Ibtisam M. Abujad

Marquette University · Department of English

The exploitation of the hijab in fetish images and pornographic films invites the consumer to explore their colonial fantasies and to ponder the raced conceptions of Muslim women and men. The fetishization of the hijab, niqab, and burqa signals this racialization; this new racism depends not only on epidermalization, but on ethnicity, geography, an...

Oftentimes, Muslim women's writing is discussed as existing on a continuum of polarities between that which is religiously Islamic and that which is secular. In my chapter, I examine how the novels by two contemporary Muslim women authors Nafisa Haji and Randa Jarrar critique the continuum as hiding racializing hegemony. They assert that finding a...

This paper examines the feminist theorizations of the cultural institution of motherhood, and the way in which power manifests itself in the interactions between the individual and the social in the short fiction of the Dalit author Bama. This essay discusses how the work of Bama Faustina constitutes a social critique and framework, centering the c...

Recommended Citation: Ibtisam M. Abujad, “She Who Flies Over Ramallah,” The Nasiona, April 3, 2019. https://www.thenasiona.com/2019/04/03/she-who-flies-over-ramallah/

My paper will examine contemporary hip-hop by Muslim women artists and its challenges to colonial logics of power. I explore the works of Naleem Hakeem and Mona Haydar to show how women musicians define Muslimness as a gendered resistance to patriarchal logics of domination, all the while undoing colonial legacies of power that operate through the...

Recommended Citation: Ibtisam M. Abujad, “Random Screening,” Flare: The Flagler Review, Spring 2022.

Recommended Citation: Ibtisam M. Abujad, “Stones Bear Witness,” Rigorous, Volume 3, Issue 3, 2019. https://www.rigorous-mag.com/v3i3/ibtisam-abujad.html

For my research, poverty is systemic. It is directly impacted by the inequitable distribution of wealth, policies that perpetuate economic vulnerability and enable exploitation of the most vulnerable in societies and a cultural justification of this exploitation. This exploitation and denial occur through global and local policies that are racial i...

https://mizna.org/journal-slider/mizna-23-1-etel-adnan-tribute/

Hyphenated identities continue to be prominent in twenty-first century scholarship meant to uncover and confront assimilative structures of power in the Global North. However, the “Arab-Muslim” hyphen, in particular, continues to be used as a convention without a proper examination of its assimilative and racial dimensions. This commentary confront...

The aim of the Liminal Existences and Migrant Resistances Conference is to discuss how markers of difference (race, gender, ethnicity, and nation) intersect to compact and inform systems of inequity. The inequities at national borders are manifestations of complex structures within metropoles and cities; they can be found in local and global relati...

“Needlepoint Gazelles.” Cream City Review 42, no. 2 (Spring 2018).

In this presentation, I analyze how Miral al-Tahawy's novella The Tent explores gender oppression as connected to national hegemony by making visible the intersections between anti-migrancy and patriarchy. I argue that: Gender oppression is sustained socially and politically through strict gender roles and then integrated into national forms of dom...