Date of Award

2025

Degree Type

Restricted to Claremont Colleges Dissertation

Degree Name

Cultural Studies, PhD

Program

School of Arts and Humanities

Advisor/Supervisor/Committee Chair

Nicola Denzey Lewis

Dissertation or Thesis Committee Member

Ruqayya Khan

Dissertation or Thesis Committee Member

Eve Oishi

Terms of Use & License Information

Terms of Use for work posted in Scholarship@Claremont.

Rights Information

© 2025 Kirsten E Boles

Keywords

Christian nationalism, Mass casualty violence, Islamophobic rhetoric, Liberal critics, Immigration

Subject Categories

Religion

Abstract

This dissertation interrogates the pervasive deployment of Islamophobic rhetoric within U.S. political, cultural, and media discourses, especially when those discourses concern issues related to gender, sex, and sexuality. I ask why anxieties around gender, sex, and sexuality are negotiated through denigrations of Islam. I argue that the use of Islamophobic rhetoric in such discourses intersects with and buttresses other systems of power and oppression such as misogyny, homophobia, racism, and xenophobia. I examine case studies such as the use of the analogy “the gay jihad” by conservative political actors attempting to pathologize gay rights activism, invocations of “the Taliban” and “Sharia” by liberal critics of reproductive restrictions, and media attempts to Islamicize instances of mass casualty violence. In each of these case studies, Islam functions as a stable signifier of violence, repression, and extremism employed to define and regulate discursive boundaries around morality, modernity, and national belonging. My analysis of each of my three case studies reveals that culture wars around religious liberty, reproductive control, immigration, and gun violence serve as extensions of imperialism and white Christian nationalism. At the end of this work, I propose a framework for ameliorating such discursive violence. I advocate an epistemological restructuring that centers intersectionality and relationality and refuses the reinscription of religious and cultural difference.

ISBN

9798265483218

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