Sahar Ghumkhor - The Political Psychology of the Veil : The Impossible Body

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I embarked on this project to address the questions that have always haunted me as a Muslim growing up in the west. Why does a piece of cloth over a womans head generate such political and emotional disturbance in the west? And just as peculiarly, how is it that the Muslim woman is discussed and debated with such assurance and conviction?

These questions have always appeared in some shape or form throughout my life despite me not having worn any type of veil. Whether it was always having to explain the reason I did not wear the proper uniform in high school (long skirts instead of the usual short ones in junior years or swimming wear or togs during swimming) or in the climate of post-9/11, the all-too-frequent conversation that paradoxically identified me both as a question and an affirmation of an accepted and unquestioned truth: where was I from? And the emphatic comments: You must be glad that you are living in New Zealand! or How fortunate that you no longer have to wear those ghastly veils! I never knew how to respond to strangers, acquaintances and friends, declaring their moral positions on countries far removed from their lives. Their extraordinary certainty about what I should be feeling left me perplexed. Later in life, I realised it was not theotheringof who I was which left me unsettled. Rather, it was the certainty aboutwhatI came from, the knowledge of my culture and its people that disturbed me. A certainty I never entertained myself. Moreover, I was most deeply unsettled by the expectation that I contained a desire toescapethis culture; an expectation that came to me through images of veiled women with stern and intimidating bearded faces of Muslim men. The veils menacing presence in these conversations, and the recurring sense of being the known, have motivated my inquiry. These familiar scenes and the feelings, evoked and remembered, have remained within and alongside me in the writing of this book. I have aimed here to trace these assumptions and certainties of my desire to escape to the expected destination of my liberation.

The subject of the veil has by now been analysed by numerous scholars. Given the burgeoning corpus on the veil, there remains this pressing question: is there a need for another? Has the veil been successfully situated, dissected, put back together,made known? Much of this literature on the veil admirably and cogently unpacks the political and historical dimensions of my persistent questions: colonialisms mission to civilise the Muslim through unveiling and through its contemporary campaign of racialisation of Muslims; the policing of bodies and national identities in the pursuit of a specific modernity and notion of self; the underpinnings of discourses that produce the veiled woman and the racialised modes in which Islam is always presented as an irreconcilable other. These scholarly approaches have taken to task the essentialist representations of Muslim women as abject, voiceless, victims of their culture. The counter discourse of veiling has also emphasised choice and agency to push for a more liberating meaning.