Depicting the Veil

Riley, with a PhD from Syracuse University (New York State), is an assistant professor in Women’s and Gender Studies, focusing on feminism, the media, and destructive processes like militarism, war, and imperialism. Typically, earlier books of hers were entitled Interrogating Imperialism: Conversations on Gender, Race, and War (2006) and Feminism and War: Confronting U.S. Imperialism (2008). This figures because Zed Books, labelling as “Radical International Publishing”, already published items like Sexuality in Muslim Contexts - Restrictions and Resistance, Rethinking the Man Question, Feminist Politics, Activism and Vision as well as Women’s Rights and Islamic Family Law. This committed book, dealing with “transnational sexism”, is particularly concerned with the misrepresentation of Muslim women in Western media, portrayed as needing protection from their violent and hyper-patriarchal men. In contrast, Western males are posited as liberal and free-thinking, white supremacist advocates of female liberation. The author observes that notions of white supremacy and male domination fatally combine with Orientalized notions of the other to ensure that inter-cultural wars occur and are sustained. (p. 13) She is acutely aware that covering Islam, in whatever context, frequently reveals the kind of racism that obscures what “we” do, and highlights instead what Muslims by their very flawed nature are.