Sexual Projects, Sexual Formations, and the Muslim Phantasm: Unpacking the Global Gender Backlash

This essay argues that Muslim sexuality provides a crucial foundation for a long-overdue postcolonial reckoning in sociology—one made urgent by the intensifying global backlash against feminist values. The global backlash mobilizes reactionary ideologies to distort gender into a terrifying phantasm that mobilizes contradictory yet effective meanings and feelings. To unpack the forces driving this phantasm, we turn to a parallel historical construct—the Muslim phantasm—which is similarly entangled with gender anxieties and offers a critical analytical resource. To this end, we propose two complementary frameworks: sexual projects and sexual formations. These frameworks are ideally suited for deconstructing these phantasms, mapping the affective and discursive landscapes that sustain them, identifying the actors who deploy them, and examining how others navigate their consequences. Applying these frameworks enables scholars to trace connections between local and global sexual formations, analyze Muslim resistance to reductionist representations, and understand how their sexual projects reshape broader sexual landscapes.