“It’s About Being Heard:” “We Are Lady Parts” and Where We Are on Muslim Representation
The UK Channel 4 mini-series takes you on a journey through the chaotic highs and lows of female friendship, the joys of self-discovery on-stage, and the normalcy of Muslims just living their lives — at a time when Muslims on-screen are shown as anything but
She’s a shy, anxious, microbiology Ph.D. student trying not to be the only single woman in her friend group. Her day-to-day goal is just to finish her lab work on time, but she also has a hidden talent for music that few get to see — that is until she becomes the lead guitarist of an all-woman punk band called Lady Parts who are hoping to take their music to the next level.
It sounds like a standard-enough plot for a musical comedy series, but “We Are Lady Parts” manages to stand out from the crowd with witty and fast-paced dialogue, colorful daydream sequences, and a headbang-worthy original soundtrack. It’s also one of the few shows in the United Kingdom and the United States that’s delivering well-rounded representation of Muslim women.
The first episode opens with an introduction to Amina Hussein, the show’s main character. She also serves as a lens for viewers, who explore the Muslim-punk fused world of the existing Lady Parts band members through her eyes. (“We play together, we pray together” explains Saira, who acts as the band’s lead singer and sole guitarist prior to Amina joining). Amina is nervous, awkward, and unfamiliar with the caustic nature of the punk scene before she steps in as the band’s new lead guitarist (she’s more of a Don McLean and Janis Ian fan). She’s unaccustomed both to the type of music that Lady Parts performs and the sort of women that make up the band, and her inexperience allows the viewer to settle into the unique setting that the show creates.
Directed by Nida Manzoor, “We Are Lady Parts” was released just a few short years after the UK had somewhat of a public reckoning with the lack of diversity on screen. In 2017, British actor Riz Ahmed delivered a viral speech to the House of Commons about representation and how rare it is to find positive depictions of Muslim characters. From terrorists to stereotyped foreigners, Muslim representation is seldom given the chance to be about topics other than religion or violence. In June 2021, Ahmed backed a study released by the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative in partnership with the Pillars Fund and the Ford Foundation. The study, Missing & Maligned: The Reality of Muslims in Popular Global Movies, found that only 1.1% of characters portrayed in 100 top-grossing U.S. films and 63 top-grossing UK films from 2017–19 were Muslim. This inquiry also expanded to include popular films from Australia and New Zealand, where researchers found similarly lacking numbers in representation.
The problem goes further than limited instances of Muslim characters. It’s also about how Muslims are portrayed whenever they do appear on-screen. The majority of Muslim characters are men and are from Middle Eastern/North African backgrounds ⸺ even though Islam is one of the world’s most diverse religions. Out of 200 films examined, only one Muslim character was LGBTQ+ and only one was depicted with a disability. Even more jarring is that 90.5 percent of those same 200 films did not feature a speaking Muslim character.
What’s worse is that when Muslim characters are featured, it’s usually tied to violence. 39 percent of primary and secondary Muslim characters were depicted as perpetrators of violence. More than half were shown as targets of violence.
This report provides the data and proof that reveals what many were already aware of — even when Muslims are important characters, our stories only revolve around connecting us to violence, suffering, and oppression. Around the same time that the USC Annenberg study was released, the production company FilmNation announced its latest project. They Are Us is an upcoming adaptation of the events surrounding the 2019 Christchurch massacre when a white supremacist attacked and killed worshippers at two mosques in New Zealand. The announcement highlighted the planned story role for New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, whose character will be played by actress Rose Byrne. The film’s announcement immediately received backlash from New Zealand’s Muslim community as well as family members and victims of the Christchurch attack. Prime Minister Ardern also criticized the upcoming adaptation while speaking to local media, stating that the film felt “very soon and very raw” for New Zealand. “There are plenty of stories from March 15 that could be told, but I don’t consider mine to be one of them,” Ardern said.
Just a few days later, the film’s producer Philippa Campbell pulled out of the project and apologized for her involvement. “I’ve listened to the concerns raised over recent days and I have heard the strength of people’s views. I now agree that the events of March 15th, 2019 are too raw for film at this time, and do not wish to be involved with a project that is causing such distress,” Campbell said in a statement released to the media. “The announcement was focused on film business, and did not take enough account of the political and human context of the story in this country. It’s the complexity of that context I’ve been reflecting on that has led me to this decision.”
