The engagement with the week’s readings reminded me of a study I came across before the break in another course I am taking this semester. A field experiment done in Germany was meant to test social norms and discrimination against immigrants. In this experiment, the researchers create a realistic “microenvironment” designed to observe the degree of assistance offered to women. Some of whom were supposed to fit the physical appearance of a “native” white German, and some were supposed to fit the physical appearance of Middle Eastern immigrants. The immigrant group in the experiment was divided to three different conditions. The first one was a non-white immigrant with no religious signs, the second was an immigrant with a cross and the third was an immigrant wearing a hijab. The results of this experiment provide evidence of non-statistically significant bias against immigrants and a strong statistical bias towards females wearing hijabs. As the study shows, the researchers argue that the “religious difference” between the natives and the immigrants is what promoted increased bias. Despite the many limitations in this type of experiment, reading the researcher’s argument for the first time made sense to me. As the hijab has religious connotation, it is plausible that religious difference is what drove the negative attitude towards women wearing a hijab in the experiment. But, after reading the piece by Louise Cainkar, I interpreted the results of this experiment in a different way. Cainkar argues that women wearing a hijab in a suburban area near Chicago were targeted after the events of 9/11 due to people seeing them as a cultural threat. She further explains that women wearing a hijab suffered more harassment than Muslim males because Arab Muslim men “did not live up to the stereotypes of being violent”. Though the experiment does not look at how "native" Germans treat male Middle Eastern immigrants, it provides reinforcement to Cainkar’s claim.
In this experiment, the control group that consists of white and German speaking women are defined as native. The notion of native and nativism is explored by Cainkar as the motivation for aggression against women wearing a hijab. As she explains, in the United States, nativism is a collective fear and the zeal to destroy enemies of the “American way of life”. Profiling the group of white German speakers as “native” is a built-in misconception that makes it clear that the designers of the experiment hold.
The aggression against women wearing a hijab by local mobs is part of a “culture war”. This figurative war led by people who believe that a hijab is a symbol of repression of women and thus represents the opposite of freedom. The notion of freedom also comes up in the text of Sima Shakhsari. As she points out, Canadian main-stream media focuses on the supposedly sexual revolution that is promoted by Iranian female bloggers living in western countries. As Shakhsari claims, though some of those bloggers write about a variety of issues, Canadian main-stream media seems to take a particular interest in anything related to their sexuality. When Iranian diaspora female bloggers write about sex, this is interpreted as expression of freedom and liberation. The effort of the media to represent these women as free relates to a western feminist idea that because these women are living in the western world, they enjoy more freedom than they would have enjoyed in a non-western country. The focus of media on the sexuality of women specifically also relates to the idea of femininity and its link with sexual expression. Shakhsari argues that sexual expression by women is wrongly interpreted as a feminine way of resistance- “The term, ‘sexual revolution’, as a form of resistance to the repressive Iranian ‘regime’”.
Link to the research - https://www.pnas.org/content/116/33/16274
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