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Flashcards by meriem bough, updated more than 1 year ago
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Created by meriem bough
over 6 years ago
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| Question | Answer |
| I suggest that within these parameters the veil acts to eliminate expressions of both difference within and unity of female identity; it both defines and disguises the individual self. 2 | Oppositional viewpoints revolving around binaries of oppression/opportunity, incarceration/insurrection, denial/expression of identity, and entrapment/agency, are contingent upon cultural and individual positioning. |
| My discussion of these problems of identity and agency incorporates psychoanalytic theory, cultural theory, postmodern and postcolonial studies and feminism. | Within this complex setting of Franco-Arab-Berber culture, Djebar, along with other women writers, such as Leïla Sebbar, have brought the issues of women’s identity and freedom into a contemporary context, in which women seek to define themselves as more than a colonial or patriarchal ‘other’. 6 |
| If men build their world upon fear is it not possible for women of the new millennium to find an alternate space of their own making, where they may regain agency? My own conclusion as to whether or not veiling indicates or eradicates agency and identity involves the important question of women’s ability to make choices. Both veiling and unveiling can be liberating or suppressive, depending on the context and on where and how women see themselves dominated.7 | The image of the mask for postcolonial critic Homi Bhabha is one of an identity of ‘no presence’, a trope of ‘unrepresentable identity’ (Richards, 1994: 294). In terms of the anthropology of art, David Richards also concludes that the mask has ‘an aura of ambivalence and ambiguity about it. It is a disguise, it hides what we most need to know’ (Richards, 1994: 295). |
| By extension, in my present analysis, much of the literature written by women in the Arab Middle East or Hindu India cannot be prejudged as necessarily ‘feminist protest’ citing the veil as the foremost indicator of social ills. For many writers, the veil is a given fact: it is not highlighted as a specific issue but passes as part of the traditional milieu.9 | The relationship of self to other is the concern of both disciplines: ‘getting to know the other’ has long been the raison d’être of anthropology, while a literary text both enunciates the cultural collision and allows the ‘other’ a voice of resistance (Daniel and Peck, 1996). Although both ask questions about the way meanings are constructed, literature allows on a subjective basis for the ‘other’ (whether gendered or racial) to find a space of freedom in which to express his or her identity.9-10 |
| (RE)PRESENTING THE VEIL | The veil, as Judy Mabro (1991) warns, is such a powerful symbol that it can blind us into generalisations.10 |
| It is important from the outset to understand that to speak of ‘the veil’ in fact engages in a misleading reductionism; the phenomenon of veiling cannot be reduced to a single explanation or ‘solution’.10 | Similarly, while it is possible to argue that veiling is an indicator of class identity, gender inequality and/or opposition to the west, it is important to clarify who is speaking and by which standards they are measuring. Everything depends on ‘who is describing the phenomena of veiling, for whom and to what end’ (Lindisfarne-Tapper and Ingham, 1997: 14). |
| The power of the imagery of the veil ‘lies in its vacuity’ (Lindisfarne- Tapper and Ingham, 1997: 15), a concept which in itself indicates a palimpsest open to theoretical and semantic reinscription. | Azizah al-Hibri questions, ‘Why is it oppressive to wear a head scarf but liberating to wear a mini-skirt?’ (in Okin, 1999: 45). |
| 11 Writers such as Marnia Lazreg advocate an understanding of women’s experience beneath the veil, to eliminate the preconception that the veil is simply a symbol of women’s identity. She complains, Ironically, while the veil plays an inordinate role in representations of women in North Africa and the Middle East, it is seldom studied in terms of the reality that lies behind it. Women’s strategic uses of the veil and what goes on under the veil remain a mystery. (1994: 14) | While taking into account recent arguments on the dangers of generalising on topics of race and gender, the present study examines both the symbolism and practical uses of the veil in the lives of women, simultaneously attempting to avoid a stance of ‘victim feminism’. The ambiguity surrounding discourse on the veil is both in terms of reality and metaphor. This problematic ambiguity is highlighted by the many interpretations that women themselves give to the veil and to their varied reasons for its use. |
