Citizens and Suspects: Race, Gender, and the making of American Muslim citizenship

Working at the intersection of anthropological engagements with cultural citizenship and interdisciplinary scholarship on the racialization of Muslims in the United States, I examine the making and unmaking of American Muslims as both citizens and suspects. Based on my ethnographic research with young Chicago Muslims, I argue that state surveillance and multiculturalism shape U.S. Muslim claims to citizenship as rights and belonging. I chart racialization across different domains to argue that the fetish of Muslim body and behavior can actually render Muslim identity both legible and illegible . It is instances of legibility and illegibility, I argue, that illuminate how race and gender coproduce differential experiences of suspicion for American Muslims, and also different beliefs in the very possibility of, and thus desire for, citizenship. Ultimately, I contend that the experience of the American Muslim indexes the centrality of both race and gender to citizenship in the United States .