Women in Campus Culture

SHABANA MIR

A PERFECT IDENTITY STORM: MUSLIMS AT COLLEGE

For undergraduates, college is a life-change that can be exhilarating, terrifying, and confusing. For youth already in the throes of physical and social change, shuttling between their roles as dependents and adolescents, on the one hand, and financially independent adults and voting citizens, on the other. Add Muslim identity to the mix, fold in a post-9/11 nativist racism, and we find that Muslim American college students have some painful growing up to do. Muslim, American, and youth — these identities effervesce and simmer in many Americans’ minds like a chemistry experiment gone wrong. How can these different ingredients harmonize? How will the balance of identities shift, teeter, and settle? This book unpacks how dysfunction and confusion may result from not being free to be — to be American “like everyone else”; to be Muslim, Arab, or Pakistani; to be authentically American as well as a Somali (or white, Arab, or black) Muslim woman; to be Pakistani American and American simultaneously; to be a religious Muslim American, and/or to be an irreligious Muslim. “I can’t get anything right,” my research participants seemed to say; “I’m damned no matter what I do.”

In the United States, Muslim identity is typically a source of “stigma” (Goffman, 1963). Conversely, behaving like a “normal” American youth can be a source of stigma in Muslim communities. In terms of American identity politics, young Muslim American women are beset by a perfect identity storm. The experiences of Muslim American women serve as a distinctive lens whence to examine the social spaces of American campus culture. Let us start with Latifa, an effusively cheerful Arab American freshman trying to find her way at Georgetown.

LIMITED LIBERTY: MARGINAL IDENTITIES ON CAMPUS

LATIFA: Yeah, I came with some baggage, but my whole approach to college is, I’m starting on a new slate, so whatever I was taught in that home is definitely not being reinforced here.

College is popularly visualized as a world of freedom, mobility, and personal maturity. This is where girls become women and boys become men. Moreover, in the liberal narrative of college, there is an inherent claim — a promise, a “university imaginary,” an individualistic, universal dream of full humanity that is accessible to all regardless of their particular characteristics (Abelmann, 2009, pp. 1–2). Yet this supposedly egalitarian community where diverse individuals may come together, share, and celebrate is not equally hospitable to all student identities; rather, it is a ranked array of decidedly unequal cliques and coteries. Latifa swiftly recognized that her home identities and cultural capital were identity possibilities blocked off in campus spaces and repackaged as “baggage.” Latifa’s religious, civic, youthful, and gendered identities stretched the conceptions of majority Americans and traditional Muslims; the “freedom” within self-consciously pluralistic campus cultures was not a very meaningful commodity to her.

Through Muslim women’s narratives, I call attention to the noiselessly marginalizing processes in campus social spaces that constrain Muslim American women’s identities and turn home cultures into baggage. I investigate how Muslim American undergraduates engage with the college environment and how these girls become women, negotiating multiple norms under the twin towers of surveillance by Muslim communities and the American majority. In this chapter I discuss the Orientalist discursive construction of Muslims and contextualize my research findings relative to the scholarly literature on campus culture and Muslim Americans.

SOCIABILITY AND HEDONISM IN COLLEGE PEER CULTURE

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5 Peer culture is one of the most powerful factors in shaping the behavior of college students (Renn & Arnold, 2003, p. 263; Renn, 2000, p. 400; Astin, 1997, p. 53), whether majority American or minority youth. Beyond university policies, regulations, official documents, and course syllabi, it is the people on campus who co-construct and consume campus culture. Since the late 1960s, when universities relinquished the in loco parentis role, sociability and hedonism have grown ubiquitous in higher education, so that “many campuses have come to be seen as increasingly chaotic and dangerous to a number of students and parents . . . places where men and women share dorm rooms and where drugs and alcohol are easily available” (Miller, 2006, p. 6). Sociability and hedonism, which play central roles in the marketing of college brands, are manufactured and indulged in by college undergraduates.

In American popular culture, college — at the corner of adolescence and adulthood — represents a selective mimicry of “adult” hedonistic behaviors combined with youthful imprudence. Undergraduates are customarily described as being frivolous, “ ‘drowning’ in a campus sea of secularism, hedonism, and materialism” (Magolda & Gross, 2009, p.315), and immersed in an “anti-intellectual student ethos” (Renn & Arnold, 2003, p. 263). Getting trashed, flirting with abandon, (aspiring to) wild promiscuity, cutting classes — these are all familiar tropes that popularly represent the college years in the popular imagination (CoEd Staff, 2008).

Peer culture constitutes marginality for many who are ugly, uncool, frumpy, unpopular, nonwhite, foreign, or poor. With important regional and rural-urban variations, “cool” students are (or seem) mellow or blasé in relation to, well, everything: academic work, sex, religion, morality, politics, and regulations — everything except having a good time. Nothing is supposed to faze normal youth, and certainly not a judicious measure of debauchery. If you were significantly disengaged from such “normal” youth behaviors, you would be marked as “different.” And if you simply performed being drunk at parties the way my research participant Heather did during her high school days, well, “everyone else is being ridiculously drunk, so the fact that you’re screaming, really no one knows whether you’re drunk or not.” You would want to do “being drunk” when “everyone” is doing the same.

When sober, youth could only pretend to be part of the real fun. As for non-participants in hedonistic campus culture — and Latifa did not even attend parties, let alone feign inebriation — they were particularly marginal. To use a heuristic spatial metaphor, the social world of undergraduate culture comprised a core, a periphery, and a semi-periphery. Members of campus culture who possessed the requisite cultural capital could locate themselves in the core, and others would be relegated to a lower status. Latifa was peripheral to campus culture. Even Heather — white, attractive, non-immigrant, and upper class — was in the cultural periphery. Within the secularity of campus culture, religiosity — particularly Islamic religiosity with its distinctive racial, political, and historical connotations — is commonly represented as “weird,” incongruous, outdated, and marginal (Magolda & Gross, 2009). This cultural placement of individuals was a shifting affair, as the same person could be core, peripheral, or semi-peripheral depending on her actions and contextual factors.

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COLLEGE PEER CULTURE AND UNAUTHORIZED OR INFORMAL POLICY

The undergraduate social world is the site of crucial identity work and the source of what Levinson, Sutton, and Winstead (2009) describe as “unauthorized or informal policy” (p. 768). Whatever “authorized policy” in the form of university policy statements may claim about diversity, student life, and alcohol, “normal” students drink: the designation of university spaces as “dry” and of underage students as non-drinking is often meaningless because “everyone” drinks in dorms and in bars with fake IDs.

10 Many persons of admirable intent (myself included) are drawn to policy studies by the emancipatory promise of virtuous power, believing that, when delivered top-down (by authorities within government, the policy community, higher education, etc.), policy promises to rid the world of injustice and create triumphant spaces of liberty and equality for marginal individuals and groups. Policy is a creature far more unpredictable and slippery and far less tractable and pliant than it is usually imagined. Rather than this top-down (unrealistic and incomplete) conception of policy, Levinson, Sutton, and Winstead (2009) conceive of policy broadly, unpacking it “as a kind of social practice, specifically, a practice of power” or a “complex set of interdependent sociocultural practices” (pp. 767–68). In shaping undergraduate identities, the street-level practice of student leisure culture is far more compelling than university regulations. As peers are “the single most potent source of influence” (Astin, 1997, p. 398), the student community’s unspoken consent forms much of the “unauthorized policy” world of undergraduates (Levinson, Sutton, & Winstead, 2009, p. 770). Systemic and powerful, unauthorized policy defeats Band-Aid solutions that are incompatible with cultural ideology and neutralizes the theater of much “diversity work.”

THE DISCURSIVE CONSTRUCTION OF MUSLIM AMERICANS

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It does not take much scholarly research, ethnographic or otherwise, to know what most Americans tend to think when they meet a Muslim man, or a Muslim woman. In social encounters, the Muslim and the non-Muslim are both aware of a set of notions about Muslim traditionalism, fanaticism, antimodernity, xenophobia, violence, and gender oppression. In that shared psychological space, battles are won and lost; but the accusation hangs in the air, and the power differential remains. When an Arab or an African American is essentialized and assumed to have an essential, unchanging, fundamental, core identity — for example, being prone to fanaticism or violence — the awareness of this stereotype can inflict symbolic violence and inwardly reduce the stereotyped individual (Bourdieu, 1977). The stereotyping gaze, manifested through a fearful glance, a racial slur, a snide joke, or a thoughtless remark, exercises power over stereotyped persons. People construct what we know about Others through discourses, or sets of ideas, expressed in words, attitudes, beliefs, and practices (Foucault, 1980, 1979; Fanon, [1952] 2008). People who circulate racial stereotypes in everyday speech, books, newspapers, television shows, movies, and music can be said to possess the discursive power to construct the truth about people of color and their supposedly essential identities.

Among these essentializing stereotypes, Orientalist stereotypes project Muslims and Muslim societies as racially and religiously homogeneous and predictable and the opposite of the “West” (Said, 1978; Haddad, Smith, & Moore, 2006, pp. 21–40). Muslim men are exoticized and assumed to be homogeneously primitive, religious, threatening, misogynistic, oversexed, xenophobic, and violent, while Muslim females are perceived to be oppressed, fragile, immobile, shy, and hyperfeminine. As “the Western episteme, supported by administrative, corporate and academic institutions, has enabled the West to simultaneously represent and dominate the Orient” (Kapoor, 2003, p. 562), Orientalism operates freely in diverse cultural and educational spaces in the multicultural metropolis (Mir, 2009, p. 250), remaining unnamed by virtue of its pervasiveness, exerting “intellectual authority over the Orient within Western culture” (Said, 1978, p. 19). So, whether a woman is jailed for adultery in Nigeria or a suicide bomber blows up a bus in Israel, the surveillance of Muslim Americans is ratcheted up, because they are symbolically representative of a worldwide Muslim community.

