UC San Diego

This dissertation develops a new framework for rhetorical and media analysis that explains how seemingly inclusive representations of Muslims reproduce anti-Muslim racism. While existing scholarship has focused on explicitly negative portrayals of Muslims or treats Muslimness primarily as a cultural identity, I argue that even progressive and seemingly inclusive depictions of Muslims rely on dominant assumptions that Islam itself is irrational, pathological, and inferior. I introduce the Imagined Practice of Islam (IPI) Framework comprised of two parts: the imagined practice of Islam (IPI) and Muslim recuperation. This conceptual framework helps explain how negative core assumptions about Islam operate at the level of perceived religious practice to racialize Muslims. I argue that this framework relies on ideology and affect to structure contemporary representations around dominant negative stereotypes that take on a felt truth and, as a result, often evade critique.Drawing on a multi-site analysis of legacy U.S. news media, television streaming platforms, and TikTok, this project combines content analysis, qualitative discourses analysis, close reading, and digital ethnography. Across these sites, I show that Islam is constructed around dominant negative imaginings that have characterized centuries of Orientalist and Islamophobic discourse. I also show how the inclusion of Muslims is predicated on rhetorical strategies that distance individuals from this implicitly constructed threatening Islam. In news discourse, the rise of the “moderate Muslim” functions as a recuperative device that reaffirms extremism as the default. In popular streaming shows, Muslim protagonists are rendered legible through narrative and aesthetic cues, particularly around gender, sexuality, lifestyle, and dress, that attenuate perceived religiosity. On TikTok, I identify feed obfuscation, a platform-specific process that embeds Islamophobic content within seemingly benign streams, obscuring patterns of discrimination. These strategies rely not on logics of assimilation—Muslimness is not erased, absorbed or integrated into dominant social structures—but on what I refer to as attenuation, the weakening or diminishment of the perceived threat of Islam itself.Together, these findings demonstrate that inclusion is not the opposite of exclusion but often depends on the backgrounding of Islamophobic assumptions and presuppositions that naturalize anti-Muslim racism. By theorizing religious practice as a site of racialization and foregrounding the role of affect, the IPI Framework offers a new approach to analyzing how racism persists in ostensibly progressive media contexts. While focused on Muslim representation, this framework has broader applicability for understanding how dominant imaginings shape the conditional inclusion of racialized groups across media environments while reinforcing dominant negative stereotypes.