Nike unveils Muslim women athletes

We analyze the Nike Pro Hijab Spring 2018 marketing campaign and how it commodifies a product intended for Muslim women consumers to make it palatable to white audiences. Although Muslim designers have been selling sports hijabs for over a decade, the Nike marketing team positions the Nike Pro Hijab as cutting-edge and innovative by targeting professional athletes. The Nike Pro Hijab advertisements and websites discursively reconstruct Muslim women’s gender to mark the Muslim athletic body as secular and therefore safe. To this end, the Nike Pro Hijab marketing campaign circulates rhetorics of blackness to recast the Muslim woman body as athletic, and thus able to participate in national identity performance. Through our analysis, we establish how the Nike Pro Hijab marketing campaign deploys whiteness to render Muslim bodies and texts safe, palatable, and “moderate” in an increasingly anti-Muslim landscape in the United States.