Islamophobia as an affective field: death and elimination

Abstract

ABSTRACT Twenty young adults attended an arts-based workshop in Toronto, Canada and responded to the question of ‘what does Islamophobia feel like?’ in order to document their lived reality of everyday Islamophobia. The article focuses on the overarching ‘story of feelings’ marking the art-pieces in an effort to understand how the art-makers use emotional fields to make Islamophobia legible from their lived standpoint. The Muslim protagonist is consistently illustrated by the artmakers as occupying an affective field marked by an everyday spatial politics of contact-and-recoil, i.e. an emotional field of disgust, while made to endure a continuous depletion-centred onslaught of violence. This article addresses a subset of the illustrations using image-based deep-story methods to argue that ‘disgust’ is the primary racialized emotional field through which young Muslims conceptualize the operational life of Islamophobia.