The Terrorist, the Enlightened Man and the Patriarch
This article examines the experiences of Muslim Canadian women who find themselves in a position in which they are confronted with and haunted by a series of discursive figures. More precisely, we consider how these hegemonic figures affect our female Muslim Canadian participants and how these figures delimit, to a certain extent, their discourses and actions. Feminine figures also exist and circulate in significant ways, but we focus here on three masculine archetypes, which were recurrent in our data that we have named : the Terrorist, the Enlightened Man, and the Patriarch. While masculine figures, they appeared most often in the narratives of the daily lives of our female participants. Specifically, we consider how our female participants engaged with these figures : in certain cases, they (re)produced or (re)activated them, in others they (re)appropriated them, and in others still, they ignored and silenced them. Their hegemony meant that our participants were inevitably impelled to construct, reconstruct and deconstruct these ever-present figures. Drawing on qualitative interviews conducted with self-defined Muslims in Montreal, Quebec and St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, this article makes two arguments in relation to these figures. In the first place, with reference to, and in contrast with, previous theoretical interventions on figures, we trace the relationships between them and show how they are not mutually exclusive ; rather, they activate one another. In the second place, we point to the complexities laden in the positions in which our female participants find themselves. In sum, even if we focus on masculine figures, more generally we engage with them to think more broadly about the fields of power in which Muslim Canadians are forced to engage.