5HIXWLQJૺ5HIXJHH&KLFૻ7UDQVQDWLRQDO*LUOKRRGV
DQGWKH*XHULOOD3HGDJRJ\RI0,$
Lisa Weems
Feminist Formations, Volume 26, Issue 1, Spring 2014, pp. 115-142
(Article)
3XEOLVKHGE\7KH-RKQV+RSNLQV8QLYHUVLW\3UHVV
DOI: 10.1353/ff.2014.0010
For additional information about this article
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ff/summary/v026/26.1.weems.html
Access provided by Washington College (2 Dec 2014 14:17 GMT)
Refuting “Refugee Chic”:
Transnational Girl(hood)s and the
Guerilla Pedagogy of M.I.A.
Lisa Weems
The article analyzes media accounts about and by international hip-hop artist
M.I.A. to theorize the cultural production of racialized girlhood within transnational
discourses on gender and sexuality. As a Sri Lankan Tamil refugee, M.I.A. is positioned as an exotic outsider to dominant discourses on race and gender in popular
culture, and to the emerging canon of girlhood studies. Using a transnational feminist
framework, the article illustrates the complicated tensions of racialized and gendered
subjectivity in the context of the globalization of media and post-9/11 identity politics. Through an analysis of M.I.A.’s representation in mainstream media, as well
as her reception in the South Asian diasporic community, it demonstrates how the
artist actively resists binary constructions projected on and through her body, which
is constituted by “refugee chic.” Specifically, it illustrates how M.I.A. rearticulates
her outsider position to challenge the boundaries of both racialized girlhood and
transnational citizenship. The article argues that M.I.A.’s self-identified mode of
“digital ruckus” is a form of guerilla pedagogy that provides an important space for
critical sociopolitical debate in the global youthscape.
Keywords: citizenship / feminist / M.I.A. / racialized girlhood / transnational
“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a radical woman
of color in possession of a microphone is a revolution waiting
to happen. Weaned on the bitter milk of colonialism, spitting spiced manifestos in the ghetto slang of an appropriated
tongue, a female desi [South Asian diasporic] MC with skills
is a glorious phenomenon to behold. Shaped by all the joys,
©2014 Feminist Formations, Vol. 26 No. 1 (Spring) pp. 115–142
116 · Feminist Formations 26.1
contradictions, challenges and indignities of being born a
brown girl in a world presided over by white men, there is
something incredibly uplifting about someone who’s overcome
unlikely odds to emerge unscathed, fully empowered, and with
a middle-finger raised high against all the inherent injustices
of a rigged system.”
—Fuad Ahmad (2005)
It is hard to imagine anyone interested in popular culture in the United States,
UK, or Canada who has not yet heard of international rapper M.I.A. Although
twice nominated for a Grammy Award, the British/Sri Lankan hip-hop artist
most recently made US headline news for “flipping off” the camera during her
2012 Super Bowl half-time performance with Madonna and Nicki Minaj.1 Those
familiar with M.I.A. were not very surprised, given her career-long antagonistic relationship with the media. Nonetheless, Madonna—once known to be
a controversial figure in popular culture—characterized M.I.A.’s action as a
“negative . . . teenager, irrelevant thing to do” (Vena 2012). In a similar vein,
the accomplishments of Maya Arulpragasam, known as M.I.A., a 32-year-old
mother and art-school graduate, are often depoliticized and trivialized as the
“irresponsible shit-talking” of a “Sri-Lankan party-girl” (Christgau 2007).
Meanwhile, another image of M.I.A. circulates across the internet. This
one foregrounds the artist’s nationalist and financial affiliations by framing her
as a daughter of a LTTE (Tamil Tiger) terrorist, an apologist for LTTE terrorism, and/or a terrorist herself.2 Whether she is characterized as a “Sri-Lankan
party-girl” or a “cheerleader for terrorism,” media representations within both
the Euro-American mainstream and South Asian diasporic (Desi) community
position M.I.A. as a subject of racialized girlhood and “refugee chic” (Caramanica 2005).3 4 Thus, in contrast to Ahmad’s above depiction of M.I.A. as
a “radical woman of color,” M.I.A. is often portrayed as either an unpatriotic
troublemaker or a hipster (for example, a young person concerned more with
style than substance). Furthermore, most of these representations, including
those by the artist herself, locate her as an outsider to the dominant discourses
on gender, globalization, and citizenship; M.I.A., however, does not necessarily
shy away from this characterization. This article argues that M.I.A. utilizes a
form of guerilla pedagogy that both reinforces and refutes the identification of
refugee chic.
M.I.A. is a particularly rich example to theorize refugee chic and guerilla
pedagogy for two reasons. First, she attended art school at the prestigious St.
Martin’s, and has received both commercial and critical success as a rapper,
songwriter, visual artist, and performance artist. She has helped to define contemporary “chic” in popular culture, or what is often referred to as the “hipster
scene.” Second, M.I.A.’s biographical circumstances denote that she is a “brown
Lisa Weems · 117
Londoner”—part of the Tamil diaspora displaced by the Sri Lankan civil war;
she is a refugee by definition. Thus, M.I.A. embodies refugee chic. Moreover,
M.I.A. is an important figure for theorizing guerilla pedagogy because she is
aware of, and works against, dominant scripts of racialized girlhood. Through
her lyrics, videos, and interviews, she makes use of refugee chic to reframe the
issues of sexualization, silence, victimization, and violence that are the results
of (trans)national systems of domination.
This article uses data from electronic and print news sources to interrogate the discursive production of M.I.A. as a figure of racialized girlhood
and transnational gendered citizenship. These data sources include: artist
exposés, biographies, and interviews in the mainstream and alternative US,
UK, and Australian music scenes; weblog posts from South Asian blogs and
electronic magazines; and M.I.A.’s song lyrics and visual texts. Although these
sources are heterogeneous, they are interrelated and interarticulated through
heteronormative and nationalist tropes of deviance. In some accounts, M.I.A.
is represented as a highly dangerous “terrorist slut”; elsewhere, she symbolizes
a commercialized rebel girl or “Tamil hottie” (Ahmad 2005). While seemingly contradictory, I argue that these images operate in collusion to exoticize
M.I.A.’s body as both a physical and cultural production that represents what
Kumari Silva (2010) terms brown deviance. According to Silva, “brown can be
conceptualized as a metaphor that—outside its circulation in the academy as a
strategic concept that marks Latina/o and South Asian identity—is employed
broadly, if not often overtly, to mark deviance” (172). Moreover, I take up a
feminist transnational framework to analyze how M.I.A. performatively navigates this post-9/11 moment when “globalized bodies of migratory labour” are
highly visible, considered suspect, and are subject to the material and symbolic
regulation of the neoliberal state (167). Through her music, interviews, and
public appearances, M.I.A. calls attention to how “third world girls” are subject
to multiple layers of domination, discrimination, and exclusion as transnational
citizens in a global youthscape.
The article is organized in three parts. First, it introduces a feminist
transnational approach to racialized girlhood (Carby 2009; Henry 2006;
Lukose 2005; Weems 2009). Second, it discusses M.I.A. as a cultural production of racialized girlhood through two specific figurations: the terrorist slut,
and the Tamil Hottie. Finally, the article explores how M.I.A. contributes,
both literally and figuratively, to burgeoning public discourses on gendered
transnational citizenship (Grewal 2005). Using the visual and performative
texts she creates, it illustrates how M.I.A. both reinforces and refutes the
position of refugee chic.
118 · Feminist Formations 26.1
Part 1: At the Crossroads of Feminist Transnationalism,
Global Youth Studies, and Girlhood Studies—
a Transnational Approach to Racialized Girlhood
How can we understand M.I.A. as a case of the transnational production of
racialized girlhood? This analysis makes visible how she, as a racialized and
gendered subaltern subject, illustrates the discursive and material constraints
of racialized girlhood as an effect of cultural and political discourses on subjectivity and citizenship. Moreover, it argues that as a cultural production, M.I.A.
articulates performance art that reflects transnational modes of interstitial
subjectivity and citizenship (Bhabha 1994; Ong 2006; Minh-ha 1989). By interstitial is meant that M.I.A. exceeds the intersections, boundaries, and familiar
narratives of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality that are tied to discourses
on nationalism and citizenship. On the one hand, it may seem possible and
desirable to celebrate M.I.A. as an ideal figure in terms of global youth culture
and twenty-first-century border-crossings; yet, she is typically associated with
questions of violence, regulation, and censorship (Weems 2009)—themes that
are often glossed over in “the happy story” of youth and globalization. Part of
the larger argument here is that the discursive production of M.I.A. as a young
woman—for example, as a “teenager”—is a strategy to disavow the politicized
knowledge she evokes as both a cultural product and a cultural producer. As
such, this analysis of her work moves beyond the “limits of the logics” of both
existing global youth studies and girlhood studies.
The art of M.I.A. represents a new generation of youth-produced popular
media that reflects the kind of fluid ethno-scapes made possible by the transnational migration of cultural, informatic, ideological, technological, and financial
forms of currency and recognition. Commenting on the cultural dimensions
of globalization, Arjun Appadurai (1996, 31) writes that “the imagination has
become an organized field of social practices . . . a form of work . . . and a form
of negotiation between sites of agency and globally defined fields of possibility.”
