Turbans, Veils, and Villainy on Television: Stargate SG1 and Merlin

Author(s): Katherine Bullock

Source: ReOrient , Spring 2021, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Spring 2021), pp. 151-172
Published by: Pluto Journals

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.13169/reorient.6.2.0151

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 TURBANS, VEILS, AND VILLAINY ON
TELEVISION: STARGATE SG1 AND MERLIN
Katherine Bullock

Abstract: In this article I investigate why two shows from different television genres in
two different countries resort to nearly identical costume choices to convey villainy. I
argue that that the directors, writers, and costume designers for the US science fiction
show Stargate SG1 and BBC’s Merlin use orientalist tropes of the veil as exotic, oppressed
or threatening as costumes for their non-Muslim characters because of the centuries-long
association in Western culture between Muslim veiling and the Other, while differentiat-
ing between acceptable and unacceptable headgear and face coverings. I draw on Said’s
Orientalism, Hall’s Encoding/Decoding, medievalism, and the theory of the ethnonorma-
tive viewer to make this case. The “veil” has become an iconic negative sign in the West
wholly distinct from meanings given to it by veiled Muslim women themselves. I suggest
that anti-veiling ideology in Western publics stems in part from negative connotations
given to it in television shows like Stargate SG1 and Merlin.

Keywords: niqab, turban, veil, face, Stargate, Merlin, Muslim women and men’s dress,
television, entertainment

If there is one constant in my students’ reflections on Islam and politics, it is a

conviction that the mainstream Western media is biased against Islam and
Muslims and that this causes anti-Muslim attitudes and behaviour in the wider
society. For several decades, scholars have illuminated negative representations
of Islam and Muslims in mainstream media, including print, film, and television
(to name a few: Alsultany 2012; Arjana 2015; Byng 2010; Golnaraghi and Dye
2016; Jiwani 2011; Said 1979; Shaheen 1984; Shaheen 2009; Taylor and Zine
2014; Terman 2017). The instinctive feeling is that this negative representation
accumulates in the minds of many non-Muslim media consumers and is causally
connected to anti-Muslim racism. These hypotheses are explored and confirmed
with audience reception studies with caveats that viewers with exposure to dif-
ferentiated news, critical theory, orientalism, or Muslim friends are less likely to
adopt hegemonic meanings (Bullock 2015, 2017; Hall 1980; Rane et al. 2014: 36;
Saleem et al. 2017).

University of Toronto Mississauga, Canada

katherine.bullock@utoronto.ca

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152 REORIENT

When subjecting media products to critical analysis for their representation

of Islam and Muslims, media scholars, rightly and not surprisingly, focus on the
representation of Muslim bodies and their cultures. My analysis of Stargate SG1
and Merlin suggests that the lens needs to be widened to include an analysis of
representations of non-Muslim bodies that might also contribute to the cumulation
of negative representations of Islam and Muslims in the mainstream media. If ori-
entalism orientalised the “Oriental” subject (Said 1979: 6), orientalism on today’s
television is also orientalising the non-Oriental subject.
I was alerted to this accidentally while watching two different television shows
with my children: a US science fiction show, Stargate SG1 and the BBC’s (British
Broadcasting Corporation) Merlin. Stargate SG1 is a science fiction show cre-
ated by Brad Wright and Jonathan Glassner, based on the 1994 science fiction
film Stargate by Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich, and part of Metro-Goldwyn-
Mayer’s Stargate franchise. It ran for ten seasons, from 1997 to 2007. Stargate
SG1 is about the US military’s discovery of a gigantic metal ring, known as a
stargate, that has stable worm hole connections with thousands of planets in the
universe. Twelve teams travel through the stargate to explore alien worlds. They
defend planets, including earth, from alien invasion and subjugation. Merlin is
a twenty-first-century retelling of the Arthurian legend, created by Julian Jones,
Jake Michie, Julian Murphy, and Johnny Capps for the BBC. It is about the leg-
endary wizard serving Prince, then King, Arthur, when they were young. It ran for
five seasons from 2008 to 2012.
In both shows villains were identified by black turbans with face veils looking
like a cross between a Taliban and a niqabi – a turban-veil. Yet neither show had
Muslim characters. With my training in orientalism scholarship, that caught my atten-
tion. Why did costume designers choose turbans and face veils to mark villains? How
could a British medieval show and a US science fiction show both resort to the same
costume device to mark evil? How could this costume choice not be related to deeply
rooted and widespread hostility to Muslim face veiling in Western cultural discourse?
How would this representation on entertainment shows impact those Muslims whose
everyday sartorial choices are turbans and/or face veils?
Said observed that, as a Palestinian growing up in two British colonies and
working as an adult in the United States, he never “lost hold of the cultural reality
of, the personal involvement in having been constituted as, ‘an Oriental’” (Said
1979: 26). While I do not wear a face veil, I do wear hijab, and I have friends and
colleagues who wear niqab, a face veil. We live in a society in which Muslim
women who wear niqab suffer institutional discrimination and both micro- and
macro-aggressions. Muslim women suffer from the highest rates of hate crimes
in many Euro-American countries (Chakraborti and Zempi 2012; Khamal 2019);
they are spat on, have their niqab pulled off while out shopping, or face people

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TURBANS, VEILS, AND VILLAINY ON TELEVISION 153

trying to ram them with their car (Ahmad 2019: 7; Clarke 2013: 49). Politicians
pass laws requiring Muslim women to uncover their faces, with widespread sup-
port amongst the populace (Angus Reid Institute 2018; BBC News 2018; Ferreras
and Abedi 2019).1
If there is any media discourse that contributes to everyday citizens’ hatred of
Muslims living in their midst, then I wish to draw attention to it. To shine the light
onto negative representations is to try and accomplish two goals: (1) to create criti-
cal media literacy for the viewer so that they can reject hegemonic representations
in the media they consume; and (2) to alert the creative people responsible for pro-
ducing, directing, writing, designing, and acting in shows that perpetuate negative
stereotypes where they have not done well, so they can improve (Taylor and Zine
2014). The goal of this article is therefore to unpack representations of turbans
and veils in Stargate SG1 and Merlin. I begin with a short section on theoretical
underpinnings. I then move to an analysis of the use of turbans and veils in the two
shows to highlight their insidious connection to villainy.

