"As-Salaam-Alaikum, Bitches!": The Biopolitics of Secularism, Neoliberal Multiculturalism, and The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City

Abstract: Based on an analysis of The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City ( RHOSLC ), we examine the role that secularism, as a biopolitical discourse, plays in rationalizing and entrenching racial capitalism through the cultural technology of reality television. We illuminate how secularism is interwoven in contemporary discourses of race, gender, sexuality, and class (e.g., post-race, postfeminism, sexual liberation, and spiritual neoliberalism), functioning as a key feature of neoliberal multiculturalism. Specific attention is paid to the complex, contradictory relational racialization of religions on the series, particularly between Mormonism and Islam, as well as to the desecularization of the housewives of color, often through reference to gender and sexual norms. Such representational strategies construct diversity as fundamental to neoliberalism while masking the maintenance of white dominance. In illustrating how contemporary processes of racialization are intrinsically intertwined with (de)secularization on the series, we encourage broader and more sustained attention to religion among critical scholars.