Muslim Women, Transnational Feminism and the Ethics of Pedagogy

Contested Imaginaries in Post-9/11 Cultural Practice

Lisa K. Taylor, Jasmin Zine, Lisa K. Taylor, Jasmin Zine

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317683056
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Feminism & Feminist Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

Following a long historical legacy, Muslim women's lives continue to be represented and circulate widely as a vehicle of intercultural understanding within a context of the "war on terror." Following Edward Said's thesis that these cultural forms reflect and participate in the power plays of empire, this volume examines the popular and widespread production and reception of Muslim women's lives and narratives in literature, poetry, cinema, television and popular culture within the politics of a post-9/11 world. This edited collection provides a timely exploration into the pedagogical and ethical possibilities opened up by transnational, feminist, and anti-colonial readings that can work against sensationalized and stereotypical representations of Muslim women. It addresses the gap in contemporary theoretical discourse amongst educators teaching literary and cultural texts by and about Muslim Women, and brings scholars from the fields of education, literary and cultural studies, and Muslim women's studies to examine the politics and ethics of transnational anti-colonial reading practices and pedagogy. The book features interviews with Muslim women artists and cultural producers who provide engaging reflections on the transformative role of the arts as a form of critical public pedagogy.

Part I
Transnational Anticolonial Feminist Reading Practices

Introduction to Transnational Anticolonial Feminist Reading Practices

These chapters exemplify new modalities and strategies for reading the broad range of literary, cinematic and cultural work by and about Muslim and Arab women today: this includes increasingly ubiquitous Orientalist narratives as well as resistant interventions circulating within transnational and regional multidisciplinary cultural fields and flows.

Reading across the postcolonial archive, MacDonald tracks particular tropes through which Muslim women are marked and their visibility constructed through early 20th-century French postcards of unveiled Algerian women, the discourses of contemporary French headscarf debates, and the literary appetite of Western liberal feminism and gendered Orientalism for the highly popular post–Gulf War genre of Muslim and Arab women authors’ confessionals.

Khan examines the complex South Asian context of cinematic production and reception in terms of the representation of Muslim femininity and masculinity within Bollywood films, focusing on Khamosh Pani (Silent Waters). Her analysis of the 2003 film highlights the ways communal violence of partition and ongoing Hindu-Muslim conflict are remembered cinematically but also traces the alignment of these gendered representations within not only local but also imperial geopolitical tensions.

Focusing on the transgressive heroine of Turkish-German filmmaker Fatih Akın’s Gegen die Wand (Head On), Eren examines the trope of the “fallen woman” as constructed within the gaze of both Western and Turkish patriarchies. She argues that Akın’s mise-en-scène and its references to the art of Edward Hopper constitute a critique of the reformation of metaphysical and moral frontiers in a post-9/11 social and political order as it is configured particularly in Europe.

Olwan conducts a close reading of Palestinian American spoken-word poet Suheir Hammad’s “First Writing Since,” focusing on the poem’s complex ethical address, which convokes nonmonolithic, antiracist, anti-imperial, and humanist formations of belonging and solidarity that resist the War on Terror’s hyperbolic politics of fear and civilizational vendetta.

Drawing from literary, cinema, media, and cultural studies, each of these scholars conducts a careful analysis to build an anticolonial transnational feminist reading practice that can enrich the teaching, critical deconstruction and appreciation of these dynamic genres.

1 Sur/Veil

The Veil as Blank(et) Signifier

Megan MacDonald

Colonialism wants everything to come from it.

—Frantz Fanon, “Algeria Unveiled”

Genealogy is gray, meticulous, and patiently documentary.

—Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”

Concerned with the body of and in the nation, this chapter tracks the movements of “visibly” Muslim women via the hijab and surveillance, examining French intransigence and the postcolonial scene in France and in other sites. This is made possible by connecting a constellation of scenes involving the Other woman: colonial postcards in transit; the headscarf debate in France and national belonging; liberal Western feminists and their responses to both the hijab and Islam; and the ways bestselling books depicting the Other woman travel like colonial postcards, scattering a postcolonial archive that places women both at the center and the margins. The current debate in the West over Muslim women continues to focus on questions of veiling and oppression. On one side of the debate sit self-appointed “authentic” voices and “native informants” who deem the veil oppressive and call for its disappearance. On the other side, there are new versions of Orientalist and colonialist discourses revived, paradoxically, by liberal feminist critiques of domination of Other women. A genealogy of Western feminists congregates around the veil, from Simone de Beauvoir in the 1950s and Kate Millet in the 1970s to Geraldine Brooks and Martha Nussbaum in the 1990s. Going against these readings are theorists such as Gayatri Spivak, Judith Butler, and Joan Scott.

