Muslims’ Positive Hypervisibility: A Transformative Anti-Islamophobia Strategy
摘要
This chapter discusses the politics of Muslims’ visibility from the perspective of Muslim Community Organisations (MCOs) with a particular focus on examining MCOs’ strategies and actions vis-à-vis the negative hypervisibility of Muslimness. The chapter explores how MCOs transform Muslims’ hypervisibility, often framed through securitised, racialised, and exclusionary logics, into a platform for Muslims’ civic assertion of citizenship and cultural recognition of Muslimness. Drawing on interviews with MCO representatives, the analysis highlights how MCOs tactically engage with civic–political spaces, cross-cultural initiatives, and public–private spatial dynamics to re-signify Muslimness within national imaginaries of belonging. These actions, underpinned by assertive, apologetic, and critically reflexive frames of meaning, enable MCOs to project a version of Muslim subjectivity that is at once religiously grounded and civically engaged. The argument is that MCOs leverage their and Muslims’ hypervisibility as a mechanism to extend their access to public sites of visibility, deploying strategic interventions to contextualise their position within visibility sites defined by notions of Australianness. While foregrounding the agentic and transformative potential of this strategy, the chapter also reflects on its constraints—such as the pressures of performative citizenship, representational burdens, and the risk of reinforcing normative ideals of the ‘good’ Muslim. These reflections point to the ambivalent nature of visibility politics and the ongoing challenges faced by MCOs in navigating Islamophobia within a multicultural democracy.