Unveiling the Veil: Gendered Discourses and the (In)Visibility of the Female Body in France.

Women’s Studies, 33:629–649, 2004Copyright © Taylor & Francis Inc.ISSN: 0049-7878 printDOI: 10.1080/00497870490464440

629

Unveiling the Veil: Gendered Discourses and the (In)Visibility of the Female Body in France

MICHELA ARDIZZONI

Indiana University, Bloomington, IN

INTRODUCTION

Much of the discussion that surrounded the question of the veilin France following the 1989 in-famous affaire du foulard, hasbeen couched in terms of restricting binaries: secularism-Islam,Us-Them, East-West. There have been few attempts to look atthe resurgence of the veil among Muslim schoolgirls in Frenchpublic schools outside of the politicized discourse of “Islam isreversing the colonizing process.” There has been only sporadicreflection on the significance of dress, and other bodily markers,in the contestation and re-negotiation of group identities withinconflicting cultural spaces. Rather, the predominant discourse,which is consistent with the Orientalist mystique of the Orient asthe “Other,” has revolved around the threat Islam and its dresscode pose to the cultural integrity of French society.

The underlying premise behind such a parochial interpreta-tion is the notion of identity as a bounded, already completedentity. This is mainly due to the limiting political discourse thathas surrounded the veil affair ever since it was made public.Following Stuart Hall’s argument that identities are contextualand relational positionings which are never fixed but always inprocess, I argue that the decision of these young women to wear

Address correspondence to Michela Ardizzoni, Via Coremmo 14F, 6900Lugano, Switzerland. E-mail: [email protected]

630 MICHELA ARDIZZONI

the veil should not be exclusively viewed as a religious statementwith an intent to subvert the status quo in French society. Dressis an important marker of difference, and highlighting one’sreligious, cultural, or social difference is expected in a context ofmarginalization and racism. In this paper, I will probe thecultural specifics as well as the political complexities that form thebackground of this affair.

The first part of this paper will lay out the cultural premisesthat have informed the West’s encounter with the East. Here,I discuss the impact of the Orientalist project and its depictionof the East as a land of mystery and danger. The predominanceof the veil in this depiction underscores its importance as a power-ful marker of an entire system of cultural values.

In the second part, I will analyze the coverage of the “head-scarf affair” in the French popular press. Here, attention will bepaid to main themes as well as voices that seem to have informedsuch discourses. Issues of immigration and nationality, laïcité (secu-larism), and religiosity will be related to articles in Le Monde,

Le Point, and L’Express. The last section of the paper will discuss the ways in which

l’affaire du foulard is inscribed in and re-inscribes issues of (in)visi-bility and knowledge in relation to the place of the female body in(post)colonial interactions.

THE VEIL IN THE ORIENTALIST DISCOURSE

In their fervent attempts to make sense of the Orient, its peoples,customs, and beliefs, European travelers, artists, and imperialadministrators indulged in an essentializing discourse of contra-dictory perceptions of mystery, inferiority, danger, and sexuality.The East fascinated writers and artists with its mysterious worldof harems, hammams, and particularly labyrinthine medinas.Traveling across the Mediterranean became a freewheeling jour-ney for the senses, a soothing evasion from Victorian prudery and

UNVEILING THE VEIL 631

bourgeois restraints of the nineteenth century. The imagesinvoked by descriptions of powerful and despotic sheiks andsultans with many wives at their disposal and vivid renditions ofhammam suggested a new space where the male European couldindulge in sensual fantasies.

Consistent with this dual perception of the Orient, the imageof Muslim veiled women in Orientalist paintings and writingsinvoked not only women’s subjugation and the backwardness ofIslamic societies in keeping a radical sexual segregation, but alsothe mysterious and secretive—almost dangