Safiyya Hosein is a Ph.D. candidate in the joint program in Communication and Culture at Ryerson University and York University in Toronto. She is an intersectional feminist scholar who specializes in Muslim superhero representation and Muslim audiences. Her dissertation project is an audience study of young adult participatory Muslim consumers of Muslim comic book superheroes and she is a recipient of the RBC Immigrant, Diversity and Inclusion Project research grant. She was chosen by Vice Media’s Motherboard for their “Humans of the Year” series for both her dissertation project and comic book writing in 2017. She can be reached at shosein30@gmail.com. The Popular Culture Studies Journal, Vol. 7, No. 2 Copyright © 2019 56 The “Worlding” of the Muslim Superheroine: An Analysis of Ms. Marvel’s Kamala Khan SAFIYYA HOSEIN Muslim women have been a source of speculation for Western audiences from time immemorial. At first eroticized in harem paintings, they later became the quintessential image of subservience: a weakling to be pitied and rescued from savage Brown men. Current depictions of Muslim women have ranged from the oppressed archetype in mainstream media with films such as The Stoning of Soraya M (2008) to comedic veiled characters in shows like Little Mosque on the Prairie (2012). One segment of media that has recently offered promising attempts for destabilizing their image has been comics and graphic novels which have published graphic memoirs that speak to the complexity of Muslim identity as well as superhero comics that offer a range of Muslim characters from a variety of cultures with different levels of religiosity. This paper explores the emergence of the Muslim superheroine in comic books by analyzing the most developed Muslimah (Muslim female) superhero: the rebooted Ms. Marvel superhero, Kamala Khan, from the Marvel Comics Ms. Marvel series. The analysis illustrates how the reconfiguration of the Muslim female archetype through the “worlding” of the Muslim superhero continues to perpetuate an imperialist agenda for the Third World. This paper uses Gayatri Spivak’s “worlding” which examines the “othered” natives and the global South as defined through Eurocentric terms by imperialists and colonizers. By interrogating Kamala’s representation, I argue that her portrayal as a “moderate” Muslim superheroine with Western progressive values can have the effect of reinforcing