| The roots of European notions about veiling lie in nineteenthcentury attitudes on both women and the ‘orient’. In the Middle East and beyond, since the beginning of the twentieth century, the veil has been a symbol of national identity and resistance. At the present time, the issue of veiling is still at the cutting edge of political and social change. | 19 Akbar S. Ahmed suggests that Muslim women seem to be squeezed between Islamic fundamentalism and modernity, and between modernity and postmodernity ... Muslim women are frequently perceived as the most vulnerable to radical change and outside influence, the more so since the front door and the compound wall are no longer effective barriers to such forces. (Ahmed and Donnan, 1994: 14) |
| 20 In seeking to transcend the polarised western view (veiling as oppressive) and Muslim view (veiling as liberating), it is imperative that we realise that veiling is as much a response to change in the world as it is an expression of ‘religious tradition’. | Fatima Mernissi delineates the position within arch-patriarchal/religious systems, where women have been, are, and continue to be the targets of intimidation and violence, whether from regimes in power or oppositional movements that hark back to the past. It happened in Pakistan in the 1980’s; it is still going on in Iran; and today [in the early 1990s] it is happening in Algeria. Tomorrow the same thing can happen elsewhere. (1993: 174)15 |
| 21 It is relevant here to question to what extent dress defines identity. Even in the west, fashion critics examine how far ‘a piece of cloth’ can define and expose identity. | 23 To what extent can it be argued that the veiled woman acts within a sphere of agency? Is she free to initiate action, or is her action determined by the way her identity has been framed within the discourse of the veil, whether by Islamic men or western women? In her work on ‘subaltern identity’, Gayatri Spivak discusses the impossibility of women, particularly those in the ‘third world’, having agency or a voice. |
| Similarly, the figure of the veiled woman is in danger of becoming a palimpsest written over with the desires and meanings of others. It is imperative that we let ‘veiled woman’ speak for herself, if possible. Spivak, however, argues that to retrieve the lost voice of the subaltern subject is to risk complicity in an essentialist, and western, model of subjectivity that ultimately keeps the subaltern woman muted, because her speech is always improperly interpreted. | <3 Nonetheless, even if subaltern identity is irretrievable, it can be recreated through fictional texts that function to subvert rather than duplicate dominant phallocentric discourse. Fiction does recreate the historical – and contemporary – subaltern voices that otherwise might be lost. Short stories and novels (and biography) act like the ‘handprints on the wall’ of the dead satis – evidence to bear witness to the importance of the veil in relation to the identity of women. |
| Even in the early days of the new millennium, feminists are still struggling to resolve two basic questions: how to free women from the iconic function to which phallocentrism has confined them, and how to express a different, positive vision of female subjectivity. | In the context of women’s captivity within patriarchy, Gilbert and Gubar emphasise the importance of women’s liberation from social and literary confinement in both ‘male houses and male texts’ (1979: 58). |
| 25 Within the parameter of ‘female space’ women This content downloaded from are placed outside the suppressive elements of patriarchy. If we view the location of veiled women (outside male space) as equivalent to a ‘wild zone’, then through veiling women may gain access to an area of inner experience that is a psychological life force of women, a prerequisite for regaining rather than losing self-identity. | The symbolic role of the female body and clothing is paramount in any analysis of the representations of the veil. Feminist writers such as Judith Butler stress the importance of the signifier of the body to a feminist analysis of power relations in societies that are founded through a set of violations. |
| European feminists such as Hélène Cixous and Julia Kristeva claim that the whole basis of women’s writing, l’écriture féminine, is the female body. All women, according to this argument, regardless of geo-historical position – and behind a veil or not – have been effectively silenced. Teresa de Laurentis has expanded upon the problem: ‘Feminism discovered the non-being of woman: the paradox of being at once captive and absent in discourse, constantly spoken of but of itself inaudible or inexpressible’ (1990: 115). Luce Irigaray, meanwhile, insists that women’s difference must be written into culture and the Symbolic Order in order to challenge woman’s ‘othering’ by western patriarchal culture and thus her absence as woman (1985). | <3 Reviewing these feminist critics reveals a cross-cultural concern about women, the female body, and phallocentric power relations. Arguing from a more postcolonial stance, Kadiatu Kanneh writes that the place of the body in feminist or cultural debate has become so complicated in contexts of gender and race that words like ‘identity’, ‘subjectivity’ and ‘desire’ are anything but simple. (‘Agency’ could be added to this list of terms, since what constructs and comprises agency must also be determined by culture and to some extent class.) Kanneh tackles the problematic figure of the ‘third world woman’ arguing that contradictory representations by Europeans have misrepresented the colonised black woman, and made her body ‘an unstable arena of scrutiny and meaning’ (1999: 145). In cases of Islamic nationalism (as we shall see in Chapter 5 on Algeria) the veil becomes a substitute for the female body – just as the female body becomes a synecdoche for a nation. |
