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Cyber Homo Sacer: A Critical Analysis of Cyber Islamophobia in the Wake of the Muslim Ban
Abstract
This article takes up Giorgio Agamben's formulation of “bare life” (1998) and applies it to the contemporary perpetuation of violent Islamophobia in online spaces, producing what I term a figuration of the (Muslim) cyber homo sacer . Particularly focusing upon the proliferation of virulent, anti-Muslim rhetoric and discourse on Twitter, I follow the hashtags #Muslimban and #BanMuslim to demonstrate how Agamben's concepts of homo sacer , state of exception, and the camp—though with important differences—helpfully illuminate the ways in which current Islamophobic and anti-Muslim sentiment online can be understand as a refiguration of Muslims as bodies which exist in a state of in-betweenness. In this “state of exception,” Muslims become more vulnerable to verbal, emotional, psychic, and ultimately physical violence, at the same time as they become less recognizable to the policies and laws which should, ostensibly, protect them.
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ENDNOTES
I conducted digital ethnography on two trending hashtags #BanMuslim and #Muslimban from January 2017 to March 2018, and I chose to focus on strident debates that triggered public conversation. Using Crimson Hexagon software, I collected tweets, manually thematized the data, and used critical discourse analysis (Van Dijk 1993). All online posts are quoted verbatim.
I view the figure of cyber homo sacer as related to the trope of “the mythical Muslim,” and its parallel associations of negative, violent stereotypes, as discussed by Mirrlees and Ibaid in this special issue.