Western democracies have long expressed a fascination with and disdain for the designated minority women in their midst. The category ‘minority women’ renders an array of non-white women simultaneously hyper-visible in media yet silenced within important public-policy debates that shape their lives. For celebrities, hyper-visibility is a much-sought after commodity that catalyses fame and fortune, yet for Black, immigrant, Muslim, Latina, other women of colour and minority women, hyper-visibility fosters hyper-surveillance and discrimination. Across national contexts, which are shaped by intersecting power relations of racism, sexism, class exploitation and homophobia, minority women are seen but not heard. Instead a range of social actors speak both about and for minority women. This practice is not questioned. In fact such actors are seen as being better qualified to speak for minority women than the women themselves.

For those of us who are categorised as minority women, the public scrutiny that accompanies our hyper-visibility is rarely good news. We often become scapegoats for our respective societies’ social problems as well as touchstones for fears and insecurities concerning national identity. As mothers, students, daughters and workers, minority women constitute the designated face of what's wrong with our respective societies. For example, women of colour in the US have been accused of an array of behaviours that ostensibly threaten the American way of life. Historically enduring, controlling images stigmatise Black women as being hyper-sexual, less intelligent, and morally lax, values that they purportedly pass on to their children. Latinas, especially undocumented immigrants, are rapidly joining Black women as a new threat. Latinas are accused of having too many babies, swelling the numbers of undeserving people who consume more than their fair share of American educational, health and family services. Muslim women who wear the hijab find themselves facing the threat of being physically attacked by perfect strangers. Unaware of or ignoring the heterogeneity among Muslim women, many Americans believe that Islam itself threatens national security. Collectively, these narratives effectively position women of colour as either incapable of assimilation (Black women), or as unwilling to assimilate (Latinas who do not speak English), or as harbingers of religious ideology that prevents them from assimilating. Such narratives may change in tandem with shifts in social and economic conditions, yet their role in upholding the economic, political and social subordination of women of colour remains constant.