| 27 Yet why do men assign such importance to women’s bodies and clothing in the context of nationalism, and why is such ideological weight given to the veil? Cynthia Enloe identifies five major reasons why the veil and sexual purity are important in terms of nationalist causes. She suggests that women are: 1) the community’s/nation’s most valuable possessions, 2) the principal vehicles for transmitting values to the next generation, 3) bearers of the next generation (‘nationalist wombs’), 4) the members of the community most vulnerable to defilement and exploitation by oppressive alien rulers, and 5) the most susceptible to ‘assimilation and co-option by insidious outsiders’ (1990: 52). She notes that in every case women are passive vehicles for male-imposed meaning. | Demonstrating their affiliation with the postmodern trend of rejecting any theories of essentialism, feminists in the last decades have grown wary of any mention of an ‘essential’ nature of the female, |
| and advocate a feminism that seeks to reflect the wide diversity of women’s experiences and views | Since Simone de Beauvoir’s groundbreaking work The Second Sex, in which she voiced the now famous phrase ‘One is not born, but rather one becomes a woman’ (1973: 301), gender has become a cultural rather than biologically-given entity. Judith Butler endorses de Beauvoir’s condemnation of universalist theories arguing: ‘When the essential feminine is finally articulated, and what we have been calling “women” cannot see themselves in its terms, what then are we to conclude? That these women are deluded, or that they are not women at all?’ (in Benhabib and Cornell, 1987: 142). |
| Moreover, recent antagonisms and distinctions between ‘first and third world’ feminists (such as arguments put forward by Kanneh, Kabbani and others) are fast being eroded. Afro-American feminist writer bell hooks has long advocated a solidarity that will embrace differences. In her important essay ‘Sisterhood: Political Solidarity between Women’, hooks argues that women do not need to eradicate difference to share solidarity. We do not need to share common oppression to fight equally to end oppression. We do not need anti-male sentiments to bond us together, so great is the wealth of experience, culture and ideas we have to share with one another. We can be united by our appreciation for diversity. (in Kouramy et al., 1995: 104) | Other recent arguments have put forward a concept of transnational feminism, refusing to accept difference as an absolute value and suggesting that it must be understood as relational. New forms of connection and solidarity across nations will do justice to the differences that force women apart while they attempt to speak and act together. Women’s agency ‘anchored in the practice of thinking of oneself as part of feminist collectives’ is now discussed in terms of the relationship between local and universal, so that: |
| To talk about feminist praxis in global contexts would involve shifting the unit of analysis from local, regional, and national culture to relations and processes across cultures. Grounding analysis on particular, local praxis is necessary, but we need to understand the process in larger, cross-cultural processes. | This international dimension of the feminist preoccupation with identity, transcending cultural boundaries, is significant to my present study especially as cultures become increasingly hybrid. Within this dynamic, the problematic of the veil has far-reaching importance, both individual and national. |
| The postcolonial emphasis on the search for identity has more recently been superseded by Homi Bhabha’s concept of culture being ‘less about a pre-given identity ... and more about the activity of negotiating ... often conflicting demands for collective self-expression’ (1999: 38–43).23 Bhabha regards people in cultures today as living in an ‘in-between state’, in a state of suspension of time, space and identity. | 30 This state of both physical and temporal ‘in-between-ness’ could also describe the position of the woman behind the veil, who is always located in in-between space, an interloper or a ‘thief in male space’ (Djebar, 1980: 138). |
