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Abstract
Engaging with a figure that came to operate as a powerful cultural signifier of otherness in debates over migrant/Muslim integration across the West, the ‘veiled woman’; the paper questions the idea of agency that inheres in the contemporary feminist discourses on Muslim veil. After showing the shortcomings and adverse effects of two dominant readings of the Muslim veil, as a symbol of women's subordination to men, or as an act of resistance to Western hegemony, it explores an alternative avenue drawing on both the poststructuralist critique of the humanist subject and feminist intersectional theorising to answer the question of what kind of conception of agency can help us to think about the agency of the veiled woman without binding a priori the meaning of her veiling to the teleology of emancipation, whether feminist or anti-imperialist.
Acknowledgements
I thank anonymous reviewers and Ann Denis for their incisive comments.
Notes
1. Unlike the women's movements which had to deal, for several decades now, with hegemonic uses of the ‘women's question’ to legitimise colonial domination and exclusion of racialised minorities from citizenship, for the global LGBT/queer movements the incorporation of their ‘cause’ and rhetoric into the sexual and racial politics of the Western nationalism and imperialism represents a new political moment. See CitationPuar.
2. Much of the literature uses synonymously veil, hijab and headscarf, which are distinguished from other forms of more covering Islamic dress such as jilbab, niqab and burqa. I conform to this use.
3. One notorious formulation of this antagonistic frame is CitationOkin's ‘multiculturalism vs. Feminism’.
4. For a recent questioning of agency in the context of religious submission, see Mack; Hollywood (“Gender”); Avishai; Bracke; and the groundbreaking work of Mahmood, offering an invaluable critique of the conflation of agency with resistance, which remains, unlike the subordination frame, largely uncontested.
5. Alternative Biblical and Quranic reinterpretations proposed by feminist theologians aim precisely to reappropriate religion.
6. For the Habermasian feminist philosopher Seyla Benhabib, feminism cannot afford to adopt the rhetoric of the ‘death of the subject’ and reject notions such as agency, autonomy and selfhood (Mackenzie and Stoljar 28). Departing from the orthodox humanism relying on the Kantian conception of the subject as independent from the social world, and hence capable of being the sole author of her own actions, Benhabib's liberal approach to agency sees humans as profoundly situated, embedded in social life and discourse which condition their personhood and agency. Yet her situated subject constituted through a complex net of social relations still bears the trace of pre-discursive self (however small), which remains the source of agency (CitationBarvosa-Carter 125).
7. Michèle André, the Secretary of State for Women's Rights declared: “adolescent girls should not become the object of controversies that are beyond them, and the Republican school should not be submitted to religious pressures of fathers and brothers” (“Affaire” 14).
8. From an anthropological perspective, the native/indigenous informant is an intercultural mediator translating her culture for the researcher/outsider, hence the term ‘cultural insider’.
9. Such as, Ayaan Hirsi Ali (Netherlands), Necla Kelek and Seyran Ates (Germany), Irshad Mandji (Canada) and Fadela Amara and Chahdortt Djavann (France).
10. Neither Whores, Nor Doormats/Submissive.
11. I draw here on stimulating conceptualisations by CitationCollins (299), who defines it as “the overall organization of hierarchical power relations for any society” having “(1) a particular arrangement of intersecting systems of oppression, e.g. race, social class, gender […]; and (2) a particular organization of its domains of power, e.g. structural, disciplinary, hegemonic, and interpersonal”.
12. Yet we should remind that the Butlerian approach's capacity to transcend the subordination/resistance frame has been called into question, because of her propensity to read as politically positive resistant/subversive resignification processes, for instance, agencies. See CitationHollywood (“Performativity” 107) and Mahmood (19–22).
13. CitationPritchard (278) makes a similar claim in her materialist account of ‘relative agency’. I prefer the term ‘intersectional agency’, for I specifically attempt to bring the normative and empirical insights of intersectionality to supplement the poststructuralist conception.
14. As pointed out by CitationMcNay (191), Butler herself acknowledged this lack in her work.