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After Orlando

Islamophobia, Homophobia, and Public Mourning

Rashida Tlaib, “Orlando Vigil: Southwest Detroit Stands in Solidarity,” June 13, 2016. Courtesy of Detroit News.

Alisa Perkins


The Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting on June 12, 2016, resulted in one of the highest death tolls of any mass gun violence incident in modern US history. On the evening after the shooting, about one hundred people gathered in Detroit’s Clark Park for an event called “Orlando Vigil: Southwest Detroit Stands in Solidarity.” Former State Representative Rashida Tlaib, who was soon to become one of the two first Muslim women to enter Congress, stood on a circular platform at the center of the park, surrounded by community activists and religious leaders. Her preteen son stood by her side, both his arms encircling her. As she spoke, she began to weep, but her words remained clear. She said:

As a Muslim, I see what happens to so many people over the weekend, the dehumanization that happens, because of our faith, because of who we love. If my son was to love a man, I don’t care. I will love him because love is love. […] So please, I want you to reach out to LGBTQ, the Muslim, Latino, […] African American, our living victims of mass shootings.

In the opening of her speech, Tlaib asserts that the impulse toward dehumanization that spurred Omar Mateen to kill LGBTQ individuals over “who they love” sprung from the same source of hatred that drives people to target minority faith-based communities, such as Muslim Americans, over “what they believe.” Laas;ldkcmas;dlkcmter, Tlaib refers to Muslims, Latinos, and African Americans all as “living victims” of mass shootings, linking them together as symbolic targets of the violence.

Like some other Muslim community leaders in Orlando vigils across the nation, Tlaib pointedly identified herself as Muslim during her speech and presented her religious identity as compatible with acceptance of LGBTQ identities. In an interview with me after the event, she explained that she did so partly to challenge narratives that associated the shooter’s motivation with Islam, such as that voiced by then-presidential candidate Donald Trump.1

The shooter, Omar Mateen, was a Muslim. He had targeted a group of young, mainly Latinx individuals who were dancing at a club. Mainstream press accounts associated Mateen’s violence with a pathologized Muslim identity that caused him to despise his own same-sex desires and to externalize his turmoil with bloodshed.2 Interpretations that link Mateen’s violence to his religious and sexual identities are problematic on many levels, particularly because they cast endemically American forms of gun violence and homophobia as Muslim problems, obviating any kind of national self-reflection by scapegoating Muslims as “the other.”3

Questions about Islam, homosexuality, and othering are particularly salient in this age of increasingly violent white nationalism and right-wing homophobic rhetoric. Studying how people find ways to respond to Islamophobia, racism, and homophobia together can help us understand the potential for strategic alliance formations among stigmatized groups. By gathering leaders of minority communities together to address the shooting, Orlando vigils across the US provided room for leaders and participants to imagine how Muslim, Arab, LGBTQ, Latinx, African American, and other minorities might represent shared struggles.4

 

The will to cross lines of race, class, gender, and sexuality expressed by Muslim Americans at some Michigan-based Orlando vigils exemplifies novel national trends in Muslim American advocacy work taking place across the US. In recent years, some Muslim American groups and individuals are becoming more likely to seek alliances with other groups that they perceive as sharing their vulnerabilities under US white racial, economic, and cultural hegemony.

Anthropologist Sunaina Maira links this trend, in part, to the shifting demographics of the Muslim American population, namely the coming of age of the “post-9/11 generation,” whose sensitization to overlapping discrimination leads to changing engagement with intersecting “questions of civil rights, human rights, women’s rights, and gay rights.”5 Political scientist Hisham Aidi refers to the tendency of some Muslim Americans to identify with other marginalized minority groups as “racialization from below.”6 Vigils such as the one in Southwest Detroit reflect, in powerful symbolic registers, what sociologist Erik Love describes as the dawn of a “new civil rights era” in Muslim American advocacy work signified by broad identity politics and rights-based approaches.7

There were more than a dozen vigils held in the Metro Detroit area after the Orlando shooting, and Muslim Americans played a prominent role in organizing and attending some of them. In some ways, this was not surprising, given the high concentration of Muslim Americans in the area and their robust history of engagement in civic and political activism. But in another sense, this Muslim American visibility was completely unanticipated, particularly given the historical reluctance on the part of the area’s Muslim community and religious leaders to publically acknowledge and support LGBTQ identities and concerns.

