Chadors, Feminists, Terror

• Author: Sylvia Chan-Malik
• Published date: 01 September 2011
• Date: 01 September 2011
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0002716211409011

On March 8, 1979, Iranian women took to the streets
of Tehran for International Women’s Day. This article
examines American media representations of the week-
long protests and explores how the event occasioned
the emergence of a distinctly American—and deeply
racialized—“discourse of the veil,” in which “Islam”
was rendered a national catchphrase for terror and the
figure of the “Poor Muslim Woman” entered U.S. cul-
tural discourse as a symbol of a new world order.
Through analysis of U.S. media coverage, this piece
tracks how discourses of second-wave feminism, a
Chadors,
post–civil rights rhetoric of racial and cultural plural-
ism, and late–Cold War logics of secularism and liberal
Feminists,
democracy intersected to create a racial-orientalist dis-
course of the veil, which would subsequently be deployed
to justify U.S. military aggression in the Middle East
Terror: The while perpetuating state violence against women, immi-
grants, and people of color throughout the 1980s and
Racial Politics into the post-9/11 era.
of U.S. Media Keywords: Islam; Iran; race; feminism; Muslim
women; U.S. media representations;
“discourse of the veil”
Representations
of the 1979
Iranian
Iran’s “Green Movement” of 2009 might be
called the first of the popular uprisings for
democracy currently sweeping the Middle East.
Women’s
Instigated in the wake of President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad’s reelection in June 2009, the move-
Movement
ment arose to protest what many claimed was
Ahmadinejad’s fraudulent election and his cor-
rupt antidemocratic regime. In the weeks that
followed, “prodemocracy” supporters protest-
ing Ahmadinejad’s rule, driven by social media
By
networks such as Facebook and Twitter, clashed
SYLVIA CHAN-MALIK
with the president’s supporters, who claimed
the opposition was being fueled by Western
imperialist, pro-Zionist forces seeking to derail
the will of the Iranian people.
Sylvia Chan-Malik is a UC President’s Postdoctoral
Fellow in the Department of American Studies at the
University of California, Santa Cruz. Her recent publi-
cations are featured in the Journal of Race, Ethnicity,
and Religion; The Encyclopedia of Muslim-American
History; and The Encyclopedia of Women and Islam.
She received her PhD from UC Berkeley in 2009.
DOI: 10.1177/0002716211409011
112 ANNALS,
AAPSS, 637, September 2011

---

CHADORS, FEMINISTS, TERROR
113
In the American media, many immediately noticed the similarities between
2009 and 1979, when political tumult had swept through Iran following the
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s rise to power. As Hooman Majd of Newsweek
wrote, “It was the summer of the ‘Twitter Revolution,’ it was 1979 redux, it was
the beginning of the end of the 30-year Islamic regime in Iran” (Majd 2010). At
the same time, the 2009 protests also immediately summoned a flurry of media
confusion surrounding precisely what the protestors were fighting for, as many
in the Western media framed their efforts as a pro-Western revolution to throw
off a theocratic “Islamic fundamentalist” regime. Central Green Movement lead-
ers continually opposed such characterizations, stressing that their agenda was far
more focused on attaining electoral transparency and civil rights, as opposed to a
complete overthrow of their current political system.
Such confusion has long marked the U.S. media’s engagement with Iran. In this
article, I focus on American television and news coverage of the Iranian women’s
revolution of March 1979, an event that produced very similar forms of ideological
and political mystification as the Green Movement has in our contemporary
moment. Yet while the U.S. media response to the Green Movement can and
should be contextualized in the frameworks of post-9/11 global order and U.S.
engagements in the Middle East, I argue that the 1979 Iranian women’s revolu-
tion cannot be viewed simply through the lens of a nascent rise of orientalism and
Islamophobia that would gain ground throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Instead,
I describe how U.S. media framings of the Iranian women’s protests and their
demands for “freedom” were deeply shaped by American discourses of race,
gender, class, and sexuality and reveal the contours of the types of misunderstand-
ing and appropriation that continue to characterize our understandings of the
Middle East, and in particular Iran, to this day.
“Blissful Detroit”
In Betty Mahmoody’s 1987 memoir Not without My Daughter, Betty’s court-
ship with Sayyed Borzog Mahmoody begins in a hospital in Carson City, Michigan,
in 1974, where she meets “Moody,” as he is called, while undergoing treatment for
severe, debilitating migraines. Moody, an Iranian Shiite Muslim doctor pursuing
his studies in the United States, is the therapist assigned to her case, and immedi-
ately his treatments become the “bright spot” of her stay (Mahmoody 1987, 47).
Betty describes Moody as “the most caring doctor I had ever encountered”
(Mahmoody 1987, 47), and as her final therapy session ends, Moody asks for her
phone number and plants a gentle kiss on her lips. “I had no way,” Betty recalls,
“of knowing where that simple kiss would lead” (Mahmoody 1987, 47).
Betty’s statement implies that she was, at the time, unaware that this “simple
kiss” would bring about her and Moody’s eventual love affair and marriage; the
birth of their daughter, Mahtob; and most important, the horrifying and now
well-known story of her and Mahtob’s captivity and subsequent escape from
Iran following Moody’s transformation from “caring doctor” to violent, misogynistic,

---

114
THE ANNALS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY
abusive, tyrannical Muslim fanatic during the family’s visit to Tehran.1 However,
where the kiss immediately leads, for all intents and purposes, is Detroit, where
the couple continue their love affair while Moody completes a three-year resi-
dency at Detroit Osteopathic Hospital. During this time, Betty and Moody’s
attraction solidifies into a full-blown relationship, a time of which she writes, “Our
lives were busy and blissful. [Moody] was a good part-time father to my children.
Together we took Joe and John [her sons] on outings to the zoo or on picnics, and
often to ethnic festivals in Detroit where we were introduced to eastern culture”
(Mahmoody 1987, 51).
She says little else about Detroit until later in the text, when—after a rocky stint
in Corpus Christi, Texas, where the now-married Betty and Moody’s relationship is
strained due to the events of the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis—they move to a small
town in Michigan named Alpena, where Moody suddenly finds himself out of
work. Betty orders him back to Detroit to find a job, and reluctantly, Moody goes,
finding a position at a medical clinic the very next day. Betty stays in Alpena, and
the two return to seeing each other only on weekends, “a routine that was deli-
ciously reminiscent of our courtship years” (Mahmoody 1987, 345). Thus, their
relationship is rejuvenated, and Moody realizes that “his professional future lay [in
Detroit] in one capacity or another,” due to how “he found much less bigotry in
the metropolitan environment” of Detroit than anywhere else he and Betty had
lived (Mahmoody 1987, 345).
Thus, for Betty Mahmoody, it seems, Detroit in the 1970s and 1980s is a site
of opportunity and happiness, where love blossoms and wealth grows. For most
of Detroit’s actual residents, however, the period in question reflected a decid-
edly different reality—a moment in which the city (and almost all of the American
Midwest) entered a severe recession from which it would never recover, becom-
ing the very symbol of the “rust belt”—a site of empty auto factories and unem-
ployed workers, and a city unable to survive the constant shifts of an increasingly
global economy.2 Additionally, long after the string of race riots that rocked
Michigan and the rest of the country at the close of the 1960s (the 12th Street
riot in Detroit, which left forty-three dead and 467 injured, still stands as one the
deadliest in the nation’s history), racial tensions continued to fracture the state,
leading many to characterize the city the way the title of an 1971 anthology put
it: A City in Racial Crisis (Gordon 1971).3
Then what to make of Betty and Moody’s harmonious Detroit, a city of their
blossoming and (later) rejuvenated love, ethnic festivals, and minimal racial big-
otry? What discursive strategies allow Betty to describe Detroit from the early
1970s through the mid-1980s with such fondness and in such an overwhelmingly
affirmative light? Indeed, the Detroit Betty describes in Not without My Daughter
reveals none of the era’s harsh realities and does little to reflect an era in which
white flight, the globalization of industry, and the federal government’s rollback of
1960s civil rights gains would gut the city’s economy and produce the conditions
that served as catalysts and context for the host of social ills the city experienced
during this time: the crack cocaine epidemic, the mass incarceration of African
American males, steep rises in drug-related violence and property crimes, wide-scale

---

CHADORS, FEMINISTS, TERROR
115
poverty and unemployment, and anti-Asian and anti-immigrant sentiment (e.g., the
murder of Vincent Chin in 1982).
Furthermore, from Betty’s perspective, Moody appears to be the only Muslim
in Michigan, an exotic anomaly who teaches Betty “Islamic cooking”...