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Abstract: The law is replete with dominant narratives endorsed by its letter and amplified by connected and conspiring levers of power. This Article centers the discursive power of law, and specifically, the War on Terror’s grand narrative of “masculine Arab and Muslim terrorism.” By gendering terror threat, this dominant wartime narrative marks Arab and Muslim men and boys as a terrorist bloc that justifies pre-crime indictment, collective punishment, and hegemony.
By focusing on law and its discursive echoes that brands Arab and Muslim men as presumptive terrorists, this Article: (1) Theorizes the gendered dimensions of Arab and Muslim threat, building upon formative frameworks of othering and racialization within and beyond the legal literature, (2) Develops the concept of masculine terror indictment assigned collectively to Arab and Muslim men and boys, (3) Interrogates War on Terror law as the forceful conduit of the dominant metanarrative of masculine Arab and Muslim terrorism, which brands anybody fitting that profile as a justifiable target of extrajudicial violence; and (4) Centers the counter-stories of men in Gaza, who repurposed new media to challenge the War on Terror narrative of masculine terrorism that erases their individual identities from legal, scholarly and popular view.
As an emanation of law itself, legal scholarship contributes to the power struggle of whose stories are told and untold, highlighting the urgency of this Article and the unheard voices within it. Through its criticism of dominant law and lore, this Article challenges the gendered War on Terror narrative. By introducing the stories from men in Gaza, it contributes the first counter-narratives of this kind to legal scholarship and writes the humanity of Arab and Muslim men into its pages. While legal scholars have examined the distinct plight of Arab and Muslim women, this Article asks: “What about the men?” and stands as the first to reconstruct their humanity through legal counter-storytelling and intimate profiles of the men themselves.
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