“I want people to know that Muslim women who are LGBTQ exist and that we can be religious too at the same time”
Nikohl Boosheri as Adena in The Bold Type. Photo: Courtesy of Freeform/ABC The Bold Type, Freeform’s new show about three young women making their way at a Cosmopolitan-esque magazine called Scarlet, features a landmark moment in pop-culture representation: a queer Muslim woman who wears a hijab.
While men from Muslim backgrounds like Kumail Nanjiani, Aziz Ansari and Hasan Minhaj are gaining ground onscreen , Muslim women are largely excluded from the picture; when they do appear onscreen, they’re often portrayed, as Aditi Natasha Kini puts it in Jezebel, “as caricatures, stereotypes, inconsequential, and/or the butts of a joke.” Adena is none of these things.
It was really cool how they were trying to convince her the magazine is feminist. I feel like usually you’re trying to tease apart whether the Muslim character even identifies herself as a feminist, whereas in this the magazine needed to prove they were feminist enough for her, which I really loved. And the chemistry between her and Kat was incredible.
I thought her speech about why she wears the hijab was interesting — I didn’t personally identify with it but I felt it was an answer that a real queer Muslim woman could likely give. I think my personal reasoning has changed a lot over the years. She kind of was like, “I do it to throw people off,” which is legit. I feel like for me, I started wearing hijab when I was 9 and it was very much because I was like, This is something that’s required by my faith.
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