Comics as Public Pedagogy: Reading Muslim Masculinities through Muslim Femininities in Ms. Marvel

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Comics as Public Pedagogy Reading Muslim Masculinities through Muslim Femininities in Ms. Marvel Shenila S. Khoja-Moolji and Alyssa D. Niccolini a ABSTRACT In this article we examine the production and operation of the character, Kamala Khan, a Muslim American-Pakistani superheroine of the Ms. Marvel comic series, to glean what this reveals about Islam and Muslims, with particular attention to representations of Muslim masculinities. We argue that Ms. Marvel’s invitation to visualize Muslim girls as superheroes is framed by a desire to interrupt rampant Islamophobia and xenophobia, yet, in order to produce such a disruption it relies on, and (re)produces, stereotypical conceptualizations of Muslim masculinities as mirrored in men who are conservative, prone to irrational rage, pre-modern, anachronistic, and even bestial. However, as the series progresses we notice the emergence of representations of complex and complicated Muslim masculinities that cast doubt on these tired, hackneyed ones, thus making way for a comic to undertake the pedagogical work of resistance. We see this graphic novel, like the shape-shifting Kamala herself, as wielding potentially dynamic and transformative power in social imaginaries. KEYWORDS affect, comics, femininities, masculinities, Muslim, popular culture

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Introduction In recent years, the production of images of Muslim1 girls in media and literature that interrupt and destabilize the trope of the oppressed Muslim women has increased. These include comic series such as Ms. Marvel (2014– the present), which features an American-Pakistani superhero Kamala Khan, and the Pakistani television show Burka Avenger (2013–the present), in which a school-teacher, Jiya, transforms into a superhero who crusades for “justice, peace and education for all.”2 This move has been applauded by Muslims and non-Muslims alike for its potential to unsettle expected representations of Muslim femininities. In this article, we examine the producGirlhood Studies 8, no. 3 (Winter 2015): 23-39 © Berghahn Books doi: 10.3167/ghs.2015.080304 ISSN: 1938-8209 (print) 1938-8322 (online)

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tion and operation of Kamala Khan in the first six issues of the Ms. Marvel3 comic series as a way into exploring what this says about Islam and about Muslims, men in particular. The heroic Muslim girlhood embodied by Kamala is constructed as a foil to unflattering, and, at times, almost villainous, conceptualizations male Muslim characters in the series. We consider three scenes from the initial issues of the series as launching points into a broader investigation about the entanglements of race, gender, religion, and identity in western contexts. First, we explore the production of what counts as normal in Ms. Marvel and note that even as the comic series seeks to emphasize the American-ness of its Muslim, first-generation American-Pakistani superhero, it implicitly retains the normal as being white, middle-class, and Christian. It is against this drab, colorless, acultural background or “white affect” (Muñoz 2000: 68) that immigrants and Muslims appear as what Shafi has called “permanent foreigners” (2014:108). Here, we highlight the operation and production of the binary of religion and secularity where the former is associated with culture, irrationality, tradition, and non-whites, and the latter with white affect, rationality, economic prowess, and neutrality. We then move on to consider several scenes that display various enactments of Muslim masculinities. We are attentive to the transnational processes of knowledge production and transmission that have, over time, produced Muslim men as figures of fear and disgust, and we explore the ways in which such representations are resisted as well as re-inscribed in the series. Indeed, constructions of Muslim femininities depend on, and are co-constitutive of, Muslim masculinities. Specifically, we notice that Kamala Khan’s father’s capricious mood swings reinforce the sturdy trope of the irrational Muslim man, and the naming of Kamala Khan’s brother as “penniless mullah” (#2, 19 March 2014: 12) highlights deprivation and emasculation in the context of a neoliberal economic and social order in which economic productivity and secularity are valorized. Hence, Muslim men come to embody, as Bhattacharya notes, “at once a dangerous hypermasculinity and a mutilated deviation from proper manhood” (2008: 89). However, as the series progresses we notice the emergence of more nuanced and complex Muslim masculinities in the figures of the Sheikh of the mosque who is alluded to earlier as a figure to be feared but who later emerges as thoughtful and kind, and Kamala’s father who also emerges as multidimensional. Such constructions of Muslim men as hypermasculine, deviant, and kind and complex, simultaneously incite and alleviate the (western) readers’ anxieties around what Jasbir Puar has called “terrorist assemblages” (2007: xiii), the ways Muslim 24

