Speaker
Description
British popular culture plays a key role in shaping how terrorism is imagined and made visible within everyday life. Amid concerns over national cohesion and extremism, Muslim women have emerged as symbolic figures within British cultural discourse. Often framed as a ‘foreign’ Other, they appear within televisual narratives as oppressed figures in need of emancipation or as subjects of heightened suspicion. These representations do not simply reflect security concerns but actively structure how terrorism is visualised.
Television dramas such as Bodyguard (BBC, 2018) and Honour (ITV, 2020) serve as sites through which the visual politics of terrorism are produced. Through narrative, characterisation, and visual cues, these programmes construct Muslim women through gendered logics of threat recognition, reproducing Orientalist binaries in which Muslim women are either those who must be saved or those from whom the nation must be protected.
These gendered visual framings are central to the construction of a ‘suspect community’ (Pantazis & Pemberton, 2009). By centering gendered visual tropes in British popular culture, this paper contributes to critical terrorism studies by exposing how imaginaries of threat and belonging are racialised, gendered, and embedded in the symbolic economy of national identity.
| Institutional Affiliation | Royal Holloway, University of London |
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