Examining the veil as a purported marker of difference in the West opens up connections between surveillance, desire, terror, and resistance. The geographic scope of this article moves between Mediterranean sites to the US and Canada, and to an Iran that is both real and imagined, before traveling back to France. Serving as a blank(et) signifier, the veil both encompasses discourses, refusing specificity and allowing for “blanket statements,” and serves as a muting device for alternative voices. That is, the veil always already works beyond the simple binary in which to be veiled is to be oppressed and to be unveiled is to be liberated and modern at the same time. The veil also travels, always ending up lost.

Following the traveling veil involves reconstructing a complex genealogy: Such a genealogical project revisits Frantz Fanon’s “Algeria Unveiled” (1965) as an instance of women’s resistance in the colony, then moves to the ex-metropole and the ban on religious symbols in French public schools where postcolonial France reveals its inability both to mourn a lost colonial past and “assimilate” those it used to rule, and arrives at Iranian-American writer Azadeh Moaveni’s (2005) memoir Lipstick Jihad, where performative citizenship is on display in Tehran and Manhattan. Such a genealogical approach to the question of the veil moves beyond the notion of veil as a screen for Western fantasies (where fear and desire are in constant slippage) as well as beyond calls for rescuing women. What it does call for is exchange and solidarity between disciplines, texts, and practices rather than a complicity with the rhetoric of a global “War on Terror” and military-industrial agendas (see Burwell, this collection).

Before arriving at issues of representation in Moaveni’s memoir, I offer a scattering of student exam responses from a second-year undergraduate course titled “Women and Identity” at a liberal arts college in Canada. The exam responses revolve around Muslim women, veiling, and Islam.¹ A friend who received the following exam responses sent an e-mail with the subject line: “This is what we have to deal with”:

1. People think veiling is oppressive because if immigrating to a country where veiling isn’t very common people look at women in veils to be either; oppressed, or a terrorist. Veiling in the US is very much a risky thing. There is the stereotype that goes along with veiling terrorist. So why do people continue to veil if it brings such negative thoughts? Because people also find veiling to be liberating. It is very mysterious and leaves it up to your imagination about what the person looks like under the veil. Men find it to be sexy and mysterious. . . . In one of the articles it talks about some Muslim women veiling in order to hide their appearance. They feel as though they are ugly but veiling covers this and men are attracted to this.
2. Harem Girls are Muslim females who use their ethnicity and the veil as a way of being sexy. . . . Harem Girls are Muslim but are considered sexy.
3. The third is that ideal of a terrorist. When we see a Muslim man we may not immediately assume he is for sure Muslim and therefore a terrorist but when we see these women we automatically know they are practicing Muslims therefore we in the Western world think of 9/11.²
4. Another argument against the veil is that it actually tempts men MORE because it leaves so much to the imagination and makes me want to explore what’s hidden beneath. Muslims in the past have actually argued that this is true but is actually a good thing because it ensures even the ugliest woman will be married (to the unsuspecting man).

The discourses here cover race, religion, beauty, and the Other. “People” is used, meaning Western, white, Canadian, or perhaps North American, Christian—non-Muslim for sure. The veil surfaces, “sexy” and “mysterious.” It “covers” and “hides,” repelling and “attract[ing]” the “unsuspecting man.” Why is the terrorist veiled? It is connected to “ethnicity” and to “female.” It signifies the harem, where we find “Muslim but. . . sexy.” So Muslim is not sexy, usually, but can be made so, when covered up, uncovered, and then proffered as access to the forbidden. “We” and “me” surface, as does nationality and the imagined US across the border. The veil is a marker, something to be argued against, a known quantity as one student offers: “we automatically know,” this we the people.

The veil gathers different significations depending on the spectator and the location, offering a constellation of readings that, for the purpose of this reading, shuttle between three scenes. The first scene is one of surveillance, revealing the limits of its own power in the form of impenetrability. The second is desire, tracking the ways in which the veiled woman mobilizes desire via the gaze. The third scene combines terror and resistance, here linked to desire. The present discourse revolving around Islam and terrorism has reserved a special level of surveillance for the veiled woman (perhaps corresponding to the color-coded terror-level scale). Surveillance works like a cleaving, to and from: Woman is society, in that she bears the cultural weight of society and culture, and must visibly present as such, and society points to itself: Society creates itself through surveillance and exclusion. The community arises in its task to collectively watch over one an/other.