The fiasco created by the They Are Us project is emblematic of a larger problem. Most of the stories being told about Muslims focus on us committing violence, or violence that is committed against us. And even when those stories are told, we aren’t the main characters. But that’s what makes Manzoor’s “We Are Lady Parts” such a welcome breath of fresh air to the burgeoning space of Muslim representation.
The show revolves around Muslims, their friendships, their families, and their culture, but it doesn’t bother to spoon-feed context about Muslim life to viewers. Amina’s inexperience with the open, brash, and biting nature of the punk scene functions similarly to how the show depicts its majority-Muslim setting ⸺ no holds barred, without holding back, without any explanation. You’ve never seen a fully-covered Muslim woman talk about sex? Well, get comfortable, because it’ll probably happen again before the series is over. You’re not entirely sure about the meaning of common Arabic words that Muslims throughout the world use regularly? Better grab your context clues and keep moving.
And yes, it’s likely that many of the viewers who tuned in are either Muslim or are receptive to Muslim representation, so they might already be prepared for the context this show presents. But it’s important to remember that representation can let non-Muslims resonate with Muslim experiences that they don’t ordinarily see in their daily lives. In addition, when these representations avoid negative stereotypes, it allows Muslims the opportunity to view themselves with the same dignity that is offered to people from other backgrounds.
As a Muslim woman myself, it’s a rarity that I see characters who share my religion and culture taking center stage in storylines that aren’t about terrorism, bigotry, or Islamophobia. But that doesn’t mean that the women in “We Are Lady Parts” don’t have to tackle these issues sometimes ⸺ in the first ten minutes of the show, for example, the band’s drummer Ayesha deals with Islamophobic comments from the riders in her car while she works at her day job as an Uber driver. The riders ask if she’s working because her father is forcing her to, and Ayesha quips back that if she didn’t agree to drive “simple, dickless pissheads around” her father promised to send her to Iraq to marry her cousin. Two out of three of the riders believe her until the third realizes she’s mocking them and threatens to give a one-star rating. Ayesha, usually one of the least calm members of the band, responds by turning up the radio to maximum volume and blasting music through their ears.
Ayesha’s personality is tough and harsh around the edges, with a take no prisoners mentality that sometimes leads her to have destructive reactions like road rage. Keeping that in mind, this scene becomes more than just a depiction of the bigotry that she and other Muslim women face. Instead, it functions as a defining introductory character moment for her.
This scene serves as a lesson and a reminder to audiences that even though it’s understandable for Muslim characters to confront Islamophobia in their storylines, that shouldn’t be their only purpose in the narrative. Real-life Muslims have motivations and worth outside the oppression they face, so their stories and characterizations shouldn’t only exist around enacting or receiving pain and violence. “We Are Lady Parts” delivers on that premise by showcasing Muslim women as they live their lives — working at jobs they love and at jobs they hate, trying to fulfill their artistic dreams and passions, struggling in their love lives, and then doing the same thing all over again the next day. All of these are storylines that are usually afforded to white, non-Muslims, but it’s practically a novel idea to afford the same grace to Muslim women.
Amina is a woman with an imagination that runs further than her confidence allows, and one of her main struggles throughout the first season is that she vomits (or has horrible diarrhea) every time she performs on stage. She’s unlucky in love and worries about being single forever but finds her inner strength through friendship and camaraderie with her bandmates. Guitarist Saira is a woman fueled by a strong creative drive while also struggling with her emotions in other aspects of life. Drummer Ayesha can initially come across as harsh to the people around her, but she can be emotionally vulnerable in a way that terrifies even herself. Bassist Bisma is a visual artist who balances her home-life as a mother and wife with her role as mediator for the band’s more intense personalities. Meanwhile, she still has big dreams for her feminist horror graphic novel. And band manager Momtaz is the calm and collected cornerstone for Lady Parts, who tries to keep the band on track and focused on their goals.
These women laugh together, play music, argue, fight, but always come back into the fold as a team. They are not perfect at everything, and they shouldn’t have to be. They deal with oppression, but that’s not the only story they have to tell. If that story is to be told, they’ll be the ones crafting the narrative and the show’s original soundtrack is representative of that. Filled with songs like “Bashir with the Good Beard” and “Voldemort Under My Headscarf,” the music performed by Lady Parts lets its Muslim characters tell their own stories about their experiences and allows them to scream it into punk’s cathartic, anti-establishment void.
I wasn’t expecting to see a show like this anytime soon, but I do hope for the sake of young Muslims like myself that there will eventually be more to come.
