"WHEN THE CAMERA LANDS ON CAREFREE MUSLIM GIRLS"

"I first came across his portraits of Moroccan Muslim women dressed in brightly colored djellabas and niqabs, sitting astride motorcycles and set against vibrantly patterned backgrounds while scrolling through Tumblr. In one photo, the women wear djellabas and niqabs emblazoned with the Nike logo. In another, their dresses were army camo, and their Moroccan babouche slippers were rendered in the iconic brown Louis Vuitton lettering. In all the photos, the women seem to stare with defiance at the camera, projecting an unspoken challenge to the lens. These portraits demanded to be reblogged. They were, as The New York Times called them, “dazzling.”

What was the subject of Hajjaj’s 'Kesh Angels? Was it the women or was it the veils? His portraits were less about people than they were about the collection of symbols, and what they meant when they were overlayed with each other. In fact, Hajjaj designed all the clothes featured in the photographs, including the babouches. These images weren’t so much about authentic representation as they were about countering otherrepresentations. He began the project, he says, after working on a photoshoot in Marrakesh that featured non-Moroccan models and Western clothes...

These Muslim women are not like those Muslim women, Hajjaj’s images say. These Muslim women are depoliticized and decontextualized, the veiled Muslim woman made palatable to a Western audience. She wears Nike symbols just like you. She rides a motorbike. And she doesn’t look like she’s going to be strapping a bomb onto her chest any time soon. When introduced to the Western imagination, her hijab becomes a signifier for the traditional and the provincial. The logos she bears on her clothing become the signifiers of modernity and globalization. The rigid binary between these two concepts means that when they are combined together, they constitute a contradiction. And it’s the assumed tension between them that fascinates the Western art world...

the motorcycles are meant to invoke a sense of exciting recklessness, independence, and rebellion that’s not usually associated with Arab women. But in reality, the motorcycles don’t represent rebellion in Marrakesh—they’re merely practical in a city whose narrow streets and alleyways are difficult to traverse with a car."

https://bitchmedia.org/post/when-the-camera-lands-on-a-carefree-muslim-girl

wowwww there is so much here. So much about using muslim women as objects to cast political messages, about the question of whether a body - once it has been made political - can ever relax into "accurate representation". There is so much about Western symbols of safety and what Nike represents, and our American ideas about who rides a motorcyle and why.

And I'm thinking about how we offer ourselves for others' consumption. Particularly, as a person of color who has always lived in mostly-white spaces with mostly white friends and mostly white authority figures, I am thinking about the costumes and characters we wear in order to be intriguing and non-threatening therefore acceptable.