This scholarship, which might be termed global youth studies, aptly points to
the ways in which popular culture provides both real and imagined networks
of affiliation and border-crossings in terms of race and nationality (Dimitriadis
and McCarthy 2001; Dolby 2001; Dolby and Rizvi 2008; Maira 2002; Maira and
Soep 2005; Muggleton and Weinzierl 2003; Nayak 2006). Within the field of
global youth studies, scholars have noted the central role of music in crossing
ethnic and aesthetic borders, and music’s potential to create political change
(Dolby 2001; Gopinath 2005; Maira 2002). This scholarship has produced keen
insights into the production, distribution, circulation, and reception of hybrid
cultural productions. Yet, an intersectional approach to difference, hybridity,
subjectivity, and citizenship remains a challenge. For example, issues related
to gender appear in only seven of the approximately fifty articles included in
oft-cited texts in global youth studies.5 Furthermore, of those seven, only five
Lisa Weems · 119
focus on girls as gendered subjects located within cultural, racial, and national
politics. It appears that the question raised by Angela McRobbie (2000) is still
pertinent: Is it that girls are not active in subcultural activities, or could it be
that the conceptual apparatus of global youth studies, by definition, dismisses
and/or marginalizes particular girls as producers of youth culture in general,
and as producers of politicized forms of transnational style, subjectivity, and
citizenship specifically?
The topic of young women as cultural producers is evident in the field
of girlhood studies. Yet, like global youth studies, this field has its theoretical
limitations. Specifically, the field of girlhood studies tends to be populated with
constructions of gender and sexuality among Western (or Northern) and/or
white young women (Brown 2003; Brumberg 1997; Drake 2002; Hubler 2002;
Kearney 2006; Lamb and Brown 2007; McRobbie 2000) and the institutionalized spaces they inhabit (Aapola, Gonick, and Harris 2005; Bettis and Adams
2005; Bloustien 2003; Mitchell and Reid-Walsh 2005).6 Although there are a
few notable exceptions (Brown 2008; Jiwani, Steenbergen, and Mitchell 2005),
the trend is to conflate girlhood with white femininity in the United States.
Thus, while specific studies of young women in local and global contexts may
include girls of color, the discourse on girlhood studies articulates its subject as
a white middle-class, heterosexual female living in the United States, Canada,
UK, or Australia (Jiwani, Steenbergen, and Mitchell 2005).
An effect of these theoretical and empirical blindspots within both of these
fields is that the lived experiences, cultural productions, political interventions,
and theoretical contributions of third world girls remains somewhere between
invisible and underexplored. Here, third world girls is used to designate political
solidarity, in a sense similar to Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s (2003) articulation
of third world women and Gloria Anzaldúa’s women of color. For both, these terms
are not intended to suggest a pre-discursive, essentialist lived experience, but
an ideological solidarity that seeks to contest the primacy of gender and sexual
difference as the organizing principle of feminist politics, and bring awareness
to how geopolitical location, in addition to race, ethnicity, and nationality,
structures relations between and among women.
Like the term gender, girlhood is a heterotopic discursive space populated
by various images, texts, and practices, including policy, research, media, and
lived experience (Foucault 1990). In other words, the category of (racialized)
girlhood indexes an analytic space with boundaries that are located in time
and space; yet, these boundaries are porous rather than fixed. Within this heterotopic space, heterogeneous “regimes of truth” regarding what it means to be
a girl are produced, circulated, and contested.7 The politics of representation is
underscored by the fact that particular claims about third world girls and racialized girlhood become sedimented within institutions of knowledge production,
such as the media, education policy, and legislation, as well as in the political
propaganda used to legitimize military action.
120 · Feminist Formations 26.1
Feminists of color have argued that racialized girlhood is largely constructed
through mass media and results in images of young brown and black females as
hypersexualized and immature (Brown 2008; Henry 2006), trivial but dangerous
(Gopinath 2005; Handa 2003), and, above all, in need of domestication into and
regulation by a heteronormative subjectivity that is in line with the dominant
discourses on gender and development (Ahmed 2000; Hernández and Rehman,
2002; Jiwani, Steenbergen, and Mitchell 2005). Despite this scholarship, much
of the research in global youth studies has overlooked how gender and sexuality
mediates narratives of subjectivity and citizenship. Thus, this analysis expands
the literature within global youth studies to understand how globalization affects
various groups of girls differently. In this way, the analysis runs parallel to that
of Ritty Lukose (2005), who documents how the Miss Kerala pageants—beauty
pageants that blend indigenous and diasporic understandings of the culture of
Kerala, India—both produce and are produced by new forms of identities at the
interstices of gender, caste, and nation. What forms of identity and agency might
be rendered visible by making explicit a theoretical framework of transnational
feminist practice?
Inderpal Grewal and Caren Kaplan (2000) argue that transnational feminist scholarship includes interdisciplinary analysis from postcolonial, cultural,
and women’s studies. Transnational feminist scholarship addresses issues of
gendered power in relation to colonialism, modernity, and globalization. They
write that
[s]ince recent scholarship has shown us that gender, class, religion, and
sexuality produce different kinds of women in relation to different kinds of
patriarchies, we must design classes that present a more complex view of how
women become “women” (or other kinds of gendered subjects around the
world). In addition, we need to teach about the impact of global forces such
as colonialism, modernization, and development on specific and historicized
gendering practices that create inequalities and asymmetries.
This passage is quoted at length to draw attention to three specific points
pertinent to this analysis. First, like Grewal and Kaplan, this article is interested in how different kinds of patriarchies—or what queer theorists would
call heteronormativities—produce different kinds of gendered subjects, and to
illuminate the differentiated processes of subjectivization in the representation
and experiences of girlhood.
Second, transnational feminist practices analyze the relationships among
women within and across national borders; however, specific relationships and
movements among women, cultures, societies, and nation-states are both porous
and asymmetrical in terms of access, conditions of citizenship, and physical and
financial mobility (Alexander 2005; Lowe 2006). For example, M.I.A.’s status as
a Sri Lankan refugee in Britain is the grounds for which she was both allowed
Lisa Weems · 121
and denied entry into the United States. Her position of celebrity and assumed
affiliation with the Tamil Tigers made her a highly visible third world girl who
was denied a US visa in 2006, but it is also her status as a British/US celebrity
that allowed her to publicize and contest that decision.
And third, transnational feminist practices analyze how global forces like
colonialism, modernization, and development create and maintain gendered
inequalities (Spivak 1999). As postcolonial theorist Appadurai (2006) notes,
it is on and through the minoritized body that globalization takes its warfare:
To be sure, we need to understand a great many specific events and processes
in order to get from the vertiginous spin of the global to the intimate heat of
local violence. But here is the possibility to consider: that part of the effort
to slow down the whirl of the global and its seeming largeness of reach is by
holding it still, and making it small in the body of the violated minor. Such
violence, in this perspective, is not about old hatreds and primordial fears. It
is an effort to exorcise the new, the emergent and the uncertain, one name
for which is globalization. (47–48)
Following Appadurai’s insight about the “overdetermined” meanings associated
with the “minoritized body,” this article interrogates how US- and UK-based
media discourses, through an imperial spectacle, play a crucial role in creating
and maintaining racialized and gendered inequalities (Carby 2009; Said 1987;
Stoler 2006).
The article turns now to a discussion of media representations of M.I.A.
during the period 2004 to 2012, which oscillate between two nodes of sexual
and political subjectivity. The first is the figure of M.I.A. as a Sri Lankan
adolescent party girl or a racial or ethnic hottie. Like other racialized young
women, her ideas and actions are trivialized rather than being viewed as
important cultural, artistic, and civic contributions. In this node, her physical
appearance and style are highly sexualized through the innocence/naughtiness
trope. The second node is the representation of her as a “cheerleader for terrorism” and a terrorist slut. This characterization, which emerged around 2005,
is the most inflammatory and is in heavy circulation in formal news accounts
of M.I.A., as well as in informal posts by readers of online media. However, it
is very difficult to trace the exact origin of these statements precisely because
they are susceptible to erasure due to the obscenity and slander conventions of
particular websites.8 M.I.A.’s affiliations with militant violence and terrorism
may have dissipated, but her lyrics and interviews suggest that she still wrestles
with this abject position of political and sexual subjectivity. As discussed in
part 3 below, the position of refugee chic that M.I.A. refutes is an effect of
both of these representations.