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bodies and identities get subsumed within affective economies of fear, anxiety, and mistrust. Relationally, they also render intelligible Muslim femininity as threatened by being subsumed within those unwieldy assemblages (and, hence, in need of being rescued) while simultaneously empowered (and, hence, able to attend to its own needs); while Kamala Khan struggles with the strictures imposed on her by her family, she is also empowered, and cannot be controlled or contained because of her superhero powers. Broadly, the visual economies and disruptions of Kamala Khan, her father, her brother and the Sheikh highlight the complex and unstable entanglements of gender, religion, and identity in Ms. Marvel. As forms of public pedagogy, comics such as Ms. Marvel play a critical role in the simultaneous effort of reproduction of, and resistance to, dominant constructions of Muslims, Islam, and immigrants in the United States. We conclude by highlighting how Ms. Marvel provides material for resisting everyday forms of Islamophobia.

A Proliferation of Female Muslim Subjectivities Alongside images and narratives that confirm the oppression of Muslim women by Islam and/or Muslim men,4 we find an increase in the production of images and narratives that explicitly set out to denaturalize this dominant discourse. These include images of Muslim superheroines, such as Kamala Khan and Jiya; autobiographical writings by American Muslim women who speak for themselves, such as Abdul-Ghafur (2005), Ebrahimji and Suratwala (2011) and Mattu and Maznavi (2012); as well as Malala Yousafzai, the teenage Muslim girl who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014 and whose book, I am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up for Education and Was Shot by the Taliban, was written with Christina Lamb in 2013. These diverse images and self-representations aim to indicate the complex, multi-dimensional lives of Muslim women and girls. For instance, Abdul-Ghafur notes that “very rarely do we encounter empowering images of American Muslim women” (2005:3), and, through reading these first-person narratives, she hopes that “the masses of women who fear judgment and condemnation will find permission to claim their own experiences and a self-determined future” (6). The underlying assumption that informs this proliferation of writings by and about Muslim women is that it will push back against the reduction of Muslim women to stereotypes, and portray their lived experience in all its complexity. 25

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While we agree that such writings play a critical role in disrupting entrenched images of Muslim women and girls, in this article we are interested in exploring how they serve both regulatory and empowering functions. Elsewhere (Khoja-Moolji and Niccolini forthcoming), we examine how this proliferation of Muslim girlhoods is entangled in discourses of girl power and practices of self-surveillance that come together to produce a Muslim postfeminist subjectivity. Here, we specifically attend to the operation of such images in relation to Muslim men: what affordances and challenges does the disruption of Muslim femininities present for our understanding of Muslim masculinities? Our approach to masculinity aligns with the work of scholars of gender (Butler 1990; Connell 2005) who emphasize the performativity of gender identities and point to a hierarchy within such performances. The establishment of white, middle-class masculinity as the norm or hegemon entails the demonization and feminization of other masculinities. Stereotypes of hypersexual black men, oversexed Arab men, effeminate brown men, angry and/or violent Muslim men and so on are all examples of ways in which white masculinity is established as an ideal. In this vein, Bhattacharya (2008) highlights the sub/in/human status allocated to Muslim men, which marks them as brutish, monstrous, and abject, and informs contemporary practices of the over-policing and torture of brown bodies. Likewise, Shafi (2014) shows that Muslim bodies have historically been viewed as a source of contamination, unraveling the racial integrity of Europeans and Americans in the present, and Christendom in the past. She traces the production of darkskinned, monster figures that appeared in medieval and Renaissance literature, often consuming and containing the anxieties about Jews, Muslims, and Africans all at once. Dominant or hegemonic Muslim masculinity is often represented as threatening not only Muslim women but also the harmony of the social, racial, and economic orders. We note that cultural expressions such as novels, dramas, comics and such like, play a critical role in (re)producing (and resisting) such constructions of Muslim masculinity (and, relationally, Muslim femininity), among other discursive practices (see Said 1978). O’Malley, Sandlin, and Burdick (2010) argue that such cultural productions are forms of public pedagogies that teach their readers and viewers about possible subjectivities. Indeed, the series editor of Ms. Marvel, Sana Amanat, notes that comics are educational tools (Sampathkumar 2014). For Smith (2001), the genre of superhero comics, in particular, has, historically, performed a didactic role in defending and maintaining the social status quo. It does so by clearly delineating aber26

