Citizens and Suspects: Race, Gender, and the making of American Muslim citizenship

Abstract

AbstractWorking at the intersection of anthropological engagements with cultural citizenship and interdisciplinary scholarship on the racialization of Muslims in the United States, I examine the making and unmaking of American Muslims as both citizens and suspects. Based on my ethnographic research with young Chicago Muslims, I argue that state surveillance and multiculturalism shape U.S. Muslim claims to citizenship as rights and belonging. I chart racialization across different domains to argue that the fetish of Muslim body and behavior can actually render Muslim identity both legible and illegible. It is instances of legibility and illegibility, I argue, that illuminate how race and gender coproduce differential experiences of suspicion for American Muslims, and also different beliefs in the very possibility of, and thus desire for, citizenship. Ultimately, I contend that the experience of the American Muslim indexes the centrality of both race and gender to citizenship in the United States.