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My Muslim American female participants continually encountered in the gaze of the Other this conviction about Muslim women’s inferior status and underdeveloped personhood. Muslim women’s religious identities were hypervisible in their social encounters on campus, and they were assumed to be “Muslim” — purely religious beings — rather than “American,” in that exclusive binary. For Muslim women, continued double consciousness (Du Bois, [1903] 1995) meant awareness that Americans believed Muslim women to be oppressed, immobile, weak, and hyperfeminine (as Muslim women) on the one hand and threatening, primitive, xenophobic, and fanatical (as Muslims) on the other. It meant that Muslim women were constantly aware of being considered irrevocably different and alien.

15 Besides being a source of psychological strain for the minority individual, double consciousness and the internalization of stereotypes can be a useful tool for comprehensive control by the modern nation-state of population groups that are subversive, suspect, or just plain eyesores. Since overt oversight and inordinate enforcement can be costly and violent, a system of internalized psychological self-surveillance can cause marginal groups to feel as though they are always being watched, with a minimum of state effort. In Foucault’s words: “There is no need for arms, physical violence, material constraints. Just a gaze. An inspecting gaze, a gaze which each individual under its weight will end by interiorisation to the point that he is his own overseer, each individual thus exercising this surveillance over, and against, himself. A superb formula: power exercised continuously and for what turns out to be minimal cost” (1980, p. 155).

COVERING TO BE NORMAL

While Muslims, blacks, Latinos, Jews, and gays are stereotyped and imagined as having fixed core identities, identities are socially constructed rather than inherent, essential, and unchanging. Anthropological analysis indicates that our behaviors are not a pure manifestation of some inner unchanging core and that social interactions result in complex combinations of identities that, moreover, change in composition in different environments. Socially, we engage with people’s opinions of us and with others’ views on acceptable behavior. No one is entirely “free” to be who she is or wants to be. We are wrapped within a matrix — of social connections, roles, personae, rituals, and expectations — that blocks entire worlds of possibility, in the manner of the Keanu Reaves blockbuster. The roles and personae we adopt do not stay frozen forever; situationally, we don and remove roles like shoes, but — unlike a pair of shoes — multiple identities may be worn at the same time in particular circumstances.

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Certain types of identities are more stigmatized, more radioactive than others. In the United States, Muslim youth, like women and gays, learn to “play down” their “outsider identities to blend into the mainstream.” The American dream holds out a promise: “Just conform, the dream whispers, and you will be respected, protected, accepted” (Yoshino, 2007, pp. 20–21). This (usually) unspoken demand to conform — the reason why “outsiders” play down racial, religious, sexual, and gendered identities — is wrapped into a promise for better things. Blacks, Latinos, Muslims, Asians, and professional women learn to disguise, or cover (Goffman, 1963), stigmatized identities in order to survive and succeed. Today, discrimination targets not entire racial or religious groups, but subgroups that fail to tone down awkward identities, to “act white, male, straight, Protestant, and able-bodied” (Yoshino, 2007, pp. 17–18), and to blend into the majority, conforming, harmonizing, and becoming all but indistinguishable. In this book, I explore Muslim American female students’ responses to identity constriction, or to the demand to cover and mute their identities in campus culture.

Muslim American women regularly experience such identity silencing demands on campus. This is not to say that all Muslim American women who are indistinguishable from their peers are always responding to the demand to cover. It is to say that the choice to be openly, publicly Muslim is not an easy one because the stigma against Muslim identities breeds ambivalence, contradiction, and disavowal vis-à-vis their identity backgrounds (Bhabha, 1994; Khan, 2002). Under the oppressive awareness of the stigma they bear, Muslim women often try to be “ordinary” (Sacks, 1984) by projecting “normal American” (mainstream Anglo, Judeo-Christian) identities. In table 1, I show the dominant constructions imposed on Muslim American women (left column), and their corresponding attempts at being normal in response to stereotypes (right column). This performance entails downplaying or “covering” their Muslim backgrounds, and sometimes even concealing Muslim identity to “pass” as “normal” (Goffman, 1963).

White Christian Americans are typically unaware of the existence of racism or of “covering demands” on racial and religious minorities. Minority persons, on the other hand, are acutely aware of the content of “normal American” identities, of what norms they must obey and what behaviors they must choose and reject to adopt or approximate such American normalcy. These choices form the generally hidden assumptions of a culture. Most people work to be “normal” in various ways, but through a fine-grained ethnographic analysis of marginal individuals’ identity strategies I examine the process of becoming so. Ethnographically investigating how religious Muslim students work to “pass” as normal drinking and dating college students reveals “the strategies of the stigmatized” and how marginal individuals are unobtrusively silenced within college cultures. Such ethnographic analysis also shows how we all conform within “the routines that we all use unconsciously each day” — a clue to “every life’s inevitable existential compromise” (Rymes & Pash, 2001, p. 280). Minority students frequently perform conformity, resistance, and accommodation to the hidden curriculum of campus culture. By so doing, minority students explicate the hidden curriculum and the implicit assumptions and norms buried in everyday campus interactions. Ethnographic analysis of these performances reveals the cultural checkpoints that obstruct certain persons, behaviors, and ideas from crossing over into normalcy.

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