GTFO Lady Gaga: "Burqa Swag" Is Not Yours.

By Elliott Banuelos on February 23, 2013

As a frequent reader of social justice, I’ve had some issues with Lady Gaga for quite some time, for many other reasons. just take this article for an example. But it has recently come to my attention that Lady Gaga is reclaiming something that does not belong to her, as an Italian American woman in American society–the burqa.

The burqa, as some of you know, is a type of religious garb for Muslim women who follow the Islam religion. For some years, this has been the issue with the white populous feminist movement: the claim that such instances of covering women (in a deemed ‘oppressive society’ – the Middle East) is anti-feminist and anti-women, with which such ideologies has lead to the burqa ban in France, heightened Islamaphobic rhetoric in the Netherlands (read with caution, the language is incredibly hateful and written out of spite), and even similar discussions in Canada.

But in The United States, do we really have a right to ban those who exercise their religious freedom? Is in it our position, or at least from my position as a non-Muslim woman, to tell another religion from my own, to tell them what to wear? Is it in the position of these seemingly white countries to tell women of color what they can and cannot do, what’s oppressive and what isn’t?

This is where the problem begins. But before I get too off topic, I want to talk a bit about Lady Gaga, and why this burqa swag nonsense is incredibly problematic and leads to a hypersexualization of Muslim women.

For some Muslim women, wearing the burqa or niqab (which is a veil that covers everything but the eyes) makes them feel like they’re in control of their sexuality.

What Lady Gaga is doing, in turn, is making it OKAY for non-Muslims to walk around town, screaming at the top of their lungs “I’VE GOT BURQA SWAG!!!!”, when the majority of these individuals hold a position of power, completely denying that there are hate crimes that happen every hour of the day in the United States alone that make is a result of the highest anti-Muslim sentiment, attitudes, and murders in America alone, based off of our bigotry of their religion. So, I guess the lives of Muslim women, who get harrassed on the regular from white feminists, politicians, and are constantly discriminated against because of their “unconventional”, non-Eurocentric culture, are easily made disposable, at least to Lady Gaga, it seems.

Thank you for doing absolutely nothing to advance the struggles of those who are below the ladder of the social hierarchy, and thank you for your cultural appropriation (just a little something something that I wrote that can connect the dots a bit).

What do you think Lady Gaga is doing with this campaign? Do you think it is productive, at all?

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