The Women of Islam: The role of journalistic photography in the (re)production of character-type

Abstract

With the idea, as a starting point, that some images incite one to acts of contemplation, mediated by ambivalent meanings and sensations, this study proposes an interpretation of the photographs of Islamic women in the Brazilian press. Their condition as a fi gure present in the media is a concern, above all recurring in the contemporariness, in the places usually occupied by political content involving the confl icts between the East and West, and therefore on the whole and in the economy of the illustrative visual information of the fi rst page news or the World section. Thus, the Muslim woman’s image in several articles metaphorically appears as a source of evocation of a culture characterized by restrictions of behavior and values that seem strange to us, apparently personifi ed in the solitary and anonymous fi gure or in the ordered crowd of women covered by the black veil of furtive glances.