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rations that must be restored to the norm through the intervention of the superhero since the actions of a superhero (Kamala Khan, in this case) signal to readers the kinds of values and norms that must be defended. Smith argues that this has often meant that the genre of superhero comics reinscribes conservative values. However, the character of Kamala Khan has been developed to explicitly de-stabilize the status quo as it relates to Muslims, so it is increasingly critical to attend also to the possibilities that this genre may open up for resisting dominant values.

Marvel Entertainment’s Kamala Khan “Everyone Else Gets to be Normal” We begin our analysis with the opening sequence of issue #1 that came out on 5 February 2014, as the entitled Zoe Zimmer, a caricature of white middle-class American girlhood, traipses into a convenience store demanding her regular coffee confection. After being reminded that “this is not Starbucks” (2)—the corporate icon of white middle-class girls—Zoe bumps into friends Nakia and Kamala. While Zoe’s hyper-whiteness is intended as a comic foil to Nakia and Kamala as Muslims, her words also open the series with a reference to violent Muslim masculinity. While this is, of course, a trope that the comic writers deploy ironically, its comic tones do not mitigate its affective work. In a gesture of pseudo-liberalness she compliments Nakia on her headscarf, but then immediately asks if she has been pressured by an oppressive father or somebody else (presumably a male) to wear it. When Nakia explains that it is her personal choice to wear a headscarf and her father actually wants her “to take it off,” Zoe declares, “Wow, cultures are so interesting” (3). Culture is marked as foreign to Zoe; she is unencumbered by belonging to a marked religion or identity. Although Zoe’s character is intended to serve a clearly ironic function, a few panels later we see Kamala sniffing BLTs5 in the store saying, “delicious, delicious infidel meat” (1), making remarks about blond hair, and complaining that she is not allowed to go to parties where alcohol may be served; later, in #6, that appeared on 16 July 2014, she partakes in the politics of space within her mosque community by contesting the partitions between, and separate entrances for, men and women, and exclaims that she does not want to have a talk (most probably a reference to potential admonition from him) with the Sheikh at the Islamic Center. All these signs—from a BLT and blonde hair to the hijab—elaborate for the readers Kamala’s cultural specificity in relation to the white, blonde, blue27