| Yet, as Bhabha emphasises, ‘we should remember that it is the “inter” – the cutting edge of translation and negotiation, the in-between space – that carries the burden of the meaning of culture’ (1994: 1–2). The veil creates such an ambiguous space; it defines identity and yet simultaneously removes any identity. | This conceptualisation of the veil as a borderline, a barrier between spaces and between identities could be argued to provide a possible site for women’s agency. Some writers have advocated the veil for its associated sense of privacy and freedom, the liberty of seeing while |
| remaining unseen. | It is time for women to act as agents of change, in redefining social space and the artefacts of culture and tradition. Social space has traditionally been branded by the binary logic of inside/outside, female/male, trivial/important; now women can redefine their areas of agency to upset, or even reverse this logic. |
| Since experience itself comprises both external and internal, subjective and objective phases of activity, this shift could come about through a prioritisation of internal, subjective space as a place of agency. | Psychoanalytic theory: Freud, fear, and the gaze Freudian psychoanalytic theory was arguably the basis of many masculinist attitudes to women in the late nineteenth century and the twentieth century |
| Freud’s discussion of the gaze in particular relates most centrally to the problematic of veiling. To summarise briefly: in an essentially patriarchal theory, Freud claims that the exclusive rights of the gaze belong to men. In his ‘Three Essays on Sexuality’, he isolates woman’s basic quality as one of lack. In the patriarchal subconscious, the woman, because of her lack, symbolises a threat of castration. In this situation, based on both fear and obsession, man is able to play out his fantasies and obsessions, since he is the bestower of meaning, the rightful owner of language and the symbolic order. | 32 Freud discusses ‘scopophilia’, the pleasures inherent within other people being treated as the objects of a controlling gaze. Woman is the silent image upon which man superimposes his own meaning through control of the gaze. While man seeks to define and control woman through the gaze, woman becomes the silent spectacle, the passive object of desire. The male pleasure-in-looking projects both a role for woman as erotic object while also giving the man a satisfying sense of omnipotence. Woman goes ‘on display’ for the gaze and the enjoyment of men. For feminists, Freud’s analysis of woman is both frustrating and oppressive. Yet it reveals one explanation of the roots of oppression under the phallocentric order. |
| Alexandra Warwick and Dani Cavallaro have discussed the veil in its paradoxical role of both concealing and exposing: concealing the truth by giving ‘familiar realities an unknown turn’ and as a means of exposing since ‘defamiliarisation enforces discovery’ (1998: 134). | The male characters in the stories long for this moment, both for the revelation it affords, and the opportunity to gaze unrestricted upon the object of desire – since (if we follow Freud and, later, Foucault) the gaze secures power over the object gazed on. |
| 33 A Freudian reading suggests that woman as the other harbours a secret, a mystery that is both desirable and dangerous for man. The signifier of ‘woman’ negates the ‘reality’: an enigma that raises the question ‘is there any reality behind the female facade at all?’ The signified seems to be ultimately deferred, or an empty void | Wilde’s story, the woman is denounced as having ‘no truth’, which equates with ‘no reality’. The female stepping outside (here, literally) the female sphere threatens men, since women have no right to partake in the liberties of society that are open only to men. While Gerald enjoys the erotic voyeurism and masculine power of his gaze, he denies ‘his beloved’ the right to action, truth and language (all three belonging to man). |
| 35 Freud defines the uncanny (das Unheimlich) as ‘the name for everything that ought to have remained secret and hidden but has come to light’ (Freud in Jay, 1994: 332). | This fear of the female return of the gaze is found in Islam as well as in the work of Freud. (Nawal El Saadawi’s short story ‘The Death of His Excellency the Ex-Minister’ (in El Saadawi, 1987) is analysed in this light in Chapter 3. In this story, the minister is driven to madness and death through a woman usurping the power of the gaze, which is legitimately male.) |
| The perceived female aggression – in the example of El Saadawi’s ‘Ex-Minister’, suggested in a woman’s refusal to acknowledge shame and inferiority – is threatening both to the man as individual and to society as a whole. In Islam, woman is the symbol of fitna, ‘the embodiment of destruction, the symbol of disorder, the polarization of the uncontrollable, the representative of the dangers of sexuality and its rampant disruptive potential’ (Mernissi, 1975: 130). | Women must be restrained (and veiled) to protect men from an irresistible sexual attraction that will inevitably lead to social chaos. The Freudian concept is directly comparable: ‘the placement of a veil over a woman’s face works to localise and hence contain dissimulation, to keep it from contaminating the male subject’ (Doane, 1989: 141). |
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