Theoretical Underpinnings

There is a voluminous literature on Muslim women’s “veiling”. I wrote about it

myself for my PhD thesis in 1999, motivated by a curiosity about the new hostility
I experienced as a white convert to Islam who began wearing hijab. My purpose
in this article is not to focus on the veil per se; as far as I am concerned, exces-
sive attention is already given to this little piece of cloth that covers a woman’s
head and sometimes her face. But to make the case that two television shows from
completely different genres use Muslim turbans and veils to represent evil on non-
Muslim characters, I need to say some brief words about European conceptions of
the veil (and the turban, about which much less is written).
While the English term “veil” is used to translate both hijab (headscarf) and
niqab (face veil), I do not think it is a precise way to convey the difference between
a hijab – a headscarf that leaves the face visible – and a niqab that covers the
face.2 When I use the word “veil” I mean only the piece of cloth that covers
the face. In the late 1990s hostility to Muslim women’s dress did not distinguish
between headscarves and face veils. It is more complex now. In Anglophone
countries there seems to be a differentiation, people can accept hijab, even
if they do not like it, but not the face veil, which vast majorities despise. In
Francophone countries hostility does not differentiate. Muslim women wearing
headscarves cannot become public employees. Muslim women in face veils can-
not even receive government services (Ferreras and Abedi 2019).
To relate the European discourses of the veil to Stargate SG1 and Merlin I build
on insights from Edward Said’s Orientalism and connect them to Stuart Hall’s

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154 REORIENT

(1980) discussion of iconic signs and hegemonic/dominant/preferred, negoti-

ated and oppositional viewers. I stitch these with theories of the ethno-normative
viewer and medievalism.
Said’s Orientalism drew attention to the relationship between what he called
strategic location and strategic formation (1979: 20) in writings about the Orient.
Strategic location concerns the hegemonic power structure “vis-à-vis the Orient”
in which a writer is located, and strategic formation demonstrates how what
they produced related to each other over time to produce a cumulative body of
knowledge that purported to be about “the Orient”, but in fact bespoke more a rela-
tionship between Western power and knowledge that produced the Orient, without
necessarily any referent to an “actual Orient”. Said was not trying to claim a “real”
Orient that the writers missed understanding, rather a system of knowledge that
was not only built on a power relation of superior to inferior, but one that had the
material force behind it – colonisation – which continued to allow the production
of this kind of knowledge.
The resultant tropes of Muslim men as conniving and barbaric and Muslim
women as oppressed, exotic harem women threatening to Western civilisation are
lodged deeply into Western cultural discourse, what Jiwani calls “chains of asso-
ciation” (2011: 19). Said (1979: 26) observed that “[t]elevision, the films, and all
the media’s resources have forced [orientalist] information into more and more
standardized molds”. Anyone who approaches tropes from orientalism’s reper-
toire must deal with it as something that is already defined in advance. Just what
arches, domes, flying carpets, magic lamps, genies and harem dress do for those
reproducing tropes for Aladdin (Bullock 2017), these images and metaphors of
barbarism, threat, backwardness, exoticism, the harem, veils and turbans provide
the imaginative material upon which draw the creative workers of the television
shows I here analyse.
Said (1979: 67) observed that orientalism exerts a three-way force on orien-
tals, orientalists, and consumers. It is this force that has established as “common
knowledge” in Western societies the “fact” that the veil is a symbol of oppression
for Muslim women. While this judgement predates European colonialism, being
first observed in Cervantes’ Don Quixote published in 1605, who created a veiled
and silenced Muslim woman, Zoraida (Kahf 1999: 64), it reigns as an overarching
trope beside which other interpretations sit.
Millward and Dodd (2012: 22) point out that a “central function of science fic-
tion is to raise questions about the connection between politics, power relations,
and what science and technology make possible”. Yet, as Hall (1980: 129) teaches
us: “The production process . . . is framed throughout by meanings and ideas:
knowledge-in-use concerning the routines of production, historically defined
technical skills, professional ideologies, institutional knowledge, definitions and

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TURBANS, VEILS, AND VILLAINY ON TELEVISION 155

assumptions, assumptions about the audience and so on . . .” Television entertain-

ment is sensible through already understood social codes; veiling on Stargate SG1
and Merlin conveys hegemonic, deeply embedded orientalist presumptions about
the veil as exotic/oppressive/threatening.3
As I learned in my analysis of I Dream of Jeannie (Bullock 2018), without
scrutiny of television shows based in an understanding of orientalism, scholars
can overlook these harmful orientalist representations. Scholarship on Stargate
SG-1 and Merlin is no exception. Even those who draw attention to feminist and
anti-racist concerns miss the role of Stargate SG1 and Merlin in perpetuating
negative representations of veiling (Bourke 2014; Cowan 2010; Edwards 2015;
Elmes 2015; Johnson-Smith 2005; Meredith 2015; Sherman 2015; Thomas 2019;
Tollerton 2015), including the only study I found that alerts us to orientalist and
colonialist discourses underpinning Stargate SG1 (Donker and Yorke 2018).
No matter where we live, clothes are polysemic signs with layers of meanings,
both to those who wear them, and to others. We cannot essentialise a singular
meaning to clothing, since it is a sartorial choice that exists within particular moral
and political spaces. Inside such spaces, and between them, there are multiple lay-
ers of tension and contradictions over what clothes and their design symbolise.
During the European colonial era both the veil and turban were linked to the exotic
(Bullock 2002; Cass 2015; Kahf 1999; Said 1979; Yeğenoğlu 1998). The exotic
has always carried the double connotation of something similar and exciting, but
different and foreboding (Bullock 2018). Since Christian European women have
also veiled, the Muslim woman was the utterly familiar and the utterly Other.
The veil was at once a piece of cloth denying the gaze (a gaze that the colonial-
ists assumed gave them the superiority and power to rule the region), a symbol
of oppression (because of its connection to a supposedly backward culture), and
a mystery that encouraged sexual fantasies, particularly for the male European
traveller (Bullock 2002; Yeğenoğlu 1998: 45).
The face veil became the metonym of the “Orient” in European discourse
(Bullock 2002; Yeğenoğlu 1998: 48) – a region called the Orient and then the
Middle East, but what I prefer to call South West Asia and North Africa.4 Cass
(2015) suggests this of the turban as well for Victorian England. Orientalist rep-
resentations favoured a turban often with a jewel and a feather, as seen in early
Hollywood films and I Dream of Jeannie (Bullock 2018). Though a way for
European males to “dress up” and play oriental, and a trope of Muslim men in
European representations, the turban never had the same metonymic function as
did the veil. Above all the turban is a male dress, and the veil is a female dress,
and “the Orient” was feminised. (I know only the Tuareg, an ethnic group in North
Africa, who combine turbans and veils for men.) Yeğenoğlu’s work draws atten-
tion to the connection between male colonial desire, the role of the veil as refusing

