Memoirs by Political Muslim Women in the Post-9/11 Settler Colonial United States and Australia

This thesis examines how four political Muslim women—Ilhan Omar, Huma Abedin, Mehreen Faruqi, and Anne Aly—employ memoir to confront racial, religious, and gendered narratives that cast them outside the bounds of national belonging. It traces the processes of othering that mark them as perpetual outsiders and the creation of third spaces where belonging is both contested and reimagined. It further interrogates how their life narratives engage the politics of (un)veiling in the post-9/11 settler colonial United States and Australia, thereby positioning memoir as a site through which to resist and reconfigure the terms of political and cultural inclusion.