122 · Feminist Formations 26.1
Part 2: M.I.A. and Racialized Girlhood—
from Terrorist Slut to Tamil Hottie
M.I.A. as a Cheerleader for Terrorism
M.I.A. (Mathangi “Maya” Arulpragasam) selected her stage name largely to
signify the psycho-social and geopolitical situation of refugees like herself. Born
in 1977, she represents one of the 700,000 members of the Tamil diaspora displaced by the civil war that had been going on for the last thirty years within
and across the borders of Sri Lanka and India. In Sri Lanka, Tamils comprise
nearly 18 percent of the general population and are often characterized as a
militant ethnic group, even though only a small subset of Tamils identify with
the fighters, the Tamil Tigers (LTTE) (Jayasena 2010).9
As a racialized transnational figure, the mystique surrounding M.I.A.
involves even the most basic biographical details of her life. She was born in
Hounslow, London, but moved back to Sri Lanka with her family within her
first year of childhood. At around age 10, M.I.A. and her siblings fled war-torn
Sri Lanka with their mother and relocated in London. It was regularly cited
that her father was a member of LTTE who used the code name Arular and who
left his family in order to fight for a separate geo-political state (Tamil Eelam)
on the north and eastern periphery of the Sri Lankan nation (Kellman n.d.).
However, media sources clarified that M.I.A.’s father was never a part of LTTE,
but instead a member of a less militant Tamil nationalist group called Eelam
Revolutionary Organisation of Students (EROS).10
Part of the early media attention regarding M.I.A. centered on whether or
not she advocated violence, and the extent to which she supported LTTE politically or economically. The question of her nationalist and political orientation
toward violence is a major point of dialogue and contention within the larger
Desi blogosphere.11 However, dominant cultural US and UK sources bought into
this representation and reproduced it when discussing M.I.A. in the popular
press. For example, her representation as a supporter of LTTE terrorism, whether
accurate or not, reportedly was the reason for her denial of a US visa in 2006.12
From 2004 to late 2008, M.I.A. was a highly politicized figure, despite her
relative lack of visibility and recognition within more mainstream popular
music audiences. This politicization was due, in part, to the general “brown”
xenophobic hysteria post-9/11 (Silva 2010).13 More specifically, M.I.A. was often
explicitly linked to discourses on radical extremist politics and LTTE. Public and
counter-public controversy centered on her persona as a militaristic rebel girl
and a potential mouthpiece for the Tamil Tigers. Although no direct connection between M.I.A. and the Tamil Tigers has ever been established, her lyrics
and imagery certainly includes militaristic style and nationalist iconography; for
example, the cover of her 2005 album Arular features a photo of her framed by
repetitive and brightly colored images of military-uniform insignia in orange and
green, yellow automatic weapons (AK guns), airplanes, red tanks, and missiles.14
Lisa Weems · 123
She juxtaposes these military icons alongside a green floral wheel pattern (on the
left) and Tamil-language characters (on the right), which reflects a Tamil folk
aesthetic. M.I.A. looks out at the viewer; her hair is in disarray and cannot be
contained by the ordered symbols that provide a border for her image. Her gaze
offers a kind of seductive invitation and a direct address to the viewer. “M.I.A.”
appears diagonally across the image and resembles graffiti art or a graffiti tag.
In this way, she links a history of official armed conflict with unofficial cultural
politics and symbolic warfare through guerilla art.
This contested history of land, language, and culture is referenced on
the bottom left corner, where a color-coded geopolitical map highlights the
contested land at stake in the civil war. The northern and eastern, primarily
ethnic Tamil areas of the country are represented in red, and the primarily
ethnic Sinhalese area of the country is shown in light orange. Thus, the cover
art of Arular not only signals a general or global military aesthetic through the
utilization of multiple icons of armed combat, but in addition, the selection
and juxtaposition of Tamil-language characters, folk art, and the graphic representation of the country into the ethno-political borders connotes the local
sociocultural context of Sri Lanka.
Like her artwork, another element of M.I.A.’s aesthetic style that has been
critiqued and regulated is the use of gunshots in the chorus of her song “Paper
Planes.” In an interview with the Daily Beast (Touré 2009) she says that
[i]f you’re an immigrant you left somewhere and most of the time you fled a
war. Gun sounds are a part of our culture as an everyday thing. If you’ve been
exposed to gunfights and violence and bombs and war then I can use those
sounds backing my thoughts, ya know? Look, I’ve been shot at so I’m quite
comfortable with gunshot sounds. If you have a problem with it, go and talk
to the people who were shooting at me.
Here, M.I.A. positions herself alongside other immigrants who have experienced
violence and war firsthand. Therefore, because this song connects to larger
global trends of racialized violence, and because music is one creative response
to those trends, it makes sense that it was sampled by US rapper Jay-Z.
M.I.A. argues for Tamil sovereignty, but also advocates for solidarity and a
call to arms among ethnic minorities within and across nation-states. She became
a sort of diasporic celebrity in the United States specifically because of the racialized construction of her rebellion as a form of supposed third world terrorism.
M.I.A.’s music exacerbates her precarious position of postcolonial (hyper)visbility
through a guerilla pedagogy in which she contests the characterization of her
as a “celebrity terrorist.” And yet, interviews with her in mass mainstream and
independent media outlets document her attempts to re-narrate her position(s)
of Otherness into a state and statement of cultural productivity and political
freedom. In an interview with Nekesa Mumbi Moody (2007), M.I.A. noted the
unintended political benefits of being denied entry into the United States:
124 · Feminist Formations 26.1
Me not being able to get into the country actually forced me to go to Africa
and India, which actually works out worse for whoever wants me to shut up,
because the worst thing you can do is make Africa look cool, or like make
India look cool. . . . They just made it a step closer for a bridge to get built
between modern developing countries and modern Third World and America,
which is what needs to happen.
Here, M.I.A. notes how she was able to not simply “work around” her
physical and symbolic exclusion from the United States and the mainstream
media-production industry, but that she actually “made use” of the situation.
By traveling to Africa and India to complete her highly anticipated second
album Kala (2007), M.I.A. effectively subverted at least some of the intended
objective(s) of silencing her message/voice. She used this refusal of entry to
the United States as an opportunity to further explore a more global sound
and political message in Kala in two ways: first, she set up musical production
in places like Ghana, Angola, Trinidad, Sri Lanka, and Australia, purposefully incorporating indigenous aesthetics into her music through sounds, local
musicians, and dancers; second, and more importantly, she used lyrics that
highlight local political themes and social conditions. In this way, we can see
that M.I.A. is both engaged in cultural appropriation—a point that some of
her critics have raised—and in shining a spotlight on issues of violence, war,
and cultural survival that are often overlooked in the West. Taken in this light
then, the passage between M.I.A. and Moody might be read as a coherent narration of “strategic essentialism” (Spivak 1993). According to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, one effect of the Western gaze of imperialism is the assumption
that there is an essence or authenticity of the native subaltern subject that is
fundamentally different (read inferior) from the subject of modernity and the
West. While Spivak rejects this notion of essential difference(s), she argues that
claiming or reclaiming a position of difference may be strategically advantageous for forming alliances with other minoritized persons and groups. In line
with Spivak’s thinking, this article argues that M.I.A. intentionally resignifies
the site of marginalization as a space for critique and community building, and
that she has knowledge of the necessary complicities involved in such a move.
As an advocate of third world democracy, M.I.A. challenges young people
across the globe to question institutionalized forms of authority, especially
government leaders who attempt to censor the perspectives of ethnic minorities:
Your prime minister to your employer
Ego lovers need more power
Trendsetters make things better
Don’t sell out to be product pushers
The gyro casher and baby makers
Try something new cause it ain’t over
All poor people from all over
Lisa Weems · 125
Lottery’s got a rollover
You can be a follower but who’s your leader?
Break the cycle or it will kill ya
Break the cycle or it will kill ya
Cherokee Indian, Iraqi and Indians
Girls and me girls when they come to the fellas and
Japanese, Moroccan, Caribbean, African
That’s your life but who the fuck’s your president?
You don’t get my life cause I don’t have a side and I
Spread dat boy I’m a mile wide and I
Got brown skin, I’m a west Londoner
Educated, but a refugee, still. (“Bonus Track”)15
These lyrics raise several points related to power, race, and citizenship: first,
M.I.A. is speaking directly to other “poor people from all over” to “break the
cycle” of following leaders blindly; second, she notes that leadership, whether
political or economic, macro or micro, is an ego-driven need for power; third,
by listing particular global citizens, she privileges the racialized dynamics of
nations in the global South, and implicitly makes a connection for alliances
among them; fourth, in between and after the articulation of racialized citizenship, she positions herself and her girls as agentic subjects who “come to the
fellas” with their demands (“spread dat boy”) rather than the other way around;
and finally, she cites the fact that she is often misunderstood in the public and
press because her life experiences and musical genre defy easy categorization and
dominant stereotypes—for example, “You don’t get my life cause I don’t have
a side.” Specifically, she owns the fact that she is a brown west Londoner and
educated refugee. M.I.A. embodies the complicated subjectivity of transnational
life; she inhabits multiple and contradictory subject positions of privilege and
oppression and offers no apologies for exceeding classification.