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156 REORIENT

the gaze, and the mystery behind the veil which was experienced as a seduction
by the gazer. It was the veil that drew all attention, even from women colonialists,
who adopted a masculine gaze (Yeğenoğlu 1998: 91): “The veiled existence is the
very truth of Oriental women; they seem to exist always in this deceptive manner.
This metaphysical speculation or mediation, this desire to reveal and unveil is at
the same time the scene of seduction” (Yeğenoğlu 1998: 45).
Post-9/11 both the turban and the veil have been reinscribed as images of threat
(Taylor and Zine 2014). Since the Middle Ages, the representation of the Muslim
man has been consistent as a character meant to evoke fear in Western publics, be
it as a devil, monster, barbarian, or terrorist (Arjana 2015). In the 1970s the head-
gear image of the “TV Arab” shifted from a turban to a headdress that looked “like
tablecloths pinched from a restaurant” (Shaheen 1984: 5). Post-9/11, the turban is
represented less as exotic and more as a symbol of the evil male Muslim terrorist –
Osama bin Laden was always depicted in a turban, witness the use of the turban in
the Danish cartoon controversy, which featured the Prophet Muhammad (peace be
upon him) with a bomb wrapped in his turban, or the billboards of newly elected
Barack Obama in 2009 asking if he was President (head uncovered) or jihad (head
turbaned) (Cass 2015)?
There has also been a temporal evolution of the sign of the veil since the
colonial era. These days feminist discourse transforms the exotic, seductive yet
threatening nature of the veil into a different kind of sexualised cloth – one that
emphasises the role of the veil as a sex-inhibitor, thence a threat to purported
Western values of women’s empowerment and equality (as if patriarchy is over
in the West). Chakraborti and Zempi suggest (2012: 278–9) that anti-niqab senti-
ment today is made worse because, through their covering up, niqabi women are
symbolically rejecting the Western concept that women’s empowerment must be
linked to her being undressed. Although some commentators view contemporary
hatred and policy restrictions against niqab as new (Chakraborti and Zempi 2012;
Arjana 2015: 2), the veil as a symbol of terrorism predates 9/11, likely beginning
from the 1979 Iranian Revolution (Bullock 2018). This is how Stargate SG1 pro-
duces the turban-veil as the costume for a villain in an episode aired just prior to
9/11. The turban-veil stiches together the Muslim male and female as threat into
a single costume. None of these subsequent representations deletes the prior one,
they continue to exist simultaneously, forming a “toolbox” from which creative
workers draw depending on what they want to emphasise: the veil as a symbol of
oriental exoticism exists in one episode, as a symbol of oppression in another, and
a turban-veil as a symbol of threat/evil in another.
Veils and turbans have thus become iconic signs in Western cultural discourse.
Hall (1980: 132) observes that iconic signs are no less the result of discursive
practices than any other sign. They have been “so widely distributed in a specific

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TURBANS, VEILS, AND VILLAINY ON TELEVISION 157

language community or culture, [and] learned at so early an age, that they appear
not to be constructed . . . but to be ‘naturally’ given”. Hall (1980: 133) cautions that
a distinction between “denotation” – the literal meaning of a sign – and “connotation” –
how the literal sign’s meaning is understood through cultural codes – is only useful
analytically. In fact, this distinction is crucial in understanding that in Western cultural
and political discourse against the niqab, it is not the materiality of a piece of cloth
covering the face per se that is at issue (denotative meaning). The connotative
meaning is the ultimate point here: it is precisely that it is a piece of cloth covering
the face of a Muslim, which carries other codes such as exotic, oppressed, threat
to Western civilisation, a sign of a violent community, and inability to integrate
into the West. After all, Christian women have also veiled, brides wear wedding
veils, and now publics wear surgical masks. Some face coverings are acceptable,
and some are not – distinctions, discussed below, that also appear in Merlin and
Stargate SG1.
But Muslim-majority spaces have produced different connotations of veils/
turbans. The turban was worn by the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him).
My imam wears it when he gives the sermon at Eid festivals. In Islamic cultures
sacrality was often expressed through veiling: Caliphs were spoken to from behind
a veil; in Persian miniatures Prophet Muhammad’s face is veiled. In Islamic his-
tory the niqab has been a sign of wealth, status, and piety (Bullock 2002). During
the post-colonial modernisation period the veil and headscarf became symbols of
backwardness, peasantry, and illiteracy – orientals performing orientalism. In the
contemporary era the veil can be a sign of piety, support of one’s own culture and
a rejection of Western hegemony. I do not speak of Muslim women who dislike
niqab, Muslim women forced to wear it, nor Muslim-majority countries requiring
face covering by law. I speak of those women who have the freedom to choose
to wear niqab. It is this juxtaposition that helps us locate the racism that Muslim
women who wear niqab experience (or men who wear turbans, much less analysed
and commented on, though Hindu and Sikh men are often attacked being mistaken
for Muslims). The clash of connotations. When interviewed about why they wear
niqab, women, including converts and immigrants who began wearing niqab after
they moved to a Western country, will give a variety of answers, but those who
speak of their choice to wear it, deny the oppression connotation. They speak of
spiritual comfort and contentment wearing niqab in spite of the hostile backlash
they face daily in Western societies (Bullock 2002; Clarke 2013; Khamal 2019;
Khir 2015; Robert 2000). They seem to be shouting into the wind that they are sat-
isfied wearing niqab, and not at all disabled by it. They want to be full participants
in society yet are rejected by most of their Western compatriots (Robert 2000:
120–3). Should not their interpretation be part of Western entertainment shows,
rather than being marked as villains?

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158 REORIENT

To analyse the traces of these orientalist discourses on the veil in Euro-

American media, scholars tend to focus on print or television news (Byng 2010;
Golnaraghi and Dye 2016; Gottschalk and Greenberg 2008; Khir 2015; Terman
2017). To be sure “news media texts play an important role in public communica-
tion . . . [and] are among the most influential sources of reality construction and
power” (Golnaraghi and Dye, following Van Dijk 2016: 141). I referred above to
reception studies that highlight a correlation between negative news about Islam
and Muslims and agreement to racist tools like racial profiling. Yet we should not
overlook the contribution entertainment can make to racist attitudes. Typically, due
to its emphasis on diversion and amusement, entertainment is often overlooked as
a significant source of meaning making – especially by audiences – although it as
equally constructed as news to reflect socially and politically dominant ideologies
(Park, Gabbadon, and Chernin 2006; Mirrlees 2016). And while it would be nice
to contribute to the meagre number of studies tackling causal connections between
anti-Muslim racism and watching film and television representations of Islam and
Muslims (Bullock 2015; Bullock 2017), this paper is not an audience reception
study. I am focused on an analysis of the representation of the veil and turban-veil.