In the weeks after the Orlando tragedy, I carried out ethnographic work on a series of vigils in the Metro Detroit area in which Muslim Americans played a role as organizers, speakers, or participants. These included vigils in Southwest Detroit, Dearborn, and Ferndale and in Kalamazoo, the West Michigan city where I live and work. To understand the logistics, meaning, and impact of these events and their implications for Muslim American coalition building, I collected data on eight vigils in all and interviewed twenty-four people who took part in these vigils either as organizers, speakers, or attendees.

Reverend Juan Perez Jr., “Orlando Vigil: Southwest Detroit Stands in Solidarity,” June 13, 2016. Photo Credit: Daymon Hartley.

The vigil in Southwest Detroit in which Rashida Tlaib spoke was described by participants as an event that featured remarkably open expressions of solidarity and acceptance between Muslims and LGBTQ-identified groups. Southwest Detroit is known as the center of Latin American life in Michigan. The vigil took place in a part of Southwest Detroit called Mexicantown, with a majority residents identifying as having Mexican, Puerto Rican or Central American backgrounds. The neighborhood is also shared by African Americans, Arab Americans, and Hmong.

Mexicantown’s Clark Park has long been known as a hub for Latinx American organizing. Especially since Trump’s candidacy, Latin American and Arab groups in the area have used Clark Park to reach out to each other in solidarity. For example, activists have been holding a weekly vigil called “We Stand Together with Our Neighbors” at Clark Park to protest unfair immigration legislation. They carry “No Bans, No Walls” placards to convey the inter-relatedness of the issues affecting Muslim and Mexican Americans.

Ritual processes draw legitimacy from the power of the places in which they are situated. By locating the vigil in Clark Park, activists emphasized the Latinx identities of those who had been targeted. Ritual can also bring new meanings to space. Some community activists explained to me that there was almost a complete absence of LGBTQ visibility among Latinx individuals in Southwest Detroit. They compared this conservatism to that of local Arabs and Muslims. By locating a vigil honoring Latinx youth in the center of Mexicantown, activists symbolically re-coded Mexicantown as an LGBTQ-accepting place.

Southwest Detroit borders on Dearborn, a wealthier city considered the capital of Arab America in the United States. The vigil in Clark Park featured Muslim and Arab American community leaders from Dearborn and drew significant numbers of Muslim and Arab Americans from Dearborn to the event. The participants standing together provided symbolic and social expressions of crossing barriers and breaking boundaries across racial, religious, and class lines that were novel for some participants in the event.

Alma, a Latina American woman who was a principal organizer of the Clark Park vigil, describes her reaction as she saw attendees of the vigil gather. She said:

When certain Latinos and people from the Arab community came […] who don’t normally talk about [homosexuality] all of us on the stage together, the array of color too […] that was the most awesome, awe-inspiring moment. It was cross-generational […] So many people said something about it [to me]. Like, the fact that they’ve never seen anything like this. It was powerful.

 

“Candlelight Vigil & Prayer for the victims of the recent shootings in Orlando and all Victims of terrorism & Oppression in the World!” Islamic House of Wisdom, Detroit, Michigan, June 16, 2016. Courtesy of Detroit Press and Guide.

Nationally, some Muslim American leaders publicly critiqued that decision of other Muslim Americans to form alliances with LGBTQ communities, speaking out in particular against the (in their view) overly inclusive nature of vigils such as the one in Southwest Detroit. These spokespeople cautioned Muslim American activists, asking them to make sure that the messages that they conveyed when speaking out as Muslims were compatible with a legitimate interpretation of Islam. Reflecting this, some Muslim American activists organized alternative Orlando vigils and designed them in ways that muted the LGBTQ identities of the victims, seeking to mourn them apart from the fact of their sexual identity. In contrast to what I refer to as “public, secular vigils,” such as the one in Southwest Detroit, which came together quickly with many spontaneous elements, these “private secular vigils” were more tightly controlled by the Islamic organizations that hosted them. Additionally, the private, religious vigils took place indoors, contributing further to the organizers’ ability to influence the events.

In two of the area’s largest mosques, Muslim religious leaders billed their events as memorials for victims ofallrecent mass shootings and not for Orlando victims only. For example, one of the events that took place right after the Orlando tragedy was billed as a“Candlelight Vigil & Prayer for the victims of the recent shoo\tings in Orlando and all Victims of terrorism & Oppression in the World!”8 In gatherings such as these, leaders addressed crowds of mourners, but without the rainbow flags that were a prominent element of other vigils. Here, conservative leaders pronounced the names of the Orlando dead, but without emphasizing how their killing was part of a structurally supported history of violence against LGBTQ communities. Some Muslims who were engaged in organizing these events stressed that these representational limits were set deliberately and strategically in order to prevent alienating some Muslim congregants and their conservative interfaith partners.