However, M.I.A. certainly has her critics. Reviewers in the hipster music
press are suspicious of her self-representation in terms of both the form and
content of her lyrics. Jon Caramanica (2005) writes that “she is wise enough
to know that the common ground between pop and politics is sloganeering
or ‘slang tang,’ as Arulpragasam calls it.” In another review, Dan Rule (2005)
refers to her as
the first cover girl of London hip-hop’s new wave . . . [who] the mainstream
media started to take notice, not just for her music and looks, but for the fact
that she had something very different to say. The song, with its sugarcoated
pop melodies and bounce-laden rhythms, was brimming with lyrical allusions
to bombings, sniper attacks and military torture. . . . Who was this girl, and
was she for real? Or was this just another case of publicity-driven political
opportunism? Indeed, the voice on the song and the figure in the press shots
126 · Feminist Formations 26.1
seemed to belong to that of a hipster art school grad as much as it did a refugee
of war. (emphasis added)
This passage gestures toward the alternative representation of M.I.A.: that of
the Tamil Hottie. Like the representation of the rebel girl, M.I.A. is racially
constructed as an ethnic Other and a subject of colonization, but the “lyrical
allusions to bombings, sniper attacks and military torture” are attributed to
“publicity-driven political opportunism” rather than being a product of her
ideological or (geo)political perspectives. Caramanica (2005) goes so far as to
characterize M.I.A.’s style as refugee chic. Ironically then, her self-referential
identification as a refugee actually became depoliticized and domesticated by
inscribing her within discourses on style, commercialism, and girlhood. Calling her music “sugarcoated,” the emphasis on her “cover girl” looks, and the
trivialization of her performative style (such as the Super Bowl finger flip as
“irrelevant”) function to infantilize her sociocultural critique and its potential
for shaping discourses on cultural citizenship.
M.I.A. as a Tamil Hottie
Within the global alternative music scene, M.I.A.’s work has been described,
schizophrenically, as “carefree,” “tedious and thrilling” (Phares 2013), and
“fashionable” (Stevens 2008). The Glasgow-based Herald (MacLennan 2007)
referred to M.I.A. as the “Tamil Temptress”:
When she launched into the night’s first song, Bamboo Banga, the hollered
lyric of “MIA coming back with power, power!” was almost unnecessary: as
though the booming bass vibrations hadn’t already secured our submission.
Through the set, the sound system makes startingly obvious her wicked intent,
those low frequencies booming through the floor and shuddering the very
souls of those shaking their hips. (emphasis added)
These examples specifically illustrate how hipster media accounts during the
2004–08 period by and large frame M.I.A. as a Tamil Temptress or an ethnic
hottie, but these accounts also signify a larger effort to diminish her message
by depicting her as a girl rather than a woman.
This exoticization of women of color in Western popular culture is a phenomenon that is neither new nor unique to M.I.A. However, representations of
her highlight how this eroticization is not just a function of ethnic/racial and
gender discourse; in the current global context, South Asian women are read
through nationalist discourses on gender, race, and ethnicity that foreground
political ideologies of neoliberalism, globalization, and the commercialization
of “brownness” in a global economy (Silva 2010). For example, journalist Kai
Chai Yeow (2007, 70) of the Singapore Straits Times refers to M.I.A. as a “masala
maven,” writing that “M.I.A. throws the rule book at pop pundits with her own
spice blend mixing politics with a feral dance-floor groove” (emphasis added).
Lisa Weems · 127
Here, M.I.A. is linked metonymically with the imperial construction of
the function of the Indian subcontinent: namely, to incite and feed colonial
desires for an authentic native culture that is an exotic hybrid by “nature” rather
than by geopolitical and market-based domination. In the same article, Yeow
further comments that “[i]t’s a world assailed by stimuli overload, stalked by
terrorism and drawn along religious divides. . . . You can say she’s ransacking
the white-bread cultural canon for cultural re-appropriation. Still whether or
not her politics cuts any ice with you, the result is spectacular” (ibid.).” According to Yeow, questions of violence, whether the symbolic violence of cultural
(re)appropriation or the physical violence of terrorism, are abstract, if not
peripheral, to the centrality of the mass media and its “white-bread cultural
canon.” Within and against the assemblage of the mundane safety of such
a cultural canon, M.I.A. is cast as spectacular. She becomes the antagonist
referent in the narrative of the “world assailed by stimuli overload, stalked
by terrorism and drawn along religious divides” (ibid.). M.I.A. is, therefore, a
spectacle and a threat.
This racialized metaphor of M.I.A. is linked to larger discourses on the
“Asian threat” (Zakaria 2006) and “Asian invasion” (Ross 2006), or to what
Silva (2010, 167) refers to as the identification of “deviant brown,” which refers to
this potential for random bodies, whether they are the historically brown
bodies of Latin American migration, the brown bodies of Asia and the
Middle East, the globalized bodies of migratory labour, or the queered bodies
of alterity, to fall under the same disciplining and governmental practices of
the neoliberal state . . . it is a malleable term that refers to the ways in which
deviance and discipline manifest in national, regional, and global contexts.
Brown deviance encapsulates a post-9/11 space created through the acts and
meanings associated with the events of that day. Yet, it gathers and renegotiates
previous articulations of xenophobic and homophobic discourses on various
crises, such as immigration, terrorism, and a fear of the collapse of the heteroand homonormative nationalist economic policies.
Manifestations of this space of brown deviance cohere in constructions of
M.I.A. An example is the way in which her song “Paper Planes” was thought
to be an anthem for and of brown deviance and anarchy by condoning the
illegal underground economies of British immigrant life. Later, however, “Paper
Planes” took on new meaning as a theme song for the 2008 Oscar-winning
film Slumdog Millionaire. Molded through a veneer of neoliberalism and given
the stamp of approval by Indian musician and superstar A. R. Rahman, “Paper
Planes” marked the spirit of “India rising” (Zakaria 2006) and the global appeal
of populist democracy. “Paper Planes” became further resignified and completely
depoliticized as just a “party song” in the 2008 film Pineapple Express.
In an interview with Rule (2005), M.I.A. said that “a lot of people think
that if you want to be political you have to create some serious, righteous, full-on
128 · Feminist Formations 26.1
political manifesto type thing. . . . But I just don’t think that’s possible right
now, or not completely realistic anyway. I like to have a good time as well.” And
M.I.A.’s fans agree; in the words of Jeff Weiss (2013), M.I.A.’s fourth album is “a
dialectic disguised as a danceparty.”
Despite this attention (and some acclaim) from music critics, M.I.A. went
largely unnoticed by US popular culture until 2007. But within South Asian
American discursive communities, she has been a figure of public scrutiny since
her debut release in 2004. Like the comments in the larger Desi blogosphere
cited above (see note 11), most of this criticism foregrounded her political ideas,
accusations of Tamil terrorist propaganda, and sexual promiscuity.
A more favorable depiction of her appeared in a 2004 interview in Nirali.
As an e-zine for Desi young women, Nirali allowed M.I.A. to speak specifically
about her complicated subjectivity within the worldwide Desi population. In
the interview, she discussed her experiences with poverty, and the racism she
experienced from both whites and other South Asians while growing up in
England. Specifically, M.I.A. recounted how she was always aware of her status
as a Tamil refugee despite her success at the Central Saint Martins College of
Art and Design and the multiple accolades she received from critics in England.
Haunted by her cousins who were literally missing in action in Sri Lanka, she
decided to travel back to the country to, in her words, “see what was going on,”
noting that “I was just crying the whole time. I had a message from the Ministry
of Defense, a letter from the British embassy, and I was (still) getting harassed,
even though I was so obviously Westernized. There were women getting raped
in broad daylight and people were getting raped by the army soldiers. It was just
havoc” (qtd. in Mangla 2004). M.I.A. concluded by saying that she has a sense
of urgency in her music: “I think, coming from where I come from, you just
have to get on with it. That’s what life is. You just get on with it. You can’t be
indulgent enough to whine about stuff. It’s about being useful” (ibid.). For M.I.A.,
being useful is about speaking to multiple audiences and calling attention to
and inciting discussion about controversial issues.
What is interesting about the Nirali interview is that, although it appears
to be published in 2004, the blog responses begin in April 2007, three years
after the interview was posted online. In other words, the interview in Nirali
did not capture much reader attention during 2004–07 despite the fact that
M.I.A. had been very outspoken regarding violence and conflict in Sri Lanka
in both mainstream and subcultural (Desi) media. Furthermore, unlike Rolling
Stone’s and Sepia Mutiny’s earlier negative characterization of M.I.A., Nirali
suggests a more favorable representation of her as an attractive, sincere, and
politically savvy artist.
While is it impossible to determine the actual demographics of the blog
posters, it is fair to assume that most of the respondents are female, based on
the gendered dynamic of the comments and the screen names. Many of the
posts call M.I.A. a “cool chicky” and an “awesome artist.” Several comment
Lisa Weems · 129
on her looks, but the Nirali respondents tend to credit her for being “inspiring, “gorgeous,” and “sexy in the most respectable way”; for example, one post
characterizes her as “the guerilla goddess.” Like the figure of refugee chic, the
image of M.I.A. as the guerilla goddess is constituted through politicized and
militarized discourses on sexuality; however, the distinction between refugee
chic and guerilla goddess is the critical repositioning from public spectacle to
communal admiration.