Ethnonormativity, Medievalism, and the Hegemonic Viewer

In all this scholarship on orientalism, veiling, and media representations of

Muslims and Islam, the focus is on Muslim peoples. To understand the use of
the turban-veil in Stargate SGI and Merlin on non-Muslim characters we need to
extend the analysis of orientalism to this new subject matter. I watched the shows,
making note of each time a head covering of any sort appeared as a costume. Here
I look at the relationship between plot, character, narrative, costumes and aural
elements, to make the case that two shows from two different serial television
genres in two different countries, neither with Muslim characters, use iconic signs
of “Muslimness” to represent villainy.
Morey and Yaqin (2011)’s theory of ethnonormativity is useful here.
“Ethnonormative” means the differentiation between an

implicit distance posited between the viewer (the normalized subject) and the
Muslim object of the gaze, whose difference is always in view . . . which is also
heavily marked by racial value judgments . . . Ethnonormative space is the viewing
space called into being by the narrative tension between the contending groups
depicted (host community versus alien wedge. (113–14)

The ethnonormative viewer is the hegemonic or preferred viewer of Hall’s (1980)

tripartite category of audience reception to television, whose reaction aligns with

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TURBANS, VEILS, AND VILLAINY ON TELEVISION 159

the dominant ideological message of the show, while the oppositional viewer
takes a contradictory stance, and the negotiated viewer is in between.
Morey and Yaqin (2011) highlight in their analysis of veiling in two contempo-
rary British shows, Yasmin and White Girl, that despite attempting more positive
portrayals of Muslim struggles in the UK, these shows end up using Muslim veil-
ing practices as a way to reinforce the binaries of insider/outsider. Two unique
renderings suggest alternative positive representations can be possible: Grey’s
Anatomy, a medical drama, introduced a hijabi doctor in Season 14, 2018; and the
Canadian Broadcast Commission has gone even further, with Zarqa Nawaz’s sit-
com, Little Mosque on the Prairie, which featured a main character wearing hijab,
and an episode with an empathetic portrayal of a niqabi. As I will show, the use
of veiling to reinforce the insider/outsider binary is complicated by the medieval
settings of some of Stargate SG1’s episodes, and all of Merlin, but the shows are
able to maintain several different connotations of face covering due to their appeal
to the constructed “common sense” of the ethnonormative viewer.
Both Stargate SG1 and Merlin function as vehicles that reinforce ethnonormativity
reflecting white Euro-American culture and patriarchal hierarchy as hegemonic sub-
ject positions for the viewer. The SG1 team are white, with one black actor, Christopher
Judge, playing Teal’C, an alien; the main characters of Merlin are white, with one
mixed race actress, Angel Coulby, playing Guinevere. Supporting cast in both shows
present some ethnic diversity, but the white male hero is always ultimately in charge.
In both Stargate SG1 and Merlin, medievalism, which has enjoyed a “resurgence”
over the last decade and a half (Pagès and Kinane 2015: 1), plays an important role in
creating ethnonormative space for the contemporary viewer. The “medieval” relates
in a complicated way to a contemporary viewer. From today’s vantage point, the
European medieval era is the “Dark Ages”. It is part of the past, but the break between
the medieval and the modern subject is strong. The medieval is almost akin to an alien
Other mocked for backwardness, intolerance, muddiness, lack of democracy, free-
dom, and Enlightenment. There is the modern/medieval binary that is similar to the
Western/Muslim binary of radical difference mapping a superior/inferior dichotomy.
And yet, because it is part of European history, it is still an Insider, especially when
compared to a Muslim, who has always been an Outsider, no matter the era (Hamilton
2001). Christian women in medieval Europe also wore headscarves, so in both Merlin
and Stargate SG1 they are an important and regular feature of any medieval scene.
And yet, the actresses wear their headscarves in ways remarkably similar to contem-
porary Muslim women’s hijab designs. They are non-Muslim women marked by a
contemporary Muslim referent. In both shows, female characters in headscarves are
always part of background scenes, with action taking place in the foreground. In
most episodes of Merlin there are servant women in bandanas or headscarves, vil-
lage women in headscarves at the tournament crowds, or walking through the village

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160 REORIENT

square or marketplace. But other visual and aural clues in the medieval scenes (par-
ticularly in Merlin which is set in a British castle, replete with segments of knights
jousting with chain mail and medieval helmets, and King Uther’s crown) place the
narrative in the Insider of the medieval, and not a Muslim country. The same is true
of medieval Stargate SG1. Scenes that feature European architecture, certain kinds
of roofs, cobbled stones, geometric shapes, music that sounds like it is from a church
service, and men in medieval European styled hats, shirts, and breeches (as opposed
to domes, arabesques, flowing robes, headdresses, oriental music, and/or camels)
help confirm that the women in headscarves are not Muslim. The ethnonormative
viewer might feel distanced from the “medievalness” of the scene, yet still be able
to identify with the characters because of the European referents. The veiled women
are not Muslim-Others, so they are not marked in the same way as outsiders, as they
would have been if they were Muslim characters. This is an important comparison to
the characters who are marked as villains with more obviously Muslim referents. For
example, in Merlin, Morgana, now a foe plotting to take down Camelot wears a black
headscarf that looks like a hijab (S5E04). Morgana is a British king’s daughter, she
does not normally wear a headscarf, but in a black headscarf, which places her in non-
normative dress, indeed in a dress typically represented in British media discourse as
not-British (Khir 2015), she is emphasised in her role as the enemy.
Stargate SG1 references the medieval in a novel way, by portraying Camelot,
Merlin, and Morgan le Fay as members of the Ancients practising not magic,
but highly advanced technology. Stargate SG1 adopts a view of human progress
based in modernisation theory (Lerner 1958) that conceived human history as a
progressive linear timeline from cavemen through medieval times to advanced
civilisation, with the West as the exemplar. The assumption was that other soci-
eties would and should progress from “tradition” to “modernity” by adapting
the same socio-economic, political, and religious structures. When SG1 visits a
planet, they find the community in various stages of “development” from primi-
tive cavemen to medieval villages to civilisations similar to, or technologically
more advanced, than Earth. (Only a very few early episodes venture further afield,
tapping into concepts of aliens as rocks, bugs, or fishlike, thus a range more like
Star Wars.) The last two seasons, the Ori arc, featuring an encounter with powerful
beings pretending to be missionaries of a true religion, is almost entirely based in
a medievalist setting, similar to the medieval scenes in Merlin.

