The Terrorist, the Patriarch and the Enlightened Men: The Figures Haunting the Quotidian life of Canadian Muslim Women

This intervention focuses on how public debates, including those around policy reports, public policies and legislations, in a Canadian setting, participate in the (re) production of Muslim hegemonic figures. The paper pays special attention to the (re) production of three male figures – the terrorist, the patriarch and the enlightened men - and how those haunt the everyday life of self-identified Muslim women, who participated to a qualitative study conducted with Canadian Muslims from 2012-2014. This intervention is structured around two central objectives. First, by documenting the presence of these figures in the narratives of female participants, we chart how these figures activate and are intimately related to one another, but not necessarily in dichotomous ways (i.e. terrorist versus the enlightened men). Second, we deliberately put the emphasis on masculine figures, as they act as a gateway to capture the gender politics that influence the complex subject position of female participants. While these hegemonic figures are not exclusive to the Canadian context, we posit that it is important to explore the particularities of how they get deployed in Canada, where securitization politics targeting Muslims are burgeoning.