Frantz Fanon’s (1965) “Algeria Unveiled” acts as a historical counter to some of the student responses. He cites the case of colonial Algeria, where the veil acts as a counterpunch to outside surveillance (surveillance is always both inside and outside). The veil resists surveillance in this context, denies this visage-as-guarantee: “This woman who sees without being seen frustrates the colonizer. There is no reciprocity. She does not yield herself, does not give herself, does not offer herself. . . . The European faced with an Algerian woman wants to see. He reacts in an aggressive way before this limitation of his perception” (Fanon, 1959, p. 44). What happens when the European “he” is a “she”? The female gaze (masquerading as masculinist) demands “reciprocity,” the right to “surveillance,” and denounces the “limitation” of the veil putting forth no self-critical limitation of its own subject position. As Judith Butler cautions: “Feminist critique ought to explore the totalizing claims of a masculinist signifying economy, but also remain self-critical with respect to the totalizing gestures of feminism” (1999, pp. 18–19). While Fanon’s observations are insightful, again, the subaltern does not speak here. Fanon offers no Algerian women’s voices— with or without the veil—and if he did, he would be appropriating them. He points to what one must “imagine” they would put forth in dreamwork. Looking for voices via quotation marks in the piece offers up only “Europeans,” but a powerful Algerian woman is portrayed and admired.³ Resistance surfaces under the veil and the woman becomes a weapon in the hands of men. The Algerian scene combines surveillance, desire, terror, and resistance.

Paper Doubles: The Colonial Postcard

Another example of the veiled/unveiled Algerian woman surfaces, the one who “sees without being seen” (Fanon). France-based Algerian writer and publisher Mallek Alloula (1986) revisits the unveiled Algerian woman as portrayed in French colonial postcards from the early 20th century in The Colonial Harem. His work is instructive if we see the postcards as the Other-ed side of colonial existence in Algeria. Alloula collects French representations of colonized life in Algeria as evidenced by colonial postcards offering fantasies of exotic Algerian women, at turns veiled and nude. The staged scenes offer cheap fantasies to the French in tired tropes. The veiled woman is portrayed as inaccessible, and thus must be made accessible: Women are staged in various forms of undress, at turns bored and coquettish, playing with the veil and baring breasts for the camera. In his essay accompanying the photographs, Alloula brilliantly connects the photographer’s frustrated eye when confronted with the camera to the veiled woman’s gaze.⁴ The postcard “becomes the poor man’s phantasm: for a few pennies, [the postcard can] display racks full of dreams. The postcard is everywhere, covering all the colonial space” (Alloula, 1986, p. 4). As its paper double, the postcard becomes the veil’s opposite or challenge writ small: It must cover all of the colonial space to counter the frustrating and impenetrable veil, covering to uncover. The postcards, as Barbara Harlow argues in her introduction to Alloula’s text, are meant to “represent Algeria and the Algerian woman” and offer “the Frenchman’s phantasm of the Oriental female and her inaccessibility behind the veil in the forbidden harem” (Harlow, 1986, p. xiv). The French “cover” all of the space—their property—with their ideal or imagined version of the Other, the compliant and visible female. Alloula notes that the “Orient” “has fascinated and disturbed Europe for a long time. It has been its glittering imaginary but also its mirage” (p. 1). In the desert mirage under the influence of a feverish colonialism (as the colonizer is always ill) this shimmering and shuddering mirage becomes the dream of a mirror via the postcard. The postcard reveals both the violence of portrayal and its transit, but also the missing mirror. The colonizer dreams of water in the desert, the unveiled woman; he arrives at the site of shimmering heat, is left with paper. In transit, the unveiled exotic woman is surveilled by the recipients of postcards, and all those whose hands the postcards touch. Further on in France’s imperial conquest, the postcard becomes an ID card. Once the French realized that Algerian women had joined the resistance to French rule and were dangerous to the colony, the French government instituted photo ID cards in 1960, forcing Algerian women to unveil for the purposes of the camera, this time for outright surveillance.⁵

Harlow cites Fanon’s “historic dynamism of the veil” (1986, p. x) in terms of the Algerian Revolution of the 1950s and 60s. The appearance of the veil changed according to strategies for resistance against French colonizers: The women hid weapons under their clothing/veil when they were allowed to pass unseen, and then unveiled in order to pass unseen again.⁶ We can move this concept forward citing the oxymoronic stagnant dynamism of the veil presently at work in terms of Western liberal discourse and not...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction The Contested Imaginaries of Reading Muslim Women and Muslim Women Reading Back
• Part I Transnational Anticolonial Feminist Reading Practices
• Part II The Politics of Production and Reception
• Part III Transformative Pedagogies
• Part IV Reflections on Cultural Production
• List of Contributors
• Index