Headgear and Insiders/Outsiders

As mentioned above, historically, Western conceptions of the veil have revolved

around a limited set of meanings – exoticness, oppression, threat. Stargate SG1
and Merlin feature each of these representations. Before I analyse the episodes

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TURBANS, VEILS, AND VILLAINY ON TELEVISION 161

that do this, I need to comment briefly on the overall context and interplay of head
coverings in general through the lens of the ethnonormative viewer.
Headgear costumes in both shows reinforce an insider/outside positionality for
the hegemonic viewer in a complex manner. The lead characters in Stargate SG1,
Jack O’Neill, Samantha Carter, Daniel Jackson, and Teal’C, all wear headgear
in some settings: military berets and helmets, baseball caps, beanies, safari hats.
Daniel Jackson, an anthropologist embedded in the US army’s premier unit, SG1,
likes to wear a bandana, especially when on a dig exploring another planet. These
kinds of headgear are considered “normal” Western dress, a constructed “common
sense” about dress codes and styles that excludes ethnic minorities’ traditional
dress, such as the turban, hijab or niqab, from being Western. The episodes dem-
onstrate that it is acceptable to be a hero and cover the head, but only in certain
ways. A bandana wrapped around a man’s head is acceptable wrapping, a turban
is not; a turban turns the man into a jihad-sympathiser, as we saw in the billboards
of Obama. In spite of the variety of headgear worn by the characters, headscarves
never appear in any Earth scenes in Stargate SG1. No hijabis in the US Army,
Washington, DC, or any city visited by the team on Earth. By contrast headscarves
feature regularly in many of the planets they visit, especially the planets still in
“medieval times”. This is a crucial aspect of creating the insider/outsider quality
of the narrative. Headscarves worn in the style that many contemporary Muslim
women do, with a fold of material covering the forehead and the scarf pinned at
the neck, are worn as the costume of aliens the SG1 team encounter when they
go off-world. Because the headscarf is considered by the white ethnonormative
viewer as not “normal” dress, this costume reinforces the alienness of the char-
acters. It is a visual confirmation of the narrative. They usually stay as extras in
background scenes, while the action takes place in the foreground. Off-world men
are often dressed in long robes with turbans or keffiyeh-style headscarves (the
“TV Arab” look, a cloth held onto the head by a rope encircling the head). In these
episodes the headscarves, turbans, and keffiyehs are part of other visual and aural
clues that the place is foreign. It creates a representational feedback loop between
the very real exclusion of these styles of Islamic dress as normative for Westerners
(Byng 2010) and the subject position of the hegemonic viewer whose viewing
gaze will appreciate the distinction made between the bandana and the turban, the
baseball cap and the hijab. So, in contrast to Stargate Command, which, through
military uniforms, portrays the rationality and benevolence of the US Army, the
alien races are frequently marked by clothing considered “exotic” or otherwise
indicating their alienness, and always potentially a threat to Earth.
This juxtaposition of military uniforms with aliens wearing headscarves is
underscored by the fact that Stargate SG1 is a form of “militainment” (Mirrlees
2016: 199). Hollywood has a long-standing mutually beneficial relationship with

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162 REORIENT

the US military supporting shows that portray them in a good light.5 Stargate SG1
is about a secret US military group who constantly put their lives on the line to
save the planet Earth and the Universe, thereby being a “pernicious form[] of PR
for the US Empire” (Mirrlees 2016: 164–6).6 Recalling Said’s focus on strategic
location and formation, the show’s view of the veil, by excluding the hijab from
Earth scenes and emphasising the turban-veil as the face of evil, is juxtaposed to
the heroes’ costumes: the heroes do not wear veils/turbans, they wear US military
uniforms. And when they cover their faces, there are valid scientific reasons for it
(more below). A Muslim hijabi viewer like myself can take an oppositional subject
position, identifying with the women and headscarves, the men in turbans, and be
dismissive of the US military portrayed as heroes.

The Oppressive Veil on Stargate SG1

An early Stargate SG1 episode references contemporary debates about Muslim wom-
en’s oppressive veils directly, in an episode actually called “Emancipation” (S01E04).
First aired in August 1997, the era in which France and other European countries began
refusing Muslim students in hijab to attend school, and the Taliban were enforcing
the burqa on Afghan women, “Emancipation” makes the orientalist assumption that,
unlike societies on Earth, represented here by the USA military, which have evolved
through the stages of modernisation, foreign cultures are unchanging, forever trapped
in their ancient traditions (Yeğenoğlu 1998: 99). The inhabitants of this planet are
apparently descendants of Mongols from a thousand years before, and in this planet’s
tribes, women must cover their faces with a veil, and not speak unless spoken to, on
pain of death, thereby signalling the veil as a symbol of oppression. “Emancipation”
rehearses the idea that white Western women, represented here by the blond army
Captain, Samantha Carter, are free and advanced, and that backward veiled women
need their help to unveil and advance themselves; they are incapable themselves of
seeing their own oppression or getting rid of it (Yeğenoğlu 1998: 102).
One of the features of orientalism is its inability to differentiate between the dif-
ferent ethnic groups that make up the region. Said (1979: 102) refers to a character
in Disraeli’s novel Tancred remarking “Druzes, Christians, Muslims, and Jews
hobnob easily because – someone quips – Arabs are simply Jews on horseback,
and all are Orientals at heart.” In Western media representations, especially film
and television, this turns into visual referents that are a mishmash of different
cultures. In “Emancipation” the women’s veils are a miscellany of Muslim veiling
practices, ignoring the cultural and ideological specificities around particulari-
ties: the Chief’s wife’s veil looks like a traditional Turkmen veil, Nya’s veil looks
like a modern Salafi niqab, and, Samantha, having been kidnapped by Abu, the
tribal chieftain’s son, is forced to dress in an elaborate bejewelled headdress that
includes a transparent face veil – seen one oriental veil, seen them all.

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TURBANS, VEILS, AND VILLAINY ON TELEVISION 163

Wearing a beautiful dress and face veil cannot be appreciated by a Western

viewer, which is the oppositional reading I bring to the episode, so seeing Captain
Carter dressed in a face veil, the SG1 team makes fun of her – a soldier reduced
to chattel in a pretty dress and face veil. The episode ends with Captain Carter
performing the final act of emancipation on behalf of the oppressed women who
cannot. Abu offers Samantha to a rival Chief, Turghan, in exchange for Turghan’s
daughter Nya with whom Abu is in love. Turghan refuses to give his daughter, giv-
ing Abu 500 gold pieces for Samantha instead. Abu later persuades the daughter
to escape, but they are captured. Her punishment is stoning to death. Abu’s father
says the only way to save Nya is for someone to defeat Turghan in hand-to-hand
combat to the death. Samantha volunteers, and defeats him, not killing him in
exchange for his promise to let his daughter go and not make war on the rival tribe.
He agrees. As SG1 leave, Abu’s father yells, “All Shavadi be free”, the women
drop the curtains that had enclosed their tents while taking off their face veils
smiling, applauding, and ululating. “It is how, you will be remembered, Carter,” he
tells her (Freeman n.d.) Did Mongol women actually veil like this? This is beside
the point. The veil’s function in this episode is simply a visual device to carry the
notion of women’s oppression, and to highlight the heroes’ role in helping these
women understand and throw off their oppression – emancipation, as the episode
is titled. 7 Instead of defending their thousand-year-old traditions, Samantha has
unveiled their minds, and they throw off their veils – a Western colonial and con-
temporary fantasy.8

