Strange, Incompetent and Out-Of-Place

Abstract

At the London 2012 Games Muslim women from twenty-eight countries competed in over twenty different Olympic sporting events. In this paper, we critique online and print news articles, op-ed pieces and radio and television reports produced about these women athletes. We focus specifically on mediated representations that were constructed before and during the Games, and which originated and circulated across what is commonly referred to as “the West” (referring here to North America, Canada, Australia and parts of Western Europe). The aim is to ascertain what was considered newsworthy in relation to “Muslim sportswomen,” and what this reveals about popular mediated understanding of Muslim sports/women. Ahmed's (2000) discussion of ‘strange encounters’ is used as an analytical framework to make sense of the ways in which Muslim sportswomen, their sporting bodies and their presence at the Olympic Games was, typically, discussed, defined and represented to Western audiences through a manifold process of constant ‘Othering’. Emphasis is placed on exposing the underlying intentions of the authors/writers and contextualizing the relations of power, bias and subjectivity through which female Muslim athletes competing at London 2012 were mis/represented as strange, incompetent and out-of-place. By demonstrating the extent to which orientalist thinking continues to infiltrate contemporary western discussions on Islam and Muslim women, findings in this paper strengthen not only what Ahmed calls an ‘ontology of strangeness’ but also add to and lend further support to the work of post-colonial feminists, feminist media studies scholars and sociologists of sport.

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