As in the other Desi blogs, there is a thread in Nirali that questions the
authenticity of her claims of genocide of the Tamils in Sri Lanka. However,
in the words of Nirali blogger Thusitha, “I don’t care [whether] her parents are
LTTE supporters, her songs are amazing.” Another Nirali blogger, Muniba,
articulates the essence of M.I.A.’s work: “I love the debate M.I.A.’s story has
begun between ‘patriotic’ Sri Lankans and Tamils and those who sympathise
with them. We are all products of our past, and M.I.A’s politicized lyrics and
political consciousness is deep rooted in her childhood. Just like Paris Hilton’s
flakiness stems from being brought up in the lap of luxury with satin sheets and
a silver spoon in her hand.”
Muniba’s point is paramount: M.I.A. can only be a “celebrity” because of
the civil war and ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka. These are the material conditions
that produce her subjectivity as an Other within the contexts of Sri Lanka, the
UK and United States, and the elite hipster music scene. Her style and taste is
a hybrid amalgam of her biographical experiences and the ideological, political, and cultural influences that have shaped her life. That she is marked as a
minoritized body makes her particularly visible to media outlets who try to push
her into too-easy categories of either party politics (masala maven with a “dayglo sensibility”) or political parties (Tamil Tigers); in either category, however,
she must contend with images of her identity as “dangerous,” both politically
and sexually, because of her (perceived) ability to seduce an unknowing audience. The dominant trend within multiple genres of media focuses on M.I.A.’s
ethnic and national politics, while simultaneously sexualizing her persona as
provocative, seductive, and ultimately dangerous.
Part 3: Refuting Refugee Chic—M.I.A.’s “Digital Ruckus”
as Guerilla Pedagogy
Like other young women in the global music industry, M.I.A. is positioned as a
highly manufactured, yet disposable female adolescent pop star with a narcissistic disposition. An important distinction, however, is how depictions of her
as a Tamil hottie differ from the prevalent images of Taylor Swift, Leona Lewis,
Selena Gomez, and even Nicki Minaj. In the context of US/UK popular music,
certainly each of these young women is sexualized through the innocence/
naughtiness frames mentioned earlier; similarly, all of these artists are racialized,
and their music is racially coded, respectively, as white (pure but trivial), mixed
130 · Feminist Formations 26.1
(accessible to/for everyone), and black (hard and dirty).16 While there is ample
evidence that M.I.A. is often cast within these racialized tropes of gender and
sexuality, she also signifies a nationalistic Otherness; in other words, her body
and music also comes to represent a foreign racialized sexuality.
In contrast to the racialized images of US-born female pop singers, M.I.A.’s
racialized sexual subjectivity is taken to be more than trivial; her lyrics, music,
interviews, and biographical accounts are constructed as opportunistic, manipulative, and even deceitful, both personally and professionally. For example, it
is widely known that Gomez is dating young mega-millionaire Justin Bieber,
but neither the press nor the public question her motives for the relationship;
it is assumed to be the product of innocent romance instead of economic or
professional manipulation. M.I.A.’s romantic relationship with Benjamin Bronf­
man—also a millionaire with connections in the music industry—however, was
repeatedly questioned in the tabloids as an attempt for political, economic, or
professional gain.
Despite allegations of opportunism and media manipulation, M.I.A. has
never shied away from taking full advantage of, and even creating publicity
stunts to call attention to, controversial issues, especially those that foreground
tensions of civil conflict or cultural nationalism. For example, the 2012 music
video “Bad Girls” features M.I.A. with several hijabi women driving cars on two
wheels in the dessert. One interpretation of the video’s message may be that
it explicitly challenges the ban on women driving in certain Middle Eastern
countries, such as Saudi Arabia; or perhaps M.I.A.’s intention was simply to
show Middle Eastern young women as tough and talented bad girls. Regardless, the video might be construed as either offensive or insensitive to women
who cover all or some of their bodies for ethnic, cultural, or religious reasons.17
Similarly, her public appearance on the red carpet of the 2010 Scream
Awards caught the attention of Desi and Muslim young women around the
world.18 The outfit was a custom-made black, light cloth (perhaps silk) niqab that
covered her entire body, face, and head except for her eyes, which were heavily
glittered in green. Most of the garment was covered in images, including graphic
text and images associated with the “XOXO” track on her third album, M/A/Y/A
(described below). The niqab featured imagery that might be called graffiti if it
was on a wall as a form of both public and private communication through symbols. The niqab was a collage of “intimacy” iconography like a twenty-four-inch
image of a red heart, including the words “I love you,” as well as digital pictures,
text, and numbers that represent bloggers’ comments and the time stamps that
document them. M.I.A. takes many shocking risks with this niqab. The image
of “M/A/Y/A” in gold-brick pyramids figures prominently on the facial covering,
actively juxtaposing icons of commercialism and money with clothing associated with modesty and the protection of privacy. Furthermore, she “flips off”
the camera in this outfit that is highly coded as particularly religious and highly
politicized in Western popular and political discourse. Regardless of intention,
this performative display effectively incited public discussion.
Lisa Weems · 131
As Egyptian American Muslim Mona Z. (2010) notes, it may be possible to
appreciate this stylization even if M.I.A.’s purpose is unknown:
British singer/rapper M.I.A. showed up to the 2010 Scream Awards in the
niqab ensemble above yesterday and left most people scratching your head
[sic]. She didn’t comment on the significance of her attire but I, for one, think
she’s awesome for it. I’m going to take it as a commentary on niqab being
banned in many places. She later changed for a performance. She’s always
been outspoken and a bit controversial. What do you think? What was she
trying to say here?19
Here, Mona’s comments appear to refract the audience’s reception of M.I.A.
as a cultural producer. Both the message and the messenger are controversial.
By wearing a niqab to a US movie-awards ceremony, she first calls attention
to it as a beautiful garment worthy of red-carpet attention, rather than the
dominant media image of the niqab and burqa as garments that stand in
contrast to style and fashion. Second, as a non-Muslim, US-based celebrity,
wearing a niqab calls attention to the highly politicized associations of the
garment, as evident in the French ban on burqas in public. In effect, as Mona
Z. has illustrated by her rhetorical questions, M.I.A. has created a third world
girlhood counter-public through her performance and visual art. And yet,
she certainly used this celebrity photo opportunity for her own commercial
purposes; for example, it is no coincidence, perhaps, that the niqab is emblazoned with an image of herself from her album M/A/Y/A. In essence, M.I.A.
is working the borders of disidentification (Muñoz 1999) of the rebel girl and
refugee chic.20 Moreover, even as we ask the question “Is this girl for real?,”
many of us respond “Real to whom?”
M.I.A. indexes a type of exotic girlhood that both excites and frustrates
audiences due to their inability to easily categorize her musical style, as well as
her “real” identity. Indeed, she was keenly aware of the critiques against her, as
well as music critics’ failure to imagine, understand, or reconcile her multiple and
competing subject positions and ideological beliefs. Regardless, she expressed
a desire to be intelligible to a broad musical audience, at least one within the
United States, UK, and Australia. During the 2004–08 period, M.I.A. tried to
clarify the public’s perception of her political, ethnic, and gendered subjectivity, saying in her interview with Rule (2005): “Just because I’m a girl and I like
colour—I like all my senses working, I like clothing, I like shoes, whatever—it
doesn’t make me any less of a political person. I just sort of think it’s way more
realistic than having one, over-arching vision.”
Like other US hip-hop/rap artists, critics debate the authenticity or credibility of her style and message. She is subject to the impossible standard of representing the racialized Other—where Otherness is associated with poverty, lack
of education, and disinterest in politics. Unlike many popular female hip-hop
and rap artists, she has not only spoken out against the sexualization of women
of color in the music industry, but has also actively produced music videos that
132 · Feminist Formations 26.1
present alternative images. Furthermore, in her music and interviews, M.I.A.
explicitly speaks out against the sexual exploitation of third world girls and gives
special attention to issues of agency. For example, in her song “10 dollar,” she
tells the story of a Sri Lankan Lolita who seduces a US banker to get “her own
way” with a US visa (Weems 2009). Despite this, M.I.A. is often criticized for
her commercial appeal, critical reception, and marriage to an affluent musician.
The very standards of heteronormative “success”—for example, educational
achievement, financial mobility, cultural assimilation, civic participation, and
heterosexual marriage—are somehow met with suspicion rather than respect.
The reception of M.I.A. as an artist is further complicated because her success is intimately tied to the political markers of xenophobic brown militarism.
The public’s and media’s fascination with her potential ties to South Asian
terrorism, her commercial success, and her penchant for “negativity” and “shittalking” and reflects growing anxieties about the security and stability of US
white cultural forms, codes, and modes of citizenship. In this way, colonial and
patriarchal discourses operate to simultaneously Orientalize and domesticate
third world girls through the figure of the young female refugee within the tropes
of globalization, modernization, and sexuality. The implications of the limited
scripts available to M.I.A. and third world girlhood are twofold: the force of
her political and sociocultural critique is diffused; and the “refugee rebel” does
not get to be the “material girl.”
To combat this image both onstage and off, M.I.A. flirts and fights with
these limited scripts in the global youthscape by causing what she calls a “digital ruckus” (Noakes, 2010, 85). In an interview in British avant-garde design
magazine Dazed and Confused, M.I.A. suggested that “[computer] hackers are
the new revolutionaries” (ibid.). She declared that digital aesthetics and critical
media literacy should be a part of the contemporary agenda of art and politics.
