Description
Abstract
This paper seeks to interrogate the racial, sexualised and gendered tropes at work in the British public and government’s reaction to Shamima Begum, following her discovery in a Syrian refugee camp in February 2019. This came four years after she left the UK to join Islamic State in 2015, as a 15 year old schoolgirl. However, her discovery and plea to return to the UK was met with a fierce campaign of misogyny, racism and othering, popularised in the British press and culminating in the government revoking her British – and only – citizenship. In turn, this paper pays particular attention to how gendered Islamophobia, misogyny and hyper-sexualisation all informed the discourse and security practices directed towards Shamima Begum. However, this paper will also explore how such discourse and practice was made possible through producing Shamima as an “unsaveable Muslim woman”. It will show how the same neo-colonial politics of “saving Muslim women” that once justified Western interventions on behalf of Muslim women, is now ironically working to produce Shamima - a Muslim woman who as actually asked to be saved - as one not worthy of saving.
