Abstract
Author Malek Alloula, in The Colonial Harem, writes about photographers traveling with early twentieth century French colonial armies to Algeria. The photographers were in search of women as they imagined them to be – sexually available and living in harems. What they found instead were women inaccessible to their photographic gaze. Undeterred, these photographers hired local women, and staged elaborate sets in studios. The invented images were then produced as picture postcards to send back home to France. Alloula describes the images as the “Frenchman’s phantasm of the Oriental female,” writing: “It is a mirror trick that presents itself as a pure reflection…it rests and operates upon a fake equivalency – namely that illusion equals reality. It literally takes its desires for realities.” This paper takes up this point, focusing on AI generated images of Muslim women as the modern embodiment of the colonial postcard. I explore how AI image tools have a tendency to default to reductive tropes reflecting the Western gaze, particularly when generating images of Muslim women. For example, the Muslim Girl website reports issues with Lensa, an AI application that produces a person’s avatars based on a photo they upload. Muslim women found that even after uploading photos with hijab (head covering), the app generated hypersexualized avatars, many of which were without hijab. I look at the role AI plays in furthering the objectification and fetishization of Muslim women, and how imagined forms of AI aesthetics can have profound consequences of gendered Islamophobia.
Presenters
Sabah UddinAssistant Professor, Language, Literature, and Cultural Studies, Bowie State University, Maryland, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Muslim Woman; AI; Islamophobia