M.I.A.’s guerilla pedagogy of digital ruckus is perhaps most evident in the
visual images and lyrics from M/A/Y/A. Of the sixteen songs on the digital
release, fourteen explicitly deal with issues of violence, regulation, and the
connections among corporate and governmental forms of surveillance. The
first track, “The Message,” is a brilliant commentary on how commercial and
state interests constitute our embodied subjectivity:
Headbones connected to the Headphones
Headphones connected to the iPhone
iPhone connected to the Internet
Connected to the Google
Connected to the Government.
Similar to the classic text Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman (1997) by Paul du Gay and colleagues, M.I.A.’s album takes on, and takes
apart, the cultural apparatus of a digital medium that literally changed how we
think, breathe, and experience the world as cultural citizens. Moreover, what
Lisa Weems · 133
she further provides is a subtle yet incisive critique of how race—read also
ethnic and religious minoritized identities—and gender further complicates
these dynamics. To this end, another song on the album, “XXXO,” serves to
disorient and disrupt commonsense tropes of gender and sexuality in discussions
of subjectivity and citizenship.
On the surface, “XXXO” is a simple pop song that features M.I.A. sweetly
crooning about hugs and kisses. She sings “I can’t be who you want me to be.”
However, it is important to contextualize the song within the frameworks of
brown deviance and refugee chic. The official video features M.I.A. in highly
sexualized commercial tropes of brown female bodies within the genre of music
videos, including images of her with teased and tossled curly hair and with
bare legs provocatively crawling across the screen.21 At times, her body literally
covers the screen, and in one shot it is superimposed in front of sky and land;
here, M.I.A.’s body provides the sexual landscape for erotic and exotic fantasy.
At other times, her lips become the primary signifier of physical openness in
the video. M.I.A.’s red cosmetic–stained lips are centered in a series of framings, alternately set within a computer “windows” design, then twisted between
gold arabesque swords and finally placed in a gold Victorian portraiture frame.
The onscreen lips literally oscillate between aesthetic frames that represent
particular sociocultural time(s), place(s), and space(s). Whether bound by the
various frames or not, the lips are often puckered to simulate a kiss or an oral
exchange with the viewer. Here, the brown woman is reduced to body parts
in the service of a nonvisible, yet omnipresent spectator and digital consumer.
The lyrics help to contextualize the visual imagery of the video into the
narrative of this song as an online exchange, such as a website, that traffics in
sexual encounters:
Upload a photo
See below
If you like what you see
You can download and store.
We can find ways to expand what you know
I can be your actress and you can be Tarantino.
In addition, a Bengal tiger accompanies M.I.A in the video, and both are seen
licking their lips. Here, the video, through a colonial patriarchal gaze, deploys
the doubled association between danger and desire condensed in the figure of
exotic (animal) sexuality.
“XXXO” satirizes the hypersexualized dynamics of political agency within
global capitalism and corporatized communication systems, especially for
refugee, poor, and/or third world girls. The video and lyrics provide further
insight into M.I.A.’s selection of the phrase “XXXO” on the niqab she wore at
the public appearance discussed above. The niqab represents a border garment,
in that it creates the boundaries of a literal “no-touch zone” covering in some
134 · Feminist Formations 26.1
Islamic traditions, or it serves to protect the female body from the outside gaze
and touch.22 Ironically, XXXO—hugs and kisses—imprinted on the garment
indicates an announcement of intimate touch, disrupting the symbolism of the
no-touch zone; furthermore, XXXO also signals a form of affection associated
with young or youthful women. It may have contributed to Mona Z.’s favorable
interpretation of M.I.A.’s appearance as a sort of guerilla communication of
friendly alliance through the digital circulation of the image.
My interpretation of both songs, “XXXO” and “Lovalot,” as satirical, as well
as crafty, is highly plausible given that the remainder of the album is dedicated
to issues of government regulation, media censorship, and racial/national profiling. For example, in “Lovalot,” M.I.A. says “They tell me this is a free country,
but it feels like a chicken factory”; in the chorus, she sings “I really love the law.
But I fight the ones that fight me.” Whether she is talking about US immigration laws or the politics of working within the music industry, M.I.A. contests
the formal and informal rules to which she is subject. It may be, however, that
music critics and scholars have yet to learn how third world girl(hoods) engage
issues of brown deviance through modes of their own making.
Conclusion
The first section of this article discussed how alternative patriarchies operate
to construct racialized discourses on girlhood. To this end, it argued that “third
world girls” occupy a particular discursive position in the academy and popular
culture given the colonial dynamics present within transnational discourses on
gender, globalization, and citizenship, and it illustrated how racialized girlhood
is theoretically marginalized (or presented as an abnormal Other) within the
fields of global youth cultures and girlhood studies.
The second section of the article uses M.I.A. as a case study to interrogate how representations of racialized girls are simultaneously politicized
and trivialized. Third world girls are constructed as sexually innocent and
highly seductive—either way, their citizenship is (hetero)sexually constituted.
Situating this research alongside other transnational feminist scholarship, it
demonstrated how racialization operates in tandem with nationalism(s) and discourses on citizenship. Thus, despite normative claims of cosmopolitanism and
border-crossings as an accepted part of a new global economy, M.I.A. illustrates
how certain transnational bodies and identities become the battlegrounds of
regulation, censorship, domestication, and exclusion.
As a highly visible media figure, she embodies a type of imperial scopophilia
of the third world girl. Her reception within US mass media illustrates her
position as a young subaltern female: her body repeats the discursive framing
of colonial desire, yet she is formally excluded from participation in both the
material and symbolic forms of cultural and political citizenship. M.I.A. is constituted by refugee chic as both a cultural producer and cultural production, but
Lisa Weems · 135
this position affords a contradictory celebration because she is excluded from
access to mainstream media production. For example, she was banned from the
United States even though she had a music contract in the country. From her
representation as an ethnic hottie and cheerleader for terrorism, discourses on
sexuality, nationalism, and race locate M.I.A. within the suspect space of brown
deviance; as such, her work and its reception offer pedagogical lessons at the
intersections of race, gender, and sexuality in transnational times and spaces.
To depict M.I.A. as a poster girl of transnational youth culture and racialized girlhood is certainly complicated and perhaps also problematic in many
ways. Her body, identity, and performances are politically stylized as refugee
chic—a characterization that is grossly offensive, dismissive, and commercial,
and also indicative of the position of the subaltern celebrity and third world
girls in the context of post-9/11 regimes of discipline and deviance that are
associated with neoliberal subjectivity and citizenship. Third world girls are
celebrated as the objects of nationalist agendas, such as cultural, educational,
and political reform, as well as objects of contestation and protection from
both domestic and foreign “abuses.” Yet, perhaps because of her celebrity status
through refugee chic, M.I.A. is able to articulate the contradictory discourses,
practices, and subject positions of third world girls. Through her music and
interviews, she calls attention to how such girls are subject to multiple layers
of domination, discrimination, and exclusion as transnational citizens in a
global youthscape. M.I.A., as an artist and a cultural production, illuminates
the price of contesting the boundaries of racialized, gendered, and nationalist
subjectivities. Doing so renders visible how the position of third world girls is an
always already-subjugated perspective that is dislocated outside of narratives of
modernity: she is both a celebrity and is displaced; she is neither a citizen nor
a cultural producer authorized to create her own rules of living.
Yet, M.I.A. fights back this power with power. Similar to bell hooks’s perspective of speaking from the margins, M.I.A. capitalizes on her visibility that
is made through her displacement. In a highly disciplined and technologized
media-scape, she takes every opportunity to flip the finger at the camera.
Lisa Weems is an associate professor of cultural studies and curriculum at Miami
University in Ohio. Her scholarship utilizes feminist transnational theories and queer
of color critique to examine issues of race, gender, and sexuality in nonformal education. She is currently writing a genealogy of girlhood, race, and nationalist politics
in North America. She can be reached at [email protected].
Notes
1. In 2009, M.I.A.’s song “Paper Planes” was nominated for Record of the Year, and
“Swagga Like Us” was nominated for Best Rap Song.
136 · Feminist Formations 26.1
2. LTTE stands for the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Elam, who have been directly
involved in the political and military struggle for ethnic, linguistic, and geographic
sovereignty since 1983. However, it is difficult to simply describe this network of soldiers
and allies, since part of what the Tamil Tigers were and are fighting for is more adequate
and accurate representations of the Tamil people in general. Since 1993, there has been
both massive artillery combat resulting in 100,000 fatalities, and an estimated 100,000
to 300,000 internally displaced persons (IDP) within a six-kilometer region that has
been claimed by the Sri Lanka government. Although the civil war was declared over in
May 2009, it is important to note that no media are allowed into this area to document
its daily events, nor are humanitarian aid efforts.