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eyed, Starbucks- and alcohol-consuming, bacon-eating American, who is cast as the norm. Said differently, Islam and cultural practices (such as not eating pork, donning the hijab, and observing Muslim rituals) become the primary tropes in and through which Kamala becomes legible. Although the creator’s stated goal is to normalize Muslim identities in the United States and not to reduce Kamala to her Muslimness, the protagonist is repeatedly marked as the other against a blank, white American cast of characters, unhindered by cultural artifacts and religion (though, as we will show, implicitly Christian). Indeed, as Muñoz (2000) and Leonardo (2004) observe, whiteness is marked as the norm precisely through its dullness, drabness, and blankness. It forms the background against which all else becomes visible—colored. In the context of this series, the cultural specificity of Muslims helps to secure the drabness of whiteness. We can see these dialectics at work in the scene of Kamala’s transformation into a superhero as well. At this event, Kamala is surrounded by her Marvel heroes: Iron Man, Captain America, and Captain Marvel. Captain America opens the scene by reprimanding her for not obeying her parents and attending a party instead, thus betraying the presumably normative prescriptions of her culture and religion: “You thought that if you disobeyed your parents—your culture, your religion—your classmates would accept you. What happened instead?” (#1, 5 February 2014:16). What stands out for us in this narrative is the implicit stabilization of Kamala’s culture and religion by Captain America against which she is presumably struggling. It seems that only Kamala has culture and religion while white America is acultural and secular, shaped by “white affect” (Muñoz 2000: 68) that is invisibly marked by Christianity. In the same scene, Kamala complains to her idol, the white golden-haired Carol Danvers (the first incarnation of the character of Ms. Marvel in the comic of the same name that debuted in 1977), also known as Captain Marvel, that “[she] want[s] to be beautiful and awesome and butt-kicking and less complicated” (#1, 5 February 2014:17, emphasis added). She bemoans the complexity of her American-Muslim identity and confirms that there is something decidedly different and alien about Islam, its followers, and their cultures. Indeed, across the first six issues, Kamala is shown to struggle with the desires and prescriptions of her parents, which, the reader may assume, emanate from their particularized culture and religion. Kamala’s parents seek to reform her into a docile subject, one who enacts the subject positions of a good student and a well-behaved, trustworthy daughter. These prescriptions are read by Kamala as hindering her desire to enact normality: she says, “[E]veryone else gets to be normal” (8). 28

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In contrast, Captain America, Captain Marvel and Iron Man are implicitly marked as simple and less complicated. These superheroes’ aculturality, in fact, grants them a liberating mobility that allows them to be tourists of otherness. Captain Marvel, for instance, speaks the Urdu language, and Kamala marvels at her ability to do so; this skill is described as the superhero’s fluency in the language of “faith” (# 1: 16). Yet, this seeming acultural and abstracted identity has strong groundings in Christianity. In Kamala’s hallucinatory vision, for instance, Captain Marvel appears in celestial beauty to her, and the composition of Kamala’s body, along with her face with its closed eyes, are reminiscent of Jesus on the cross or of a Christian saint 6 (see Figure 1). This serves to link her whiteness to a particularized history and religious tradition.7 Such discursive practices have the effect of delineating American-ness as White and Christian.

Fig 1: Captain Marvel Signaling Christian Iconography 29

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After this transformative experience, when Kamala wakes moments later in the cold grayness of a Jersey City street, she cries, “Who was I kidding? I can never be one of them, no matter how hard I try I’ll always be poor Kamala with the weird food rules and crazy family” (# 1: 13). While one of “them” signals the superheroes she worships, the transformation that Kamala seems to desire is a religious and racial conversion to an unencumbered white American-ness. In the final scene of her transformation into a superhero Kamala tenuously gets her wish, becoming a mirror image of Captain Marvel. Kamala’s dark locks are lightened, her eyes become blue, and her body is swirled in gaseous clouds. The image is strikingly similar to the celestial image of Captain Marvel in Kamala’s vision; Kamala comes to literally embody whiteness. Further articulating this sense of doubling, Bruno, her male friend, later confuses Kamala’s superhero form with Captain Marvel/ Carol Danvers. But Kamala is given only a tourist visa into whiteness. Only when danger beckons (and it is noteworthy that it is usually danger to young white bodies), Kamala gains heroic whiteness and transforms into Ms. Marvel. She must return to her complicated self, “weird food rules, and crazy family,” thereafter. The Capricious Muslim Man Although the comic intentionally mocks stereotypical constructions of Muslims, and Muslim men in particular as can be seen, for example, when Zoe asks Nakia, “Nobody’s going to like honor-kill you?” and then follows this with: “I’m just concerned” (#1: 2), even working to upend them by showing Nakia’s father’s opposition to his daughter’s donning of the hijab, in the scene immediately following Kamala’s father gets subsumed within those very negative constructions. In this particular scene, composed of four panels in a single tier, Kamala asks her father if she can attend a high school party. He advises her against it since it would not be safe for her. She protests and he rebukes her. Following McCloud, who, in Understanding Comics, argues that the “different ways words and pictures can combine in comics is virtually unlimited” (1993:152, emphasis in original) we need to look at both the text and image as an assemblage. One such combining is what McCloud calls the interdependency; “words and pictures go hand in hand to convey an idea that neither could convey alone” (155, emphases in original). Keeping this interdependency of words and images in mind, we see the transformation of the father in the four panels under consideration (see Figure 2) as a telling alliance of both the local meanings specific to the story and the larger geopolitical scripts that narrate and produce particular visions of Muslim men. 30

