"A Modest Proposal" Presentation

I'll be presenting a modest proposal by heather Mallick.

So in this text, Malik is attempting to incite fear in her readers.

She's using harmful comparisons,

extreme examples and a lot of extreme language to get the results she wants.

Um But she fails to provide proof of

However,

Malik fails to provide proof of Ahmed's beliefs that she is stating as facts.

She doesn't have quotes to back

up a lot of what she is saying. She actually quotes Ahmed once.

Um and she's also making a lot of wide sweeping generalizations.

A lot of her text actually boils down to that. It's muslim people believe this.

Canadian people believe this

and that's how she's making a lot of her claims about what Ahmed believes.

She's assuming that every muslim person has the same beliefs.

So Malek uses a lot of similes in her text to try to get her point across.

Um She makes a lot of comparison.

She often compares women to birds and also two corpses risen from the dead.

So in one excerpt, she says,

woman in the cubs look like scary black

crows as they flutter along a Canadian sidewalk.

She also says,

But they might as well be big red fire trucks.

When you consider the reactions of other Canadians.

We who generally dress like drab sparrows.

So she's trying to paint women in niqabs as scary and something we should be afraid,

afraid of.

But then when she describes Canadians, oh, they're just drab sparrows,

Their unassuming.

They're not menacing.

So you can see the prejudice in her words

in the way that she describes different people.

And then she also quotes travel writer Jonathan Raban twice. So

so he says

they make the woman look like hooded falcons and they

they make the women look like hooded falcons.

They struck me not as symbols of Islamic female modesty,

so much as objects of downright menace.

He also said

the black silk sheaths that in case the woman

as if they were corpses risen in their shrouds.

So here she is trying to prove

that

someone else feels the same way she does about women in the carbs. But I would

I would question

not whether or not someone else agrees with you, but

why are you fearful of these people?

Why are you fearful of people who are different than you?

That is more the question I would be asking.

And the other issue with these statements

is

they are making the women in the niqabs

responsible for the prejudiced reactions of others.

Why is it the responsibility of these women

to dress differently in order to not be

in order to not cause issue with you?

Should it not be on the responsibility of the person with the prejudice reaction

to look at themselves and change the way that they look at the world.

Mhm.

Yeah.

So Malik also uses

anna colono sis.

Um So these are questions that are prompting the reader to consider

their own opinion on a subject to think deeper about it.

So

at the end of

a section at the beginning of the text, she says, what is to be done referring to

um

referring to ahmed situation,

not wanting to pull down her niqab during her class.

And then she also says,

what ahmed calls racism is what I call feminism is ahmed as she says,

protecting her modesty if so from what.

And then later she says,

am I alone in noticing that sexual segregation ends in tears and sometimes blood?

So,

with the second quote,

this is something she does several times for the text

is she uses feminism as a shield for prejudice.

She said,

she says that she's trying to defend these women's

rights by taking away their choice of attire.

But I would say that

feminism is not attempting to make other women make the same choices you but

rather giving equal opportunity to every person

to make those choices for themselves.

And here we also have

other examples of

straw man arguments that are being used. So

she says,

am I alone in noticing that sexual segregation ends in tears and sometimes

blood nowhere does she provide a quote

saying that Ahmed wanted sexual segregation?

But somehow that is the point she was reviewed.

But somehow that is the point she was re button So she's making

eight point

stating that it is ahmed's view and then providing

proof to the opposite,

but really she's disproving her own point.

And again,

the question I would be asking here is why is Malik

so vehemently in opposition to a different cultural expression of femininity.

That's really what this is.

Why is

a Canadian expression, whatever

that may be, why is a Canadian expression of femininity.

Okay, one that Malik is comfortable with,

but when the expression is different than when she is normal,

it must be abolished or it must not be around her.

And my response to that would be that it's prejudice.

She's prejudiced and not doing the internal work on herself to

realize that it's not other people's responsibility to make the change.