The Exotic Veil on Merlin

Merlin draws on the veil as a symbol of exoticism, manipulating it through fab-
ric colour to signal insider/outsider positionality. This is most evident in “The
Hunter’s Heart” (S04E11), when Gwen has been kidnapped by warlord Helios’
men, some of whom wear long black bandanas. In his camp, her costume resem-
bles a “harem outfit,” with a transparent black veil that leaves the face and chest
uncovered, and her stomach area draped in transparent black gauze, likely due to
the children’s nature of the show. This is the standard TV version of the harem
outfit, an orientalist costume popularised by nineteenth-century US Americans
and portrayed in early Hollywood films and I Dream of Jeannie (Bullock 2018).
Meanwhile Arthur is presented with a bride, Princess Mithian, dressed in an old-
fashioned British wedding-style white veil, completely covering her face, though
since it is transparent we can make out her features. Even though Merlin had tried
to break the binary symbolism of white = good/black = bad, by having Guinevere
played by a black actress, the juxtaposition of Gwen in a dark veil and Mithian
contradicts this. The ethnonormativity of the viewer is mobilised: Mithian’s white
bridal veil is an acceptable face covering, Gwen’s oriental harem costume and

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164 REORIENT

black face veil are not. When Morgana arrives to plot Camelot’s downfall, Gwen
excuses herself from the room, escaping by drawing the black veil over to hide
her face. In this case, the face veil helps hide her identity to escape, but the entire,
black-themed outfit was given to her by the villain, so it is still marked negatively
for the viewer. Importantly, after she escapes Helios, the next time we see her she
is dressed in a white bodice.
In spite of the progressive approach of having Gwen, a strong female lead,
played by a black actress (Edwards 2015; Thomas 2019), the limitations placed
upon her black body through the negative orientalist stereotypes of harem out-
fits, face veiling, and connections to evil, show that anti-Muslim racism cannot
be solved by a few well-placed black actors. Tollerton argues Merlin’s mul-
tiracial cast reflects the BBC’s policy on diversity and suggests that Merlin,
consciously or not, attempts to address social anxieties over multiculturalism
in Britain in positive ways,9 with the show’s Druids, persecuted by Uther and
finally given protection by Arthur, representing the beleaguered Muslim com-
munity (2015: 120). Even though the producers made an effort to place Merlin
in a “land of myth and a time of magic” (opening voiceover) and not in any
actual historical time period (Sherman 2015: 82; also Elmes 2015; Tollerton
2015), the show acts as a foundational patriotic myth: King Arthur and his
round table of knights portrayed as democratic, ethnically equal, and open to
women and religious minorities, giving the viewer a comfortable illusion that
such laudable contemporary values are part of an historic Britain, rather than
the more real racial discrimination and violence of the British Empire’s colo-
nial heritage. This illusion is even more problematic considering the use of
orientalist veils and turban-veils, wholly leaving out of the equation British
Muslims, whereby the Muslim community, through its association with veiling
in a contemporary (not a transcended medieval) context, is ultimately rendered
an excluded Other.

The “Face” of Evil Veil on Stargate SG1 and Merlin

I am arguing that Stargate SG1 and Merlin use recognisably Muslim head cover-
ing designs in their costumes for non-Muslim characters to signal their Otherness
to the ethnonormative viewer. I have looked at examples of the exotic and oppres-
sive veils. The third one to consider is the symbol of the veil as a threat, a theme
with a long pedigree in Western cultural discourse, and amplified post-9/11 as a
symbol of terrorism.
Edkins points out that, in Western culture, “[h]idings one’s face can be taken as an
indication or shame or embarrassment, criminal intent or religious fundamentalism”
(Edkins 2015: 1). In both Stargate SG1 and Merlin, covering the face, either
totally or partially, in a hooded cape, kerchief, or veil is a way for the director to

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TURBANS, VEILS, AND VILLAINY ON TELEVISION 165

signal foreboding, suspicion, threat, and evil. Characters are depicted in hoods
while they walk surreptitiously through a city or campsite to avoid detection. The
camera usually opens on the hooded figure, either a long or medium shot, cutting
to a close up showing only the chin, thus creating narrative tension – we are not
sure who this figure is, it creates worry, what are they up to?10 It either resolves as
a hero, like Teal’C from SG1, trying to infiltrate an enemy camp to gather intel-
ligence, or Gwen, one of Merlin’s heroines, sneaking around to avoid being caught
by the enemy, or as a foe. On Merlin, once she has become an adversary, Morgana
often wears a hood that partially obscures her face, usually when slipping out to
confer with her allies who are trying to take down Camelot. On Stargate SG1,
Anubis, the Goa’uld’s scariest and most powerful system Lord, is depicted in both
a black face mask and a hood. This double and total erasure of his face, along with
the colour code symbol of black, signifies his extreme evil.
Villains in Merlin are often depicted with covered faces like when Lancelot
fights men in eye masks and face-kerchiefs to help himself and Gwen escape
(S2E02), or the time Arthur and Merlin are chased through the forest by bandits in
face veils (S3E05). Most important to note for my argument here is that frequently
the costume design references Muslim cultures even though the characters are not
meant to be Muslim: when bandits trying to extort money from villagers ride in on
horses with face-kerchiefs (S1E10), the leader has a face veil and pointed helmet
reminiscent of a Turkish military helmet rather than a face covering and a cowboy
hat, or a British military helmet; in “Arthur’s Bane, Part 2” (S5E02), Mordred,
wears, rather than a bandana, a turban that is also a neck scarf, blue like a Tuareg
without the face veil. At this stage we are not sure if he has become an enemy or
not, and the turban helps convey this uncertainty.
This double use of the exotic/evil turban-veil is evident most prominently in
Stargate SG1’s episode “Rite of Passage” (S5E06). Nirrti, in Hindu mythology
the goddess of deathly hidden realms and sorrows, is one of the show’s villains –
a Goa’uld who are a parasitic race dominating the Milky Way galaxy for centu-
ries by taking human beings as hosts. Nirrti’s costumes in the various episodes in
which she appears once again exhibit the orientalism mishmash tendency. In “Rite
of Passage” she arrives at SG1 command, villainized by her costume of a black
turban and black face veil, looking like a cross between a Taliban and a niqabi –
a Hindu goddess with a bindi on her forehead, wearing a Taliban turban-veil. In
other episodes she is presented without face veils, but in orientalised harem dresses
with long veils down her back. In this episode, her purpose is to study a young girl
she had done genetic experiments on, who had been rescued previously by SG1.
Although she is using cloaking technology and therefore cannot be seen, the direc-
tor felt it necessary to have her veiled. She is neither an Afghan man, nor a Muslim
woman, and she is wearing a cloaking device so that the SG1 cannot see her.