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In the first panel, we see a smiling and kind-faced Muslim man attired in a suit and tie. There is an implicit American middle-class cast to the scene; the father’s warm paternal concern for his daughter at the family dinner table invokes familiar popular cultural tropes of the American family. Immediately before these four frames, we are given a portrait of the Khan family at the dinner table. Here, Kamala’s Americanized father is positioned directly opposite her brother who is attired in traditional Muslim clothing and who is praying at the table. The men are set up as foils to each other, as two opposing subjectivities available for Muslim men: progressive and normative versus resistant and conservative. Yet, while they are portrayed and positioned as being diametrically opposed to each other, the two men ultimately get subsumed within the same affective and discursive legacies of hegemonic Muslim masculinities. Mr. Khan rebukes his son for praying and not eating and implicitly beckons him to become more assimilated within American norms like he, the father, is. But the father is not allowed to dwell in this normative space for long as the four-framed panel immediately following reveals. As already mentioned, it opens with a frame depicting the father, with a smile on his face, gently holding his daughter’s hand. He goes on to use Kamala’s friends, Nakia and Bruno, as examples of those whom she could invite over and whom she should emulate. To this Kamala responds, “Bruno is a boy. If I was a boy, would you let me go to the party? May I be excused?” Upon hearing this, the father explodes: “You are excused straight to your room! And stay there until you find your manners” (#1:7). What is critical about this moment is the transformation of the father from a kind, smiling figure into an enraged one thumping on the table, and all this within the span of four frames on a single comic page 8 (see Figure 2 for the final frame).

Fig 2: Transformation of Kamala’s Father 31

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While there are gutters between the first three frames, there is not one between the last two. As McCloud explains, the gutter is intended as a temporal space for the reader: “[I]n the limbo of the gutter, human imagination takes two separate images and transforms them into a single idea” (1993: 66). Through a process he calls closure, the comic reader compiles a “jagged, staccato rhythm of unconnected moments” into a “continuous, unified reality” (67). It is striking that within the final frame of this set of four, the reader has no visual break or pause to assimilate the change in the father’s attitude. The lack of a gutter means that the transition is quick; it catches the reader by surprise since she or he is completely unprepared to face this new image of the father. This publishing device also denies the reader any space, or we might say, even, agency, to create a “unified reality” and suggests that this reality is instead already-established and pre-determined. Through the lack of temporal space or gutter, the Muslim man does not become angry and violent, he is already this. For us, this scene stands out because it is placed so early in the comic series that it vividly interpellates the reader into seeing the capricious and mercurial entity that a Muslim man is or can be. This unpredictable and violent man is set in contrast to oppressed Muslim women (Kamala and her mother). Like a ticking time-bomb, Mr. Khan explodes into rage. Spitting out food, he is shown in profile, his screaming mouth and stereotypically ethnicized nose in stark relief to the apparent calmness of his wife. His fork is engulfed by an enormous, hirsute hand. It is interesting to note that in the first frame the father’s hand tenderly holding his daughter’s is hairless. As he transforms into an angry Muslim man, he devolves from his middleclass calmness into something almost animal-like. Kamala’s tired mother sits silent and voiceless in the background. Kamala’s conservative brother haunts the frame; half his bearded face peeks in from the corner. This scene confirms that even if Muslim men gain tenuous entry into American middle-class normativities, their unpredictable and violent Muslim masculinity will eventually erupt through this. The father’s explosive anger is positioned in contrast to the emotional restraint demanded of middle-class subjectivities. As much as he embodies in occupation, dress, and comportment assimilation into American norms, his affective unpredictability betrays his otherness. As noted earlier, constructions of Muslim men as irrational and full of rage have a long history and have been recurrent literary tropes. They have left traces in history whereby rage and violence come to be associated with Muslim men. In speaking about black bodies, Ahmed (2004) argues that it is fear that pro32