So the tone of this text is made up of a lot

of informal language and a lot of inflammatory language and statements.

So

the author makes a lot of word choices which really shaped the tone of the text.

So she uses words like cruelty and perversion when referring to what ahmed wants

and

when she's comparing

women who wear niqabs to women who self harm, she refers to them as anguished.

She has this complex of wanting to save these women even though they never asked

to be saved.

And this is something she does several times. So that the text is

talking down to these women as if

they are in need of

white women to save them from

their cultures.

She also uses the word threatening when referring to women who wearing the cubs.

The other thing she does is use

slang fragments and sarcasm.

So she uses the word sluttish when talking about how muslim women might see her?

And she also says Canadian men aren't easily inflamed by a mouth or a nose.

Even the most craftsmen will remain reasonably polite

when confronted by a female classmate with face,

hair, ankles, the whole package.

So she uses sarcasm here and an informal writing style.

She's trying to get on the same level as the reader, makes them feel implicated

in the story.

And she's also using sarcasm to kind of

discredit what she is stating is Ahmed's belief

that if she does not wear a Niqab, she will be harassed, essentially.

That is what Malik is saying is Ahmed's belief.

And so she's trying to ridicule that by saying, well,

it's just a knows it's just a mouth, it's just face, it's just hair as if

women get assaulted because they show those things

and not because someone is assaulting them.

So, in an attempt to support her arguments, she uses

uh data from the World Economic Forum and she also references a BBC report,

But neither one of these prove that Ahmed

has experienced harassment in her home country,

which is

the point she was trying to make is that

ahmed wears this Niqab because she has experienced harassment,

but she fails to prove that

she also uses quotations.

So, as I referenced earlier, she quotes Jonathan Raban and

it is a quotation of him agreeing that Niqabs caused him to feel fearful.

However, the real question there is

well why are they fearful

just because she is proving that someone else is scared. Doesn't mean that

that reaction is not a prejudiced one.

And as I said earlier, she only quotes Ahmad once

and

she

and as I said earlier, she continuously claims to know Ahmed's beliefs,

but she only quotes her once

and she fails to provide any proof of

her beliefs other than that.

She also uses a lot of examples, a lot of exaggerated examples

um

such as this one when she's stating that Ahmed wants sexual segregation,

she's listing several,

she's stating several situations where segregation

of sex would be bad.

However,

again,

she's not actually proving her point because she's

not provided proof that that is Ahmed's belief.

Mhm.

You can also see in this example that she

is attempting to scare the reader by giving increased

by giving increasingly

intense examples.

So she goes book groups, single sex schools, male, top heavy workplaces,

police forces, armed forces, girl gangs,

So she is increasingly getting more scary and more violent with

her examples to scare the reader into agreeing with her.

So in conclusion, you can see that her word choices demonstrate

that she is

prejudiced

against muslim women.

Um she's describing Canadian people, what she calls

Canadian people.

I'm assuming she's referring to white people as kind and welcoming.

And then she's

referring to women who wear niqabs as threatening

and scary and she's comparing them to these

Scary Animals and two Corpses.

And she constantly uses feminism as a shield

while going against what feminism stands for.

She dismisses women who have been assaulted or

perhaps in Canada by saying that Canadian men,

you know, don't get caught up in seeing a nose or an ankle or you know, hair,

things like that.

But the reality is

what a person is wearing has nothing to do with

whether or not they suffer an assault.

That is the person assaulting, who makes that decision.

So to put the onus on the women to

cover themselves up

or not because of what men are around them is completely wrong.

And throughout the text there's an underlying

assumption that the way that Malik does things

is right

and the way that ahmed does things or muslim women do things is wrong. And

if I had my mouth in front of me I would ask her why do you think that?

Because I would say it's cultural bias and it's

the only reason that she believes that certain things are right or wrong is

because that's what she's been taught and not everyone is taught the same thing

"A Modest Proposal" Presentation

Chapters

Audio TranscriptAuto-generated