Abstract
Decades of controversies surrounding “Islamic veiling” in France have contributed to construct the practice as a racialized marker of Islam’s inferiority (Al-Saji in J Philos Soc Criticism 36(8):875–902, 2010; Fanon in A dying colonialism. New York, NY: Grove Press, 1965). This chapter questions how such a context impacts the everyday shopping experiences of Muslim women who wear headscarves. An analysis of 20 interviews confirms and extends existing literature on consumer racial profiling. I show how veiled consumers experience objectification, invisibilization, and intersectional oppression in French retail settings and how they cope with it (e.g., unveiling, “re-styling,” online shopping, “communitarianism,” and co-shopping). In conclusion, I discuss the implications of my results for the study of consumer racial profiling.
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Further Reading
Alkayyali, R. (2015). Religiosity and negotiating inter-generational acculturation tensions: The case of French Maghreb Muslim women’s consumption. International Journal of Islamic Marketing and Branding, 1(1), 16–35.
Johnson, G. D., Thomas, K., & Grier, S. A. (2017). When the burger becomes halal: A critical discourse analysis of privilege and marketplace inclusion. Journal Consumption Markets & Culture, 20(6), 497–522.
Pittman, C. (2017). “Shopping while Black”: Black consumers’ management of racial stigma and racial profiling in retail settings. Journal of Consumer Culture, 17(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/1469540517717777.
Sandicki, Ö., & Ger, G. (2010). Veiling in style: How does a stigmatized practice become fashionable? Journal of Consumer Research, 37(1), 15–36.
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Alkayyali, R. (2019). Shopping While Veiled: An Exploration of the Experiences of Veiled Muslim Consumers in France. In: Johnson, G., Thomas, K., Harrison, A., Grier, S. (eds) Race in the Marketplace. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11711-5_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11711-5_6
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