Comparing the “public, secular vigils” to the “private religious vigils” reveals a split over how to honor the Orlando victims, one that echoes nationwide debates among Muslim Americans.  For example, in a widely circulated open letter, self-styled Muslim American scholar Daniel Haqiqatjou cautions, “The Orlando massacre has thrust the Muslim community once again into the national spotlight and this time the American people demand to know what Islam has to say about homosexuality and the ‘LGBT liberation movement.’” For Haqiqatjou, the question posed in the wake of Mateen’s violent act—“Does Islam support LGBTQ rights?”—is “itself unfair.” He writes that when Muslims answer yes or no, the American public will hear that “either Muslims are fully in support of the LGBT movement or they are no different from Mateen.”9

Haqiqatou urges Muslim Americans to articulate a third option: a careful and qualified response that shows which elements of LGBTQ recognition and rights Muslim Americans wish to support and which they cannot. For some Muslims in Detroit, as evidenced in public debate and in my interviews, the mosque-based vigils represented this third option, in that they successfully mourned the dead without indicating support for the open expression of their LGBTQ identities. For other Muslims in Detroit, these omissions represented a form of symbolic violence, making this mourning style unpalatable and offensive to the memories of those whose lives were lost.

“Orlando Vigil: Southwest Detroit Stands in Solidarity,” June 13, 2016. Photo Credit: Daymon Hartley.

The Clark Park Vigil in Southwest Detroit was a site for new public expressions of interrelationship among diverse communities, in a way that captured certain novel local, regional, and national trends. The public response to the Pulse nightclub shootings also resulted in certain Muslim Americans formulating critiques of these expressions and calling for a partial limit or slowing down of the way such alliances were expressed, in order to make sure that they not further lose control of how they are being represented.

For some people whom I interviewed, the Orlando vigils took on significance in the local imagination as a place for “feeling together,” in sociologist Deborah Gould’s sense of the term, or “healing together,” in the words of some respondents.10 The vigils represent a landmark moment for Muslim American advocacy and organizing in the United States. The way that community activists describe the interrelatedness of the issues confronting LGBTQ, Muslim, Latinx, African American, and other minorities exemplifies the key salience of using boundary crossing as a framework for understanding the political activism of Muslims in America today.

 

ALISA PERKINS is an assistant professor in the Department of Comparative Religion at Western Michigan University. Perkins’ current research project is an ethnographic study of Muslim American civic engagement in the Detroit-metro area. Her dissertation research was carried out in Hamtramck, Michigan, with the support of grants from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the National Science Foundation and the Philanthropic Educational Organization. Before beginning her work on Islam in America, Perkins’ research interests centered on women and gender in Muslim-majority societies, culminating in her master’s level work on women’s education and family law in Morocco (this project was supported by a Fulbright grant).

 

  1. David A. Graham, “The Complicated Pain of America’s Queer Muslims,” The Atlantic, September 21, 2016.
  2. Charlotte Alter, “Ex-Wife Says Orlando Shooter Might Have Been Hiding Homosexuality From His Family,” Time Magazine, 2016.
  3. Leti Volpp, “Blaming Culture for Bad Behavior,” Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities12, no. 89 (2000).
  4. Sunaina Maira, The 9/11 Generation: Youth, Rights, and Solidarity in the War on Terror (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 14-15.
  5. Ibid., 3-4.
  6. Hisham Aidi, Rebel Music: Race, Empire, and the New Muslim Youth Culture(New York: Vintage Books, 2014), 162-64.
  7. Erik Love, Islamophobia and Racism in America(New York: NYU Press, 2017), 229.
  8. Arab America “Events: Candlelight Vigil and Prayer for Orlando Victims,” arabamerica.com, accessed Dec 1.
  9. Daniel Haqiqatjou, “An Open Letter to the Muslim Community in Light of the Orlando Shooting,” Muslim Matters, June 16, 2016.
  10. Deborah Gould, “On Affect and Protest,” in Political Emtions (New Agendas in Communication), ed. Janet Staiger, Ann Cvetkovich, and Ann Reynolds (New York: Routledge, 2010).