3. The term girlhood is used to characterize a particular cultural production that
is less a chronological age than a social category to normalize and regulate particular
female bodies. I explore the slippery and shifting nature of time and temporality in the
construction of girlhood in my current book project, which is tentatively titled Lolita
Rising: The Modern Girl and Anti-Colonial Struggles.
4. This term was first coined in a Village Voice article, then was heavily circulated
in the Desi blogosphere; see, for example, Fuad Ahmad’s “M.I.A. & Diplo” (2005).
5. Examples of oft-cited texts with limited analyses of gender include Cameron
McCarthy, Glenn Hudak, and Paula Saukko (1999), David Muggleton and Rupert
Weinzierl (2003), and Sunaina Maira and Elisabeth Soep (2005).
6. Elizabeth Marshall (2012) presents one of the few critical treatments in the framing of girlhood as a spectacle within popular and academic discourses that have great
commercial appeal. Her analyses of Nancy Drew and American Girl series critically
interrogate heterosexual white girls’ experiences as forms of popularly and commercially
manufactured narratives on American girlhood.
7. Michel Foucault (1984) describes a regime of truth as a series of assumptions or set
of rules that govern what can and cannot be stated or written about a particular topic.
8. For example, in 2008, award-winning Sinhalese Sri Lankan rapper DeLon created a video spoof of “Paper Planes,” which referred to M.I.A. as a “terrorist slut” and
showed very graphic degrading images of the artist. This video quickly went viral on
YouTube. However, it was eventually removed at the request of Universal Music Group,
M.I.A.’s parent label.
9. This distinction between the small population of Tamils who are actively
engaged with and/or support LTTE and the larger ethnic minority Tamil population
within Sri Lanka is one that M.I.A. takes great strides to emphasize in her televised
interview with respected US news host Tavis Smiley on January 30, 2009.
10. While this fact was published in the 2005 Washington Post article by Richard
Harrington, it was not incorporated into the popular/ist e-authority Wikipedia until
2008. See references 6–8 on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M.I.A._(rapper).
11. See Sepia Mutiny (Manish [2005], http://www.sepiamutiny.com/sepia/archives/​
001043.html) and Desi blogs (Sajit [2004], http://desiblogs.blogspot.com/2004/07/mayaarulpragasam-next-big-thing.html) for just a sampling of the type of debate among South
Asians across the globe about M.I.A.’s political beliefs.
12. The actual reason that M.I.A. was denied entry is unknown. However, this
did not stop a deluge of formal news stories and informal blogging on the matter from
every angle, including a highly circulated though now deleted post by M.I.A. on her
Lisa Weems · 137
Myspace.com page. For a good treatment of the multiple layers of the story, see Asians
in Media (2006).
13. A few additional comments are in order regarding the selection of theoretical
frame and citation practices. There is a strong foundation for theorizing race and gender
in popular culture through the historical tradition of British cultural studies as articulated by the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS). Specifically, Stuart Hall
(1996) has provided immensely provocative and useful analyses of blackness and youth
identities in an urban British context during the 1970s–’90s period. While my larger
scholarship is greatly influenced by the scholarship of identity, style, and subculture of
the CCCS, the specific focus of this article lends itself more to an articulation of the
discourses on race, gender, and citizenship that are informed by the material conditions
and discursive forces that criminalize South Asians in policy and practice (Cainkar and
Maira 2005). Specifically, the reemergence of US imperial economic, political, military,
and information initiatives of surveillance and control have coalesced around the anxieties of a global brown uprising—anxieties that combine xenophobic anxieties with
sexual titillation (Puar and Rai 2002). The analysis here aims to foreground the historical
specificity of M.I.A’s performativity and reception as a cultural production. Put simply,
the assemblages of terrorist slut, Tamil hottie, and refugee chic are specific to tropes of
immigration, displacement, and militarism in a post-9/11 global imaginary. Like other
refugees, M.I.A. operates within and across international networks of dislocation and
continuous displacement. As a postcolonial Tamil refugee she is hyperpoliticized and
degraded and framed as dangerously violent, and yet repackaged as a model (scapegoat)
of economic mobility and success. Furthermore, and not unrelated, the center of M.I.A.’s
activity, in terms of target audience, mode of production, and object of critique, has
been tethered to the United States.
14. For an image of the cover art of Arular, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arular;
see also the 2012 book of art created by the artist, titled M.I.A., under the name
Mathangi Maya Arulpragasam.
15. Bonus track on Arular (2005).
16. An interesting case is the superstar Rihanna, who is from Barbados, which, like
Sri Lanka, is a small, postcolonial island country. However, unlike M.I.A., Rihanna’s
nationality, political ideas, and “authenticity” claims have rarely, if ever, received any
attention within the global music landscape. She is typically referred to as an “African
American” who grew up in Barbados.
17. Indeed, one of the key insights of feminist postcolonial thought is the fundamental critique of “speaking for the Other.” As Arab feminist scholar Dana Olwan
notes, just because one is a brown woman, does not mean that one is speaking for all
brown women between and among lines of culture, citizenship, and geopolitical location
(personal communication, June 12, 2012).
18. See “Singer M.I.A.: Custom-Made Burqa (Niqab)” (2010b), the YouTube video of
M.I.A.’s niqab, which can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbjBhhmYCzc.
19. Mona Z. (MamaMona), “M.I.A. in niqab leaves people wondering,” October 31,
2010. This personal blog is currently restricted.
20. Working within and against psychoanalytic conversations on race, subjectivity,
and performance, José Esteban Muñoz (1999, 12) describes disidentification as a strategy
to subvert hegemonic (oppressive) constructions of identity and difference, writing
138 · Feminist Formations 26.1
that “[t]o disidentify is to read oneself and one’s own life narrative in a moment, object
or subject that is not culturally coded to ‘connect’ with the disidentifying subject.” He
elaborates the power of disidentification through the discussion of celebrity queers of
color who actively challenge, negate, or parody racist, sexist, and homophobic narratives
and images. Although M.I.A. is not a sexual minority, this article argues that many of
her performances can be characterized as disidentification, in that she actively takes
up (only to implode) stereotypical images and storylines regarding brown girl sexuality as refugee chic. Thus, M.I.A.’s work is consonant with Muñoz’s characterization of
disidentification as a practice of freedom as a means of “cultural, material and psychic
survival” (31).
21. The YouTube video “XXXO” (2010c) can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com​
/watch?v=sfbQ5mHWkOs.
22. Thank you to Özlem Sensoy for this insight and clarification.
References
Aapola, Sinikka, Marnina Gonick, and Anita Harris. 2005. Young Femininity: Girlhood,
Power and Social Change. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Ahmad, Fuad, 2005. “M.I.A. & Diplo.” Indian Electronica (e-zine), May 22 http://www
.indianelectronica.com/reviews/events/220505/mia-diplo.
Ahmed, Sara. 2000. Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. London:
Routledge.
Alexander, M. Jacqui. 2005. Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual
Politics, Memory, and the Sacred. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Anzaldúa, Gloria. (1987) 1999. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. 2nd ed. San
Francisco: Aunt Lute Books.
Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
———. 2006. Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger. Durham,
NC: Duke University Press.
Arulpragasam, Mathangi Maya (M.I.A.). 2005. Arular, compact disk. Santa Monica,
CA: Interscope Records.
———. 2007. Kala, compact disk. Santa Monica, CA: Interscope Records.
———. 2010a. M/A/Y/A, compact disk. London: XL Recordings / Santa Monica, CA:
Interscope Records.
———. 2010b. “Singer M.I.A.: Custom-Made Burqa (Niqab).” YouTube video, 0:40,
from the 2010 Scream Awards, October 19. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
DbjBhhmYCzc.
———. 2010c. “XXXO.” YouTube video, 3:06, August 11. http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=sfbQ5mHWkOs.
———. 2012. M.I.A. New York: Rizzoli.
Asians in Media (AIM). 2006. “Rapper MIA Denied Entry in USA.” E-zine, May 15.
http://www.asiansinmedia.org/news/article.php/music/1321.
Bettis, Pamela J., and Natalie G. Adams, eds. 2005. Geographies of Girlhood: Identities
In-between. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Lisa Weems · 139
Bhabha, Homi K. 1994. The Location of Culture. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
Bloustien, Gerri. 2003. Girl Making: A Cross-Cultural Ethnography on the Processes of
Growing up Female. New York: Berghahn Books.
Brown, Lyn Mikel. 2003. Girlfighting: Betrayal and Rejection among Girls. New York:
NYU Press.
Brown, Ruth Nicole. 2008. Black Girlhood Celebration: Toward a Hip-Hop Feminist
Pedagogy. New York: Peter Lang.
Brumberg, Joan Jacobs. 1997. The Body Project: An Intimate History of American Girls.
New York: Random House.
Cainkar, Louise, and Sunaina Maira. 2005. “Targeting Arab/Muslim/South Asian
Americans: Criminalization and Cultural Citizenship.” Amerasia 31 (3): 1–27.
Caramanica, Jon. 2005. “Refugee Chic: The New Album from the Sri Lankan Sensation
M.I.A.” Slate, March 31. http://www.slate.com/id/2115958/.