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duces the black body as fearful. Likewise, the transformation of Kamala’s father from a kind to an enraged Muslim man draws on histories of affect that produce the Muslim man as an object of disgust, to be feared and hated. Therefore, readers feel sorry for Kamala not only because she (like many other teenaged girls) has a strict father but more so because her father is a mercurial, Muslim man. This association of uncontrollable rage and irrationality with Muslim men has a political function as well because it conflates religion with emotion and unreason, and Christian-inflected secularity with reason, rationality, and calm. Mahmood (2009) notes that the production of this binary forestalls any kind of criticism of the secular reason and its truth-claims because it is positioned in opposition to a greater evil of religious extremism. It limits a critical engagement with the norms, situatedness, and ontological assumptions that undergird secular and liberal ways of living; secular and liberal norms are placed on the defensive and protected against religious sentiment. Mahmood further notes that the conceptual opposition between religious threat and secular necessity is maintained through practices and images that threaten a secular liberal worldview, including images of suicide bombers, veiled women, angry mobs burning books, and so on. In this context, we see the figure of the irrational Muslim man, the patriarch, prone to capricious mood swings and a propensity to engage in extreme behaviors, looming large. It is precisely his uncontrollable and unreasoned behaviors that incite the reading audience to contain him or he will destroy their liberal and secular ways of life. “The Penniless Mullah” Alongside the image of the capricious father, we find the image of Aamir, Kamala’s brother, who is portrayed as an overly-religious young man often busy praying instead of looking for a job. In a way he seems to have withdrawn into religion and does not partake in the everyday labor of being economically productive. For instance, he does not intend to continue his father’s profession of banking, and notes that “money earned from a profession that offends Allah has no merit. I refuse to profit from usury... unlike some people.” To this comment, the father responds, “My job at the bank allows you to sit here at home contemplating eternity, beta.9 If you don’t like it, you can… [the father is cut off by Kamala here]” (#1: 6). In this exchange, we do not learn about the legal arguments against usury that some Muslims attend to. Instead, the act of choosing not to work at a bank is presented as a withdrawal from his responsibilities. Later on, again, Aamir’s 33

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unemployed status is discussed as part of a different conversation in which his mother, in frustration, comments on his choice of clothing, saying that he dresses like a “penniless mullah” (# 2, 19 March 2014:17). In the context in which performances of accomplished masculinity are closely tied to the ability to make a family wage, Aamir appears as a figure of deprivation. His status as economically unproductive and, hence, irresponsible, is linked to his religious affiliation thus marking religious sensibilities, too, as a site of lack and deficit. Aamir’s religiosity expressed in and through his choice of clothing, the tasbeeh (prayer beads) in his hands, and his withdrawal from the labor force make him an odd man out in this series. The other religious figure—Sheikh Abdullah of the mosque—also appears in similar garb. This re-articulates the imagined division between religious sentiments and secular ways of being. Here, to be religious appears to involve making particular choices in terms of clothing and attitudes towards wagedwork, which clearly do not jibe with secular, liberal ways of being that entail living responsibly as a rational economic actor. In other words, Aamir appears to be rejecting normalized middle-class American masculinity that, in the context of the comic, is shown to be the responsible one. Kamala takes up this liberal secular subjectivity through her feminist sensibilities. In the third issue of Ms. Marvel (16 April 2014), we see her confronting the gender segregation in her local Islamic Center. When she contests the need for a side entrance reserved for female worshippers, she is gently admonished by Sheikh Abdullah. The image depicting this encounter positions the women and men through slightly skewed frames with the two men in the top frame shifted slightly to the left and the women beneath shifted to the right. This visual staggering, given a reader’s left to right tracking, produces a temporal space from which to view the two opposing viewpoints. It also places Kamala’s religious brother and the Sheikh in the space of the past. Seen as anachronistic, the men are imagined as hopelessly lost in a fantasy of bygone halcyon days. Meanwhile, Kamala and Nakia are from a new progressive timespace in which women in hijab have agency, and can and do address the gendered dictates of Islam. While we, of course, celebrate this vision of progressive Muslim girlhood, we wonder if it needs to be construed in opposition to a backward, pre-modern Muslim masculinity. Indeed, constructions of Muslim men as being unable to attend to the concerns of Muslim women have been critical in producing the binary of East and West, where the latter stands in for progress and development. As Shehabuddin reminds us, “[I]t is important to remember the very gendered nature of the construction of the East—not simply as feminized relative to the powerful, 34

