Superheroes in the Streets: Muslim Women Activists and Protest in the Digital Age

Kimberly Wedeven Segall’s book Superheroes in the Streets is a comprehensive and sharp commentary on the figure of the Muslim woman as understood in the American sociopolitical and cultural contexts, in the contested spaces of the streets (offline) and the tweets (online) (p. 16). In coining the term ‘radical superheroism’ to talk about strategies of protesting being employed by digital Muslim activists, Segall attempts a feminist reorientation of history, anointing ‘a new set of heroes’ whose aim is to interrogate white power (p. 11). Her methodology employs the digital as a pivotal space to understand the evolution of the iconography that typically defines the figure of the Muslim woman in these spaces and the ways these icons are being reclaimed by them.

Superheroes aims to unpack tropes that shape the digital space of the internet for the Muslim woman protestor. The author records the digital lives of a few Muslim women activists who are the titular ‘superheroes’ – rap star Mona Haydar, fencing icon Ibtihaj Muhammed, comic-book icon Kamala Khan aka Ms. Marvel, Blair Imani, and Aneelah Afzali. She follows their individual trajectories online, challenging studies of digital activism that erase the stories of the activists themselves:

Further, these icons are important as symbols, or signifiers, that stand for ‘large-scale concepts, emotional symbols, even collective sites of meaning’ (p. 4), speaking to more than just an individual. They are often associated with historical events, actively shaping views and opinions of such events. So complex are the multiple meanings attached to it, that even as they are also used as symbols of resistance, they are often turned into fetishised icons (p. 5).

 

Segall uses these icons and their histories of online activism to unpack some of their culturally mediated meanings. The relevance of such a book comes into sharp relief especially when we consider how not too long ago, India saw the use of the internet to malign Muslim women. In 2022, photos of prominent journalists and activists were uploaded on to the Bulli bai app without their knowledge, and a mock auction model was set up, with the intention to humiliate them (Salim Citation2022). This app was not the first of its kind. It came close on the heels of Sulli Deals, also mock-auctioning Muslim women (Salim Citation2022). The internet has long been marked as a space that holds the potential for misinformation as much as it holds the possibility of quelling it, lending it a nature so elaborate that it attests to the need to study it, both in conjunction with other themes, and in and of itself.

Rationale and methodology

In her work on the figure of the Muslim woman, Lila Abu-Lughod (Citation2016) wrote that in the common Western imagination, the image of the veiled Muslim woman often signifies the oppressive nature of the Muslim world. The vilification of Islam in the ways that has been encouraged by the sociopolitical context of the US and a considerable section of its media, Abu-Lughod (Citation2016) writes, has ‘a deadening effect’ (p.1) on our capacity to ‘appreciate the complexity and diversity of Muslim women’s lives, as human beings’ (p.1). This kind of reasoning gains validation from extant anthropological literature because of its ‘citationary nature’: that is, newer work cites older work to obtain the tag of authenticity and reliability, but this aids in the continuation of a single story of the Muslim woman as an uncomplicated, eternally oppressed figure, and a limited story of Islam represented by this figure and this figure alone.

Segall’s work, then, is significant in two specific ways. First, it attempts to address the gap that has been created between offline and online protests. She visualises and draws attention to the power of the digital: an effort at shifting the ways power plays out in real-life spaces because, she argues, the real and the virtual are not isolated categories but rather a continuum. In asking questions like ‘how do algorithms influence which representations are most commonly seen’, she engages with ‘dynamic and variegated icons’ that confront the popular notion of a uniform identity of Muslim women everywhere. Her stance is one of cautious optimism: the power of commercialisation seen alongside stories of ‘cyber-assaults, the corporations, and the algorithms of racism’ (p. 17) that only create damage. She evokes the lives of people like Mona Haydar, Ibtihaj Muhammed, and Kamala Khan to outline a multiplicity of identities of the Muslim protestor.

Second, the book also attempts to demystify the space of the internet as having both utopian and dystopian potential. With increasing research around the internet as a medium, and more conversation around the ways information flows on the internet, we are in the midst of asking very important questions about whether the publics on the internet are counterpublics – a term that Segall uses to define the nature of these publics, even as she troubles its definition.

The nature of digital protest, Segall writes, is often tacitly decided through ‘technological redlining’, a term used by author Safiya Noble in Algorithms of Oppression (2018) to mean racial profiling using algorithms. The algorithmic world of the internet can be similarly employed to encourage a single image of the oppressed Muslim woman as a placeholder for a multiplicity of identities. Her work poses a challenge to this by acknowledging some of the fissures within the Muslim digital community in order to extract Islam from being seen as exceptional (pp. 81, 82).

