ABSTRACT
This chapter employs the model of remediated witnessing to both illuminate and challenge exploitative representations of Muslim women’s identity. The chapter assesses the ways in which Afghan women specifically—and Muslim women more broadly—have been fetishised and commoditised within the discourse of the ‘War on Terror’. Analysing how the hijab (or burqa) has become associated with, and serves to signify, oppression in Western media in the aftermath of the events of 11 September 2001, this chapter sets out to critique the ways in which the hijab is exploited—and marketed—as part of the neoliberal discourse of ‘rescue’ in support of the War in Afghanistan. Presented as in need of rescue, the so-called ‘veiled’ and ‘oppressed’—or ‘veiled’ and therefore ‘oppressed’—Afghan women can be read via the theoretical category of the subaltern. The chapter consequently theorises a possible affiliation between subject(ed) and agential identities, and critically considers how agency might unfold from within a state of subalternity. Building from this theoretical position, the chapter goes on to consider the ways in which Afghan women—who are depicted as oppressively ‘veiled’ or triumphantly ‘unveiled’ in a range of Western visual media—may embody resistant subjectivities.
