On March 8, 1979, Iranian women took to the streets of Tehran for International Women’s Day. This article examines American media representations of the weeklong protests and explores how the event occasioned the emergence of a distinctly American—and deeply racialized—“discourse of the veil,” in which “Islam” was rendered a national catchphrase for terror and the figure of the “Poor Muslim Woman” entered U.S. cultural discourse as a symbol of a new world order. Through analysis of U.S. media coverage, this piece tracks how discourses of second-wave feminism, a post–civil rights rhetoric of racial and cultural pluralism, and late–Cold War logics of secularism and liberal democracy intersected to create a racial-orientalist discourse of the veil, which would subsequently be deployed to justify U.S. military aggression in the Middle East while perpetuating state violence against women, immigrants, and people of color throughout the 1980s and into the post-9/11 era.
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