‘People hate you because of the way you dress’
| Author | Chris Allen |
| DOI | 10.1177/0269758015591677 |
| Published date | 01 September 2015 |
| Date | 01 September 2015 |
Article
‘People hate you because of
the way you dress’:
Understanding the invisible
experiences of veiled British
Muslim women victims of
Islamophobia
Chris Allen
Institute of Applied Social Studies, University of Birmingham, UK
Abstract
Chakraborti and Zempi (2012) argued for the need to increase awareness of the gendered facets
of Islamophobia in order to shed light on and improve understanding of the overlooked and
negated ‘invisible’ victimisation of veiled Muslim women in the public spaces of contemporary
western society. In seeking to shed light and improve understanding about this process, this article
sets out the findings from a project that interviewed 20 veiled British Muslim women who had been
victims of Islamophobia and had reported their experience to the British government-funded
service Tell MAMA (measuring anti-Muslim attacks). Reflecting on what is contemporarily
known about Islamophobia, and in particular what is known about Islamophobia’s relationship with
gender, this article sets out the thematically considered empirical findings from the project in order
to better understand why Islamophobic incidents against veiled Muslim women are ‘neither seen
nor heard’. In doing so, the article considers the ways in which the visibility and invisibility of veiled
Muslim women function in order to reduce and essentialise veiled Muslim women through the
symbolism of the veil, thereby becoming seen as the physical embodiment of all that is considered
to be problematic and threatening about Muslims and Islam per se.
Keywords
Islamophobia, Muslim women, gender, Tell MAMA
Corresponding author:
Chris Allen, Institute of Applied Social Studies, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham, West Midlands B15 2TT,
UK.
Email: c.allen.2@bham.ac.uk
International Review of Victimology
2015, Vol. 21(3) 287–301
ªThe Author(s) 2015
Reprints and permission:
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0269758015591677
irv.sagepub.com
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