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166 REORIENT

What is the function of the face veil in these scenes? Her outfit is clearly designed
only to place maximum distance between the ethnonormative viewer and herself,
to emphasise her evilness.11
Earlier I referred to Yeğenoğlu’s analysis (1998) connecting colonial domina-
tion, tropes of the veil, and the colonial insistence on unveiling Muslim women.
Captain Carter had that privilege in “Emancipation” and in this episode with Nirrti
the pleasure falls to team lead General O’Neill. Luckily SG1 have technology that
disables Nirrti’s cloaking device, so O’Neill shoots her. As the camera pulls in for
a close-up, while she lies unconscious on the ground, O’Neill removes her face
veil to reveal her face to the viewer. How many Western viewers who support laws
against veiling cheered? When SG1 later interrogates Nirrti, the turban and veil are
gone. But she remains Othered in a sexualised foreign dress, this time a shalwar
khameez, normally a modest dress, except in this case the tunic is a draw string bod-
ice open nearly all the way to her stomach revealing her neck and cleavage. We do
not know where the turban and veil have gone. She never wears a veil again in the
rest of the episode, nor in any other episode. It is not a function of modest dress for
her. She did not ask for it back nor take it with her when she left. Unlike the feeling
of violation a niqabi Muslim woman would feel for being unveiled, presumably
it was not an important piece of clothing to her. Although “Rite of Passage” was
aired in August 2001, just before 9/11, due to its nature as an iconic sign, discussed
above, the face veil was already a symbol of oppression and threat to the US.
The black Taliban turban-veil, extremely similar to that worn by Nirrti in
Stargate SG1, assumes a prominent role in Merlin from seasons three to five,
where Morgana, her sister Morgause and Cenred plot to take Camelot. It is not an
eccentric English man playing dress up in an Oriental turban. It is the foe’s army
attacking Camelot. Most of the time they are fleeting images in the background, as
the actors in the foreground are bareheaded. These episodes were first aired from
2010 to 2012, when UK troops were in Afghanistan as part of the NATO opera-
tions against the Taliban. The flash of a Taliban-looking man trying to besiege
the castle or kill King Uther/Prince/King Arthur, marked as the UK’s enemy in
Afghanistan, is thus marked as the enemy in Merlin. These soldiers appear in
multiple episodes. How would this depiction affect a viewer’s relationship to those
Afghani men who wear such turbans as part of their ordinary daily dress? How
would it not reinforce an anti-veiling dislike?

Acceptable Face Coverings

Why do we accept a medical mask that covers almost the same parts of the face,
but not niqab? This hypocrisy, recently exposed in the COVID requirements for
surgical masks, is evident in both Merlin and Stargate SG1 (Stansbury 2020).12

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TURBANS, VEILS, AND VILLAINY ON TELEVISION 167

The issue is not really covering the face, as opponents to niqab claim is the prob-
lem. Both shows have scenes where the characters’ faces are covered, yet they
remain normalised as insiders. On Stargate SG1 characters wear surgical masks
in the medical room, the teams wear hazmat suits while on a planet with poison-
ous gases, when they fly the jet fighter they cover their faces with oxygen masks,
Navy seals wear balaclavas. In Merlin there are many episodes where the knights
battle in helmets with only the slits for eyes showing. In these scenes, close-ups of
the eyes reveal the actors’ skill in conveying meaning, once again throwing into
doubt anti-niqab claims that face veils block communication. In all these cases,
face coverings are never used to imply outsider status the way the orientalised
veil as exotic/oppressed or the turban-veil as evil signify. The team members are
a team, they are considered trustworthy, and they can still communicate with each
other, even though their mouths are covered – all aspects denied to niqabi women.
The differentiation between a veil of evil and an acceptable face covering is most
readily apparent in Stargate SG1’s “Broca Divide” (S1E05). The team comes across
a people in translucent white robes, headgear, and face covering that look like some
modern versions of a niqab, throwing rocks at a group of semi-naked people in furs
looking like Neanderthals who grunt rather than talk. Although they take off their
face veils soon to speak to the SG1 team, the potentiality of the veil marking them
as outsiders is broken by the realisation that their face coverings are required for
medical reasons to protect them from the disease the others have that reverses their
evolution to caveman. Although they are still part of the orientalist modernisation
paradigm – they are associated with Minoan culture (Bronze Age, Greece, 3000 BC
to 1100 BC)13 – the medical rationale for their wearing niqab is associated to the
modern hazmat suit, which is a legitimate reason to cover the face. In addition their
face veils are white, rather than black which is reserved for villains.
When I make analogies between niqab and surgical masks – both are worn only
under specific circumstances for a limited time – many Muslims applaud, while
many Westerners are affronted. “Canadian[s] will never ever put up with hiding
ones face for other than medical reasons. This is a stupid argument,” wrote a com-
menter in response to an op-ed (Bullock 2020). When Western society declares
that face covering is oppressive or threatening, they mean it for only one kind of
face covering, and that is the Muslim woman’s veil.

Concluding Reflections: Implications

Merlin and Stargate SG1 speak to contemporary anxieties about multiculturalism

in US and UK society. I have argued that, while Muslim women’s veiling has long
marked an insider/outside positionality in Western cultural discourse, in these two
shows, the directors, writers, and costume designers for Stargate SG1 and Merlin