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rational, civilized West, but also criticized for the inability of its native men to protect and respect their women properly” (2011:105). Might there be a space for images of complex Muslim femininities and masculinities to sit side by side each other? We see the later issues of Ms. Marvel (25 June and 16 July 2014) as becoming more suggestive of such a possibility. Promising Muslim Men Issues 5 (25 June 2014), Urban Legend, and 6 (16 July 2014), Healing Factor, mark turning points in the portrayals of Muslim men in the series. Like Kamala, both her father and Sheikh Abdullah go through their own transformations, being depicted as violent and domineering Muslim men at the beginning of the series and becoming more complex and sympathetic characters later on. In Urban Legend, Kamala, disobeying her parents, returns home late one night. Her father ushers her screaming mother away as she bewails Kamala’s lack of respect as a daughter. He then has a heart-to-heart talk with Kamala, embracing her and telling her that they only want her to be “safe” (#5: 8). Safety, of course, is a fraught word within counter-terrorist discourses and it is interesting that Kamala’s father chooses this word rather than the common declaration of wanting his daughter to be happy. Safety, in his view, is located within the home, while the outside world is deemed threatening and unsafe. While in one sense the father invokes a well-critiqued oppressive patriarchy that delimits the woman’s space as the private rather than the public sphere, in another sense the public sphere becomes threatening to a Muslim family rather than the commonly portrayed reverse. We see Mr. Khan’s further flouting of stereotypes of Muslim men; rather than enraged or heartless, he is presented as calm and even tender. He hugs Kamala and tells her an anecdote about her birth. Instead of the nurturing maternal figure, here it is the father who offers emotional support and solace to his daughter in a time of turmoil. In this sense, he comes to occupy a more complex masculine subject position than that of domineering fatherof-the-house and enraged Muslim man as seen earlier in the series. Like Mr. Khan, Sheikh Abdullah moves from being a purely repressive force in Kamala’s life to being a more sympathetic figure. While he is built up earlier as someone whom Kamala fears and does not want to engage with, during a one-on-one conversation with him in #6 Healing Factor (6 July 2014), he gives her thoughtful advice. Rather than forbidding Kamala her secret life or forcing her to disclose it to him, he offers to become a pedagogical figure. He even acknowledges and seems to respect her being “headstrong” (4). Of course, a teacher traditionally maintains a position of tenuous 35

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power over a student, so, as a pedagogue, Abdullah is still a controlling force in Kamala’s life. Yet, in the final frame the pupil and teacher are pictured in a non-hierarchical position, talking eye-to-eye. The Sheikh’s willingness to be Kamala’s teacher signals an endorsement of her “headstrong” agency and potential. Like Kamala’s father in the scene above, Sheikh Abdullah begins to occupy a more complex gendered subject position than that of a merely oppressive Muslim male. He is an ally to Kamala and hopes to help her hone her extraordinary capacities. In fact, over the course of the series, Kamala Khan’s image, too, comes closer to her biological self with browner skin and black hair in the fourth issue (28 May 2014).