Protest aesthetics

One of the objectives of the book is to expand historical narratives. Her chapters progress from singular online icons to the networks of digital activists: ‘Islam in the US consists of diverse Muslim communities and it is impossible to talk about American Islam without focusing on specific individuals and case studies’ (p. 112). The activists employ their digital icons to refute sexual empires of fetishism individually, and chart a ‘multiracial solidarity of Muslimness’ collectively (p. 79).

The book also marks the aesthetics of these virtual coalitions, which might have been necessitated by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, but whose poetics have since marked the internet as a critical site for creating and continuing dialogue. It attempts to reclaim superhero icons that go only so far as to recognise the labour of the white women, erasing other crucial identities.

An interesting distinction that Segall’s informants make is between the conditions that create the need for asserting one’s identity and its corresponding potential for collective healing. Historical erasure and algorithms of oppression cannot only be resolved by reclaiming iconography and demanding inclusion. The very process of this reclamation acknowledges historical pain, generating a process of healing – an emotive archival (p. 136) counterpart to Truth and Reconciliation Committees. However, Segall and her informants do not deny the public assaults and cyberbullying that a lot of their iconography still confronts. This is reflective of contemporary contexts that have created a growing market for innovative fact-checking software because algorithms can be made to be violently prejudiced, signifying limits of knowledge production.

Later in the book, Segall calls Superheroes a ‘search engine’, which attempts to achieve two objectives. One, it acts as a subversive tactic, demanding that algorithmic language reflect a more nuanced picture of a debate. Second, it also articulates a feminist stance taken by a white American academic to challenge a discriminatory discourse. Segall is a professor of English and Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies, with training in postcolonial studies. She approaches her work through, among other things, the reading of protest tactics so that it is not confined to just exposing anti-Semitic structures, but also about tactics of resistance. She has worked on exposing subtler, neo-imperialist forms of violence faced by Arab-American, African, South Asian, and US Muslims, along with understanding frameworks of healing emerging from her research.

Significance of the work

This kind of work is necessary to continue feminist solidarity building across identities. Further, such work is necessary to demand accountability and active participation from historically privileged identities and to radically rethink methodologies of knowledge production. That is to say, it is not enough to hold space, it is equally important to linger around to find out how one can be actively helpful.

In the context of the geopolitical crises that continue to shock people globally, work like Superheroes is important to de-imperialise knowledge, while talking about more contemporary fissures and fusions. This kind of scholarship performs the much-needed labour of extricating Islam from a framework that sees it as exceptional and placing it amidst the complexity of the natures of religions in general. That religions can be oppressive is not news; however, the approach to understanding the lives of people within them largely should not be a corollary of this work, but its focus. One way to do this is through not only picking relevant themes, but also employing new and innovative methodology to study those themes. For instance, when researching about Muslim women’s lives, it might be significant to ask where the voices of the Muslim women are being addressed. What are the larger narratives in question that influence the representation of Islam as exceptional? What are the sociopolitical and economic factors that affect the telling and retelling of these narratives?

Segall’s work also builds upon similar work of myth-busting, fact-checking, and discourse-turning that continues to be undertaken by academics: scholarship like Gazala Jamil’s Muslim Women Speak: Of Dreams and Shackles (2017) to The Hijab: Islam, Women and the Politics of Clothing (2022), edited by P.K. Yasser Arafath and G. Arunima (2022), along with work of academics like Nazanin Sharokhni and Minoo Moallem, writing on the figure of the Muslim woman and her interactions with the state. Specifically looking at the figure of the Muslim woman and her interaction with the digital space of the internet is Sima Shakhsari’s fairly recent work Politics of Rightful Killing: Civil Society, Gender and Sexuality in Weblogistan (2020). Such scholarship collectively does the necessary work of unpacking popular stereotypical understandings of Islam.

Superheroes places its participants squarely in the middle of this kind of scholarship, charting the ‘heteroglossic icons’ of the digital world that attempt to restructure ‘problematic histories, embedded in white icon-o-spheres, signalling critical forms of de-imperialising sexual empires’ (p. 94). It provides a countercultural image of the female protestor, while critically unpacking the internet as a space that can both uphold this image and vilify it. It is mainly aimed at an academic audience, and is nuanced in its composition, despite the sometimes difficult, meandering language. While it talks specifically about Muslim women activists, it is not at the expense of contextually relevant determinants like race and ethnicity. The book might be useful to a wide range of professions, the most prominent ones being activists and academics.