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168 REORIENT

utilised orientalist notions of the veil as exotic, oppressive and a turban-veil (tying
together the trope of the Muslim male as terrorist and female as civilisational threat
together in one costume) to signify evil on non-Muslim bodies. In Stargate SG1
they are aliens, and in Merlin they are medieval British foes. Reflecting on this
is crucial to understand my point. The ethnonormative space is not between the
supposed hegemonic white viewer and a Muslim object of the gaze. The villain-
ous characters are orientalised: the costumes wrapped as turbans and drawn over
the face of the actors in the way that some Muslim men and women do these days
are used to represent villainy – no longer a “Muslim woman’s veil” or a “Muslim
man’s turban” but iconic signs separated from their indigenous roots, while dif-
ferentiating between acceptable and unacceptable headgear and face coverings.
Stargate SG1 and Merlin exemplify Hall’s (1980: 133) argument that a visual
sign’s meaning can intersect with “deep semantic codes of a culture and take on
additional, more active ideological dimensions”. Class interests, language, history,
social meanings not only provide “maps of meaning”, but allow for transforma-
tions based on a sign’s polysemic possible meanings (1980: 134). While the
episodes I have discussed here have nothing overt to do with Muslim characters,
the face veil costumes tap into Western discourses about Muslim women’s face
veils and turbans in order to carry tension in the narrative, create mood, and sig-
nify the “real” (evil) identity of the wearer. The face veil has been appropriated to
inscribe a negative meaning, not reflective of the joyous meanings many niqabi
women talk about when explaining why they veil.
Streaming services like Netflix or Hulu have forever changed the way we
watch television. We can binge watch a single show, but we do not watch a single
programme in isolation from knowing what else is on offer. Viewers will watch or
know about television shows that have expressly Muslim characters; many such
shows, especially law and order or thrillers, position the good Muslim/bad Muslim
dichotomy in relation to terrorism (Alsultany 2012). A viewer will also consume
or know about the news, which portrays overwhelmingly negative stereotypes of
Muslim men as violent and women as oppressed. They will listen to politicians
speak against the niqab. Seemingly unrelated shows, with non-Muslim characters,
like Stargate SG1 and Merlin, will then portray face veiling in a negative light,
connecting the wearers to evil or oppression. Even if viewers, especially children,
are not aware of geopolitics, and do not recognise the connections between the veil
and evil or oppression, across this diverse stream of media output it is not surpris-
ing that viewers come away with hostility or dislike towards the actual women in
their cities who wear face veils. Morey and Yaqin’s (2011: 133) conclusion about
Muslim characters in the UK show Dirty War is also applicable to Stargate SG1
and Merlin: “all feed into a fairly crude national normalization narrative that oper-
ates to redeploy and reinforce Self/Other binaries while playing on public fears”.

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TURBANS, VEILS, AND VILLAINY ON TELEVISION 169

In spite of the new use of surgical masks during COVID 19, does television enter-
tainment make it an even more uphill battle for niqabi women to gain acceptance
in Western societies?

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank deeply ReOrient’s managing editor and two anonymous
reviewers whose specific feedback helped me sharpen and focus my argument. All
remaining errors in exposition are mine.

Notes
1 Austria has banned niqab in courts and schools; Belgium prohibits niqab in public places like parks and
streets; Denmark fines anyone found wearing a niqab in public; half of Germany’s 16 states have banned
teachers from wearing headscarves and the southern state of Bavaria has banned niqab in schools, poll-
ing stations, universities and government offices; several towns in Italy have banned niqab; in Spain,
Barcelona and two small towns in Catalonia have banned niqab in public spaces like municipal offices,
public markets and libraries; in Switzerland one canton banned niqab in public. (BBC News, 2018.)
2 In standard English dictionaries the first definition of veil is “a piece of more or less transparent
material, usually attached to a hat or headdress, used to conceal or protect a woman’s face and head
(Collins)”, which is how it is most commonly usually used in English, besides the phrase “to take
the veil” when becoming a nun.
3 Let me be clear: I am not advocating that every television show that uses headcovers as costumes is
referencing Muslims or orientalism. I am making this case in relation to Stargate SG-1 and Merlin
because of the way the costume designers cut and stitched the veils I focus on.
4 This region is typically known as the Middle East, a Eurocentric concept I avoid. The designation
is not a geographic one, but a spatial one first coined in the early 1900s to designate a part of the
world in its relationship to Britain.
5 Several episodes include mentions or flashbacks to O’Neill’s time in Iraq as a black-ops soldier
(S01E18, S02E03). There are also narrative arcs about politicians, civilians or journalists med-
dling by trying to get more information about the programme, control it or shut it down. Each time
SG1 are shown to be the wiser, smarter, better. SG1 main characters frequently put their lives at
risk to save an alien woman from being raped, or villagers being killed. These fictional themes not
only ignore the military’s widespread sexual harassment problem (Philipps 2019), they also echo
political and media discourse about the US’s global role as “policeman” (Binns 2017; Alsultanay
2012: 101–2). The official Stargate website boasts about the close “relationship . . . between
the Stargate franchise and the United States Air Force,” detailing how the Airforce assigned an
“Entertainment Liaison” Officer, who read scripts, procured equipment and sent personnel to act
as extras, and provided sets, including real-life military base Cheyenne Mountain, from which
the fictional Stargate programme is meant to operate and is an anchoring external shot during
the show (https://www.stargatecommand.co/articles/looking-back-stargates-unique-relationship-
us-military). In 2004, Richard Dean Anderson, an executive producer who also plays the lead
Colonel O’Neill, was honoured at an Air Force Anniversary Dinner for the show’s “continuous
positive depiction of the Air Force.” (https://archive.is/20121212202328/http://www.af.mil/news/
story.asp#selection-643.142–643.188)

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170 REORIENT

6 Season 10, episode 6 is about the main characters vetting a TV show’s film script that is based on
the real Stargate programme.
7 In their analysis of this episode Millward and Dodd (2012: 32) mention it as an example of aliens
who try to impose patriarchy on Samantha Carter who is otherwise empowered in the feminist
utopia that is SG1, and Donker and Yorke (2018: 738, 742, 745), in spite of recognising orientalist
and colonial themes in SG1, mention this episode three times only to remark in passing that the
SG1 team leave the people on this planet with “nascent feminism.”
8 It is possible the producers realised the problems with this episode, because according to a fan site,
this episode is rarely shown in reruns, though was part of the show while it was on Netflix. https://
stargate.fandom.com/wiki/Emancipation.
9 Meredith (2015: 168) suggests Gwen is a representation of the current Queen of England.
10 Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pointing out a connection in Western culture between a hoodie and
criminality: “From its association with punk and hip-hop to skater culture, the hoodie has a history of being
adopted by youth-driven communities once relegated to the fringes, imbuing it with an iconoclastic, some-
times criminal, subtext. Mainstream fashion may embrace it as practical article of clothing, but it’s never
lost that edge.” https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/the-history-of-the-hoodie-237791/.
11 Images from this episode at https://www.gateworld.net/gallery/displayimage.php?album=103
&pid=25652#top_display_media.
12 In Québec, during the pandemic, a woman could walk into a hospital wearing a surgical mask,
have her identity confirmed by health records on a computer and receive service without needing
to remove the mask; a Muslim woman in niqab accompanying her would be required by law to
remove her face veil (Stansbury 2020).
13 Bourke (2014) mentions without comment the white veils the planet’s inhabitants wear.

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