@article {2794, title = {Digital Islamophobia: The Swedish woman as a figure of pure and dangerous whiteness}, journal = {New Media \& Society}, year = {2017}, abstract = {This article addresses the digital culture of Islamophobic bloggers, focusing on the online circulation of a forensic photograph of a Swedish woman who was assaulted. The analysis shows how through appropriating this image, the bloggers created a unifying, imagined whiteness in the transnational Islamophobic network. The empirical analysis clarifies how this one image migrated and transformed in the blogosphere and legitimated the recurrent discursive trope of {\textquotedblleft}Muslim rape.{\textquotedblright} This image became a subcultural {\textquotedblleft}memory freeze frame{\textquotedblright} crystallizing the contemporary Islamophobic ideologies articulated in connection to race, ethnicity, nation, gender, and sexuality. The viral circulation of this image constructed a cultural, gendered, and racial Swedish whiteness, imagined to have become victimized by both Islam and liberal feminism, and therefore requiring global protection.}, url = {https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1461444816642169}, author = {Horsti, Karina} }