Social Justice Event

I attended the event From Belly Dancers to Burqas: Media Representations of Muslim Women. I had the great opportunity to listen to the very smart Afshan Jafar speak. Before Ms. Jafar even began to speak she had everyone in the room anonomously write on a piece of paper four words they believe what Muslim women are. Before she got into her lecture she read every single person's thoughts and the results were stereotypical and very interesting to hear. Some examples of the thoughts that were mostly written down are:
conservative
opressed
religious
covered up
restricted
controlled by/not equal to men
misunderstood/misrepresented
beautiful
Jafar said that every time she does this activity with a group, the group comes up with mostly all the same ideas of what they think Muslim women are. What I already knew, of course, is that we get these ideas from the media. The media portrays Muslim culture in so many ways because a lot of us do not understand it. Ms. Jafar then asked if we were all asked what Christian women are we would not know what to write because Christian women could be anything. That then made me realize that Muslim women are so generalized to these stereotypes and it really does not make much sense at all.

Jafar then showed us images and explained to us how Americans sneakily put negative and wrong ideas of Muslim culture in our heads. We were shown an image of princess Jasmine from the Disney movie Aladdin. Jafar then pointed out things about Jasmine's character and the movie that I have never noticed. Jasmine wears a belly dancing costume during the whole movie which is a stereotypical outfit for a Middle Eastern woman. Jasmine also has very Caucasian features compared to the movie's villain Jafar who had very stereotypical features, a large nose, thick brows. Afshan also informed us how the opening song for the movie Aladdin had awful lyrics that Disney had to change because they were truly offensive but the song they ended up with still portrayed Middle Eastern culture as barbaric.

Jafar also showed us a very famous national geographic photograph of Muslim girl. The photographer was on an assignment at a refugee camp and happened to snap a photo of a beautiful girl with piercing eyes. The photo ended up being on the cover of national geographic. Jafar mentioned how the photographer did not even bother to get the girls or name or even speak to her. It's crazy to think how people act because of preconceived notions of a culture.