“Saving Korean Women from (Im)migrant Muslim Men”: Islamophobia

Abstract

Chapter 4 examines the ways in which Islamophobia is inscribed in the Protestant Right’s discourse on Islam and Muslims and their implications for a multiethnic, subimperial society. The Protestant Right has reinforced Islamophobia by discursively constructing Islam and Muslims based on the interpretative framework of rescue Korean women from violent and incompetent Muslim men and evil Islam. The Protestant Right discourse that relies on this framework perpetuates the gendered racialized stereotypes of Muslim men as violent, deceitful, incapable, and non-monogamous. It also generates ethnonationalist view of Korean women as hapless victims who are desperately in need of being rescued by fellow Korean men from their violent and incapable (im)migrant Muslim spouses. Implied in this depiction of Muslim men is that Korean men are, in contrast, “responsible,” “reliable,” “capable,” “faithful,” and, thus, “manly.”