 

After Orlando

Islamophobia, Homophobia, and Public Mourning


Alisa Perkins


The Orlando Pulse nightclub shooting on June 12, 2016, resulted in one of the highest death tolls of any mass gun violence incident in modern US history. On the evening after the shooting, about one hundred people gathered in Detroit’s Clark Park for an event called “Orlando Vigil: Southwest Detroit Stands in Solidarity.” Former State Representative Rashida Tlaib, who was soon to become one of the two first Muslim women to enter Congress, stood on a circular platform at the center of the park, surrounded by community activists and religious leaders. Her preteen son stood by her side, both his arms encircling her. As she spoke, she began to weep, but her words remained clear. She said:

As a Muslim, I see what happens to so many people over the weekend, the dehumanization that happens, because of our faith, because of who we love. If my son was to love a man, I don’t care. I will love him because love is love. […] So please, I want you to reach out to LGBTQ, the Muslim, Latino, […] African American, our living victims of mass shootings.

In the opening of her speech, Tlaib asserts that the impulse toward dehumanization that spurred Omar Mateen to kill LGBTQ individuals over “who they love” sprung from the same source of hatred that drives people to target minority faith-based communities, such as Muslim Americans, over “what they believe.” Laas;ldkcmas;dlkcmter, Tlaib refers to Muslims, Latinos, and African Americans all as “living victims” of mass shootings, linking them together as symbolic targets of the violence.

Like some other Muslim community leaders in Orlando vigils across the nation, Tlaib pointedly identified herself as Muslim during her speech and presented her religious identity as compatible with acceptance of LGBTQ identities. In an interview with me after the event, she explained that she did so partly to challenge narratives that associated the shooter’s motivation with Islam, such as that voiced by then-presidential candidate Donald Trump.1

The shooter, Omar Mateen, was a Muslim. He had targeted a group of young, mainly Latinx individuals who were dancing at a club. Mainstream press accounts associated Mateen’s violence with a pathologized Muslim identity that caused him to despise his own same-sex desires and to externalize his turmoil with bloodshed.2 Interpretations that link Mateen’s violence to his religious and sexual identities are problematic on many levels, particularly because they cast endemically American forms of gun violence and homophobia as Muslim problems, obviating any kind of national self-reflection by scapegoating Muslims as “the other.”3

Questions about Islam, homosexuality, and othering are particularly salient in this age of increasingly violent white nationalism and right-wing homophobic rhetoric. Studying how people find ways to respond to Islamophobia, racism, and homophobia together can help us understand the potential for strategic alliance formations among stigmatized groups. By gathering leaders of minority communities together to address the shooting, Orlando vigils across the US provided room for leaders and participants to imagine how Muslim, Arab, LGBTQ, Latinx, African American, and other minorities might represent shared struggles.4

 

The will to cross lines of race, class, gender, and sexuality expressed by Muslim Americans at some Michigan-based Orlando vigils exemplifies novel national trends in Muslim American advocacy work taking place across the US. In recent years, some Muslim American groups and individuals are becoming more likely to seek alliances with other groups that they perceive as sharing their vulnerabilities under US white racial, economic, and cultural hegemony.

Anthropologist Sunaina Maira links this trend, in part, to the shifting demographics of the Muslim American population, namely the coming of age of the “post-9/11 generation,” whose sensitization to overlapping discrimination leads to changing engagement with intersecting “questions of civil rights, human rights, women’s rights, and gay rights.”5 Political scientist Hisham Aidi refers to the tendency of some Muslim Americans to identify with other marginalized minority groups as “racialization from below.”6 Vigils such as the one in Southwest Detroit reflect, in powerful symbolic registers, what sociologist Erik Love describes as the dawn of a “new civil rights era” in Muslim American advocacy work signified by broad identity politics and rights-based approaches.7

There were more than a dozen vigils held in the Metro Detroit area after the Orlando shooting, and Muslim Americans played a prominent role in organizing and attending some of them. In some ways, this was not surprising, given the high concentration of Muslim Americans in the area and their robust history of engagement in civic and political activism. But in another sense, this Muslim American visibility was completely unanticipated, particularly given the historical reluctance on the part of the area’s Muslim community and religious leaders to publically acknowledge and support LGBTQ identities and concerns.

