American Virtual Colonialism and the Islamophobia Politics: Muslim/Iranian Women’s “Hijab” at “YouTube”

Virtual Colonialism (Ameli, 2011) is reflecting a new trend of colonialismin the virtual space parallel to the physical space. According to Ameli(2007), withthe “Dual Spacization” of life,the imperial powers like the United States of Americatake the advantage of the synchronization and translocality of the virtual space toexpand their realm of imperial power through the “attraction” and “persuasion”strategies with the least costs and losses.The present paper analyzes the user-based website “YouTube” exploiting thecritical discourse analysis method to examine the strategies through which it representsthe Muslim/Iranian women whose identity arehighlighted by Hijab. Theresults indicate that the Americanization by “YouTube” is implemented inauser-based in a pluralist context. This is while the American discourse includingthe liberal democracy values and its politics ofIslamophobic and Iranophobicimages of Muslims are prevalent in the “YouTube”.The paper depicts how the representation of Muslim woman and her hijab isdemonized through the “YouTube” result videos.Furthermore, it shows thisdemonization is duplicated in the case of the Iranian Muslim women particularlybecause of the formal American politics of Iranophobia and regime change in Iran.Taking into account the high rank of “YouTube” as the third globally-viewed Americanwebsite and its discursive advantage in the virtual space, the significance of thepresent study can be considerable.