Carby, Hazel V. 2009. “Becoming Modern Racialized Subjects: Detours through Our
Pasts to Produce Ourselves Anew.” Cultural Studies 23 (4): 624–57.
Christgau, Robert. 2007. “The Top 50 Albums of 2007.” Rolling Stone, December 1.
Dimitriadis, Greg, and Cameron McCarthy. 2001. Reading and Teaching the Postcolonial:
From Baldwin to Basquiat and Beyond. New York: Teachers College Press.
Dolby, Nadine. 2001. Constructing Race: Youth, Identity, and Popular Culture in South
Africa. Albany: SUNY Press.
———, and Fazal Rizvi, eds. 2008. Youth Moves: Identities and Education in Global
Perspective. New York: Routledge.
Drake, Jennifer. 2002. “The Mis/Education of Righteous Babes: Popular Culture and
Third-Wave Feminism.” In Growing Up Postmodern: Neoliberalism and the War
on the Young, edited by Ronald Strickland, 181–203. Lanham, MD: Rowman &
Littlefield Publishers.
Du Gay, Paul, Stuart Hall, Linda Janes, Hugh Mackay, and Keith Negus. 1997. Doing
Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman. London: The Open University.
Foucault, Michel. 1984. “Truth and Power.” In The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul
Rabinow, 51–75. New York: Pantheon Books.
———. 1990. The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction. Translated by Robert
Hurley. New York: Vintage Books.
Gopinath, Gayatri. 2005. Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public
Cultures. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Grewal, Inderpal. 2005. Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
———, and Caren Kaplan. 2000. “Postcolonial Studies and Transnational Feminist
Practices.” http://english.chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert/v5i1/grewal.htm.
Hall, Stuart. 1996. “When Was ‘the Post-Colonial’? Thinking at the Limit.” In The
Post-Colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons, edited by Iain Chambers
and Lidia Curti, 242–60. Abingdon, UK: Routledge.
Handa, Amita. 2003. Of Silk Saris and Mini-Skirts: South Asian Girls Walk the Tightrope
of Culture. Toronto: Women’s Press.
Harrington, Richard. 2005. “M.I.A., No Loss for Words.” Washington Post, September 16. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/15/AR​
2005091500697.html.
140 · Feminist Formations 26.1
Henry, Annette. 2006. “ ‘There’s salt-water in our blood’: The ‘Middle Passage’ Epistemology of Two Black Mothers Regarding the Spiritual Education of Their Daughters.”
International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 19 (3): 329–45.
Hernández, Daisy and Bushra Rehman (eds.). 2002. Colonize this!: Young women of color
on today’s feminism. New York: Seal.
Hubler, Annette E. 2002. “Female Adolescence and Its Discontents.” In Growing Up
Postmodern: Neoliberalism and the War on the Young, edited by Ronald Strickland,
169–80. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
Jayasena, Nalin. 2010. “Where Have All the Tamils Gone? Ethnicity and the Body in
the Films of Prasanna Vithange.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 27 (2): 121–32.
Jiwani, Yasmin, Candis Steenbergen, and Claudia Mitchell, eds. 2005. Girlhood:
Redefining the Limits. Montreal: Black Rose Books.
Kearney, Mary Celeste. 2006. Girls Make Media. New York: Routledge.
Kellman, Andy. n.d. “M.I.A. Biography.” AllMusic. http://www.allmusic.com/artist
/p674864/biography.
Lamb, Sharon, and Lyn Mikel Brown. 2007. Packaging Girlhood: Rescuing Our Daughters
from Marketers’ Schemes. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin.
Lowe, Lisa. 2006. “The Intimacy of Four Continents.” In Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, edited by Ann Laura Stoler, 191–212.
Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Lukose, Ritty. 2005. “Consuming Globalization: Gender and Youth in Kerala, India.”
Journal of Social History 38 (4): 915–35.
MacLennan, Michael. 2007. “MIA, Arches, Glasgow MIA, Arches, Glasgow 5/5.” Herald
(Glasgow), December 14. http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2–23673528.html.
Maira, Sunaina. 2002. Desis in the House: Indian American Youth Culture in New York
City. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
———, and Elisabeth Soep, eds. 2005. Youthscapes: The Popular, the National, the Global.
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Mangla, Ismat. 2004. “Not-So Missing in Action.” Nirali (e-zine), October 4. http://
niralimagazine.com/2004/10/not-so-missing-in-action/.
Manish. 2005. “M.I.A.: Step Up to Blow Up.” Sepia Mutiny (blog), February 8. http://
www.sepiamutiny.com/sepia/archives/001043.html.
Marshall, Elizabeth. 2012. “Global Girls and Strangers: Marketing Transnational Girlhood through the Nancy Drew Series.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly
37 (2): 210–27.
McCarthy, Cameron, Glenn Hudak, and Paula Saukko, eds. 1999. Sound Identities:
Popular Music and the Cultural Politics of Education. New York: Peter Lang.
McRobbie, Angela, 2000. Feminism and Youth Culture. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge.
Minh-ha, Trinh T. 1989. Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Mitchell, Claudia, and Jacqueline Reid-Walsh, eds. 2005. Seven Going on Seventeen:
Tween Studies in the Culture of Girlhood. New York: Peter Lang.
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 2003. Feminism without Borders: Decolonizing Theory,
Practicing Solidarity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Moody, Nekesa Mumbi. 2007. “I’m a Tiger, I’m a Tiger: Rapper M.I.A. or Maya Arulpragasam Creates Musical Revolution in Politics. Prevented from Entering America,
Lisa Weems · 141
She Travels the World for CD with an International Appeal.” Sunday Times Online
(Sri Lanka), August 26. http://sundaytimes.lk/070826/International/i517.html.
Muggleton, David, and Rupert Weinzierl. 2003. The Post-Subcultures Reader. Oxford:
Berg.
Muñoz, José Esteban. 1999. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of
Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Nayak, Anoop. 2006. Race, Place and Globalization: Youth Cultures in a Changing World.
London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Noakes, Tim (July 2010). “Shock to the System”. Dazed & Confused (87): 80–89.
Ong, Aiwa. 2006. Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty.
Durham NC: Duke University Press.
Phares, Heather. 2013. “M.I.A.: Matangi” (review). AllMusic. http://www.allmusic.com​
/album/matangi-mw0002413475.
Puar, Jasbir K., and Amit Rai. 2002. “Monster, Terrorist, Fag: The War on Terrorism
and the Production of Docile Patriots.” Social Text 20 (3): 117–48.
Ross, Catriona. 2006. “Prolonged Symptoms of Cultural Anxiety: The Persistence
of Narratives of Asian Invasion within Multicultural Australia.” Journal of the
Association for the Study of Australian Literature 5: 86–99.
Rule, Dan. 2005. “Earning Her Stripes.” The Age, April 24. http://www.theage.com.au
/news/Music/Earning-her-stripes/2005/04/21/1114028489519.html.
Said, Edward. 1987. “The Imperial Spectacle.” Grand Street 6 (2): 82–104.
Sajit. 2004. “Maya Arulpragasam: The Next Big Thing?” Desiblog, July 11. http://
desiblogs.blogspot.com/2004/07/maya-arulpragasam-next-big-thing.html.
Silva, Kumari. 2010. “Brown: From Identity to Identification.” Cultural Studies 24 (2):
167–82.
Smiley, Tavis. 2009. “Hip-Hop Artist M.I.A.” (interview). PBS, January 28. http://www
.pbs.org/wnet/tavissmiley/interviews/hip-hop-artist-m-i-a/.
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1993. Outside in the Teaching Machine. New York:
Routledge.
———. 1999. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Stevens, Darcie. 2008. “She’s a Roadrunner! Shut Up Wants to Be Like Maya Arulpragasam When She Grows Up.” Austin Chronicle, May 2. http://www.austinchronicle
.com/blogs/music/2008-05-02/619183/.
Stoler, Ann Laura, ed. 2006. “Intimidations of Empire: Predicaments of the Tactile and
Unseen.” In Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History,
1–22. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Touré. 2009. “M.I.A. Goes to War” (interview). Daily Beast, January 30. http://www
.thedailybeast.com/articles/2009/01/30/mia-goes-to-war.html.
Vena, Jocelyn. 2012. “Madonna Thinks M.I.A. Super Bowl Finger-Flip Was ‘Out of
Place.’ ” MTV, February 10. http://www.mtv.com.news/articles/1678934/madonnamia-super-bowl-middle-finger.
Weems, Lisa. 2009. “M.I.A. in the Global Youthscape: Rethinking Girls’ Resistance
and Agency in Postcolonial Contexts.” Journal of Girlhood Studies 2 (2): 55–75.
Weiss, Jeff. 2013. “Eminem, M.I.A. Explore What’s Left to Rebel Against in New
Albums.” Daily Freeman November 5. http://www.dailyfreeman.com/arts-and
142 · Feminist Formations 26.1
-entertainment/20131105/eminem-mia-explore-whats-left-to-rebel-against-in-new
-albums.
Yeow, Kai Chai. 2007. “Masala Maven.” Straits Times (Singapore), September 14, 70.
Zakaria, Fareed. 2006. “India Rising.” Newsweek, March 6.