In the weeks after the Orlando tragedy, I carried out ethnographic work on a series of vigils in the Metro Detroit area in which Muslim Americans played a role as organizers, speakers, or participants. These included vigils in Southwest Detroit, Dearborn, and Ferndale and in Kalamazoo, the West Michigan city where I live and work. To understand the logistics, meaning, and impact of these events and their implications for Muslim American coalition building, I collected data on eight vigils in all and interviewed twenty-four people who took part in these vigils either as organizers, speakers, or attendees.

Reverend Juan Perez Jr., “Orlando Vigil: Southwest Detroit Stands in Solidarity,” June 13, 2016. Photo Credit: Daymon Hartley.

The vigil in Southwest Detroit in which Rashida Tlaib spoke was described by participants as an event that featured remarkably open expressions of solidarity and acceptance between Muslims and LGBTQ-identified groups. Southwest Detroit is known as the center of Latin American life in Michigan. The vigil took place in a part of Southwest Detroit called Mexicantown, with a majority residents identifying as having Mexican, Puerto Rican or Central American backgrounds. The neighborhood is also shared by African Americans, Arab Americans, and Hmong.

Mexicantown’s Clark Park has long been known as a hub for Latinx American organizing. Especially since Trump’s candidacy, Latin American and Arab groups in the area have used Clark Park to reach out to each other in solidarity. For example, activists have been holding a weekly vigil called “We Stand Together with Our Neighbors” at Clark Park to protest unfair immigration legislation. They carry “No Bans, No Walls” placards to convey the inter-relatedness of the issues affecting Muslim and Mexican Americans.

Ritual processes draw legitimacy from the power of the places in which they are situated. By locating the vigil in Clark Park, activists emphasized the Latinx identities of those who had been targeted. Ritual can also bring new meanings to space. Some community activists explained to me that there was almost a complete absence of LGBTQ visibility among Latinx individuals in Southwest Detroit. They compared this conservatism to that of local Arabs and Muslims. By locating a vigil honoring Latinx youth in the center of Mexicantown, activists symbolically re-coded Mexicantown as an LGBTQ-accepting place.

Southwest Detroit borders on Dearborn, a wealthier city considered the capital of Arab America in the United States. The vigil in Clark Park featured Muslim and Arab American community leaders from Dearborn and drew significant numbers of Muslim and Arab Americans from Dearborn to the event. The participants standing together provided symbolic and social expressions of crossing barriers and breaking boundaries across racial, religious, and class lines that were novel for some participants in the event.

Alma, a Latina American woman who was a principal organizer of the Clark Park vigil, describes her reaction as she saw attendees of the vigil gather. She said:

When certain Latinos and people from the Arab community came […] who don’t normally talk about [homosexuality] all of us on the stage together, the array of color too […] that was the most awesome, awe-inspiring moment. It was cross-generational […] So many people said something about it [to me]. Like, the fact that they’ve never seen anything like this. It was powerful.

 

“Candlelight Vigil & Prayer for the victims of the recent shootings in Orlando and all Victims of terrorism & Oppression in the World!” Islamic House of Wisdom, Detroit, Michigan, June 16, 2016. Courtesy of Detroit Press and Guide.

Nationally, some Muslim American leaders publicly critiqued that decision of other Muslim Americans to form alliances with LGBTQ communities, speaking out in particular against the (in their view) overly inclusive nature of vigils such as the one in Southwest Detroit. These spokespeople cautioned Muslim American activists, asking them to make sure that the messages that they conveyed when speaking out as Muslims were compatible with a legitimate interpretation of Islam. Reflecting this, some Muslim American activists organized alternative Orlando vigils and designed them in ways that muted the LGBTQ identities of the victims, seeking to mourn them apart from the fact of their sexual identity. In contrast to what I refer to as “public, secular vigils,” such as the one in Southwest Detroit, which came together quickly with many spontaneous elements, these “private secular vigils” were more tightly controlled by the Islamic organizations that hosted them. Additionally, the private, religious vigils took place indoors, contributing further to the organizers’ ability to influence the events.

In two of the area’s largest mosques, Muslim religious leaders billed their events as memorials for victims ofallrecent mass shootings and not for Orlando victims only. For example, one of the events that took place right after the Orlando tragedy was billed as a“Candlelight Vigil & Prayer for the victims of the recent shoo\tings in Orlando and all Victims of terrorism & Oppression in the World!”8 In gatherings such as these, leaders addressed crowds of mourners, but without the rainbow flags that were a prominent element of other vigils. Here, conservative leaders pronounced the names of the Orlando dead, but without emphasizing how their killing was part of a structurally supported history of violence against LGBTQ communities. Some Muslims who were engaged in organizing these events stressed that these representational limits were set deliberately and strategically in order to prevent alienating some Muslim congregants and their conservative interfaith partners.

Comparing the “public, secular vigils” to the “private religious vigils” reveals a split over how to honor the Orlando victims, one that echoes nationwide debates among Muslim Americans.  For example, in a widely circulated open letter, self-styled Muslim American scholar Daniel Haqiqatjou cautions, “The Orlando massacre has thrust the Muslim community once again into the national spotlight and this time the American people demand to know what Islam has to say about homosexuality and the ‘LGBT liberation movement.’” For Haqiqatjou, the question posed in the wake of Mateen’s violent act—“Does Islam support LGBTQ rights?”—is “itself unfair.” He writes that when Muslims answer yes or no, the American public will hear that “either Muslims are fully in support of the LGBT movement or they are no different from Mateen.”9

Haqiqatou urges Muslim Americans to articulate a third option: a careful and qualified response that shows which elements of LGBTQ recognition and rights Muslim Americans wish to support and which they cannot. For some Muslims in Detroit, as evidenced in public debate and in my interviews, the mosque-based vigils represented this third option, in that they successfully mourned the dead without indicating support for the open expression of their LGBTQ identities. For other Muslims in Detroit, these omissions represented a form of symbolic violence, making this mourning style unpalatable and offensive to the memories of those whose lives were lost.

“Orlando Vigil: Southwest Detroit Stands in Solidarity,” June 13, 2016. Photo Credit: Daymon Hartley.

The Clark Park Vigil in Southwest Detroit was a site for new public expressions of interrelationship among diverse communities, in a way that captured certain novel local, regional, and national trends. The public response to the Pulse nightclub shootings also resulted in certain Muslim Americans formulating critiques of these expressions and calling for a partial limit or slowing down of the way such alliances were expressed, in order to make sure that they not further lose control of how they are being represented.

For some people whom I interviewed, the Orlando vigils took on significance in the local imagination as a place for “feeling together,” in sociologist Deborah Gould’s sense of the term, or “healing together,” in the words of some respondents.10 The vigils represent a landmark moment for Muslim American advocacy and organizing in the United States. The way that community activists describe the interrelatedness of the issues confronting LGBTQ, Muslim, Latinx, African American, and other minorities exemplifies the key salience of using boundary crossing as a framework for understanding the political activism of Muslims in America today.

 

ALISA PERKINS is an assistant professor in the Department of Comparative Religion at Western Michigan University. Perkins’ current research project is an ethnographic study of Muslim American civic engagement in the Detroit-metro area. Her dissertation research was carried out in Hamtramck, Michigan, with the support of grants from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the National Science Foundation and the Philanthropic Educational Organization. Before beginning her work on Islam in America, Perkins’ research interests centered on women and gender in Muslim-majority societies, culminating in her master’s level work on women’s education and family law in Morocco (this project was supported by a Fulbright grant).

 

  1. David A. Graham, “The Complicated Pain of America’s Queer Muslims,” The Atlantic, September 21, 2016.
  2. Charlotte Alter, “Ex-Wife Says Orlando Shooter Might Have Been Hiding Homosexuality From His Family,” Time Magazine, 2016.
  3. Leti Volpp, “Blaming Culture for Bad Behavior,” Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities12, no. 89 (2000).
  4. Sunaina Maira, The 9/11 Generation: Youth, Rights, and Solidarity in the War on Terror (New York: New York University Press, 2016), 14-15.
  5. Ibid., 3-4.
  6. Hisham Aidi, Rebel Music: Race, Empire, and the New Muslim Youth Culture(New York: Vintage Books, 2014), 162-64.
  7. Erik Love, Islamophobia and Racism in America(New York: NYU Press, 2017), 229.
  8. Arab America “Events: Candlelight Vigil and Prayer for Orlando Victims,” arabamerica.com, accessed Dec 1.
  9. Daniel Haqiqatjou, “An Open Letter to the Muslim Community in Light of the Orlando Shooting,” Muslim Matters, June 16, 2016.
  10. Deborah Gould, “On Affect and Protest,” in Political Emtions (New Agendas in Communication), ed. Janet Staiger, Ann Cvetkovich, and Ann Reynolds (New York: Routledge, 2010).

 

After Orlando

Islamophobia, Homophobia, and Public Mourning

After Orlando

Islamophobia, Homophobia, and Public Mourning