Discussion and Conclusions Our analyses of these scenes in Ms. Marvel underscore the anxieties and fears, but also the hopes of brown and black bodies, Islam, and immigrants within popular cultural productions. We note that even though strong female characters such as Kamala Khan are a direct response to dominant cultural expressions that portray Muslim women as oppressed, these images frequently rest upon the stubborn representation of Muslim men as backward, dangerous, and emotionally volatile. These representations cohere within a wider assemblage of practices of racialization and over-policing of brown and black bodies, rampant Islamophobia, and xenophobia against immigrant bodies. They make possible the production of a binary of religion and secularity in which the former comes to be associated with culture, unreason, tradition, and non-whiteness, and the latter with rationality, economic prowess, normativity, and whiteness. While we do see reproductions of the capricious and angry Muslim man trope in Ms. Marvel, we are encouraged to see a movement toward more complex and complicated representations of Muslim masculinities. As mentioned above, the later issues, #5 and #6, of Ms. Marvel reveal male characters activating a wider range of subject positions. Moments, such as when Kamala’s father maintains his kind posture and Sheikh Abdullah offers Kamala his support, signal the very precariousness of monstrous imaginings of Muslim men. This fragility of dominant imaginings heralds emergent possibilities for how Muslim identities are and can be constructed in the United States. We hope that future adventures of Ms. Marvel will put further pressure on tired constructs of oppressed Muslim women and violent, mercurial Muslim men. In their dis36

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rupting of these repetitive narratives, we see these novel comics, like the shape-shifting Kamala herself, as having their own transformative powers. Indeed, in some ways, this process has begun already. Kamala Khan’s image has been taken up to resist Islamophobic messages in the United States. For instance, recently in San Francisco (January 2015), Philadelphia (April 2015), and Washington DC (May 2014), the American Freedom Defense Initiative paid for advertisements that featured slogans such as, “Islamic Jew-hatred: It’s in the Quran. Two thirds of all US aid goes to Islamic countries. Stop the hate. End all aid to Islamic countries,” and “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat Jihad.” Kamala Khan’s image has been transposed onto such advertisements by activists who have modified them to say: “Stamp out racism,” and “Free speech isn’t license for hate,” as well as “Calling all bigotry busters.” The take-up of a cultural artifact to resist everyday forms of Islamophobia is precisely one of the ways in which the public pedagogies of Ms. Marvel can transform into action. Kamala Khan then leaps out of the pages of the comic book to teach lessons about tolerance and acceptance and to disrupt limiting images of Muslim identities. a

SHENILA S. KHOJA-MOOLJI is a research fellow and doctoral candidate at Teachers College, Columbia University. She also serves as an Education Affiliate at the Harvard Divinity School’s Religious Literacy Project. Her research explores the intersections of gender, education, and religion with a focus on Muslim masculinities and femininities, immigrant youth, and transnational discourses of women and girls’ education. She teaches undergraduate and masters level courses in the fields of education and women’s studies. ALYSSA D. NICCOLINI is a doctoral candidate at Columbia’s Teachers College. Her work focuses on affect, sexuality, gender, and secondary US education. She has taught in Brooklyn, New York, the Khayletisha Township in Cape Town, South Africa, and in Germany. She currently teaches public high school students through a non-profit and feminist and gender theory to undergraduates in NYC. b

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Notes 1. Although we use the conventional initial capitalization in “Muslim” we feel compelled to note that this practice obscures the many different interpretations of being Muslim. 2. See www.burkaavenger.com (accessed 11 August 2015). 3. These came out on 5 February, 19 March, 16 April, 28 May, 25 June, and 16 July 2014, 4. See for instance, the work of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a former Muslim who fled Somalia and has now become the so-called insider who tells the tales of horror about Islam. 5. These are bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches. 6. Ms. Marvel #1, 5 February 2014:15. 7. http://maltian.deviantart.com/art/Ms-Marvel-Kamala-Khan-Tripping-Balls458092069 (accessed 1 January 2015). 8. Reproduced from Marvel Digital version http://www.historythruherstory.com/2014_ 12_01_archive.html (accessed 1 April 2015). 9. This is the Urdu word for child.

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