Discrimination

Open Access: No.

Abstract

This article examines the operations of the hijab within US productions of ‘hijab porn’: an online pornographic subgenre that stages women porn performers wearing the hijab during their sexual encounters. I investigate how the generic development, categorization, and visual conventions of hijab porn professionally produced in the USA expose operations of post-9/11 US racial formations, which problematically collapse ’Arab’, ’Middle Eastern’, and ’Muslim’ into a consolidated racial figure. Beginning with a situation of existent theoretical approaches to hijab porn, I trace how the history of the subgenre’s emergence in the USA, its categorization on video hosting sites, and on-scene performance conventions on sites like hijabhookup.com reflect how the hijab has been utilized as a gendered and sexual racializing technology through which the Muslim woman pornographic subject is not only visually assembled and ostensibly made legible, but is also racialized as Arab or Middle Eastern, despite the differences between these categories.

Relevance

This article shows how contemporary pornography stereotypes and racializes Muslim and Arab women through portrayals of the hijab – as a continuation of “the veiled Muslim colonial subject”, albeit in a new period of “virulent anti-Muslim racism” in the US and Europe. (Note: Despite the obvious bigotry of the pornography industry, as this article shows, the author is enigmatically unwilling to critique pornography itself.)

Citation

Duran, S. (2025). The hijab as technology: gendered and sexual racialization in ‘hijab porn.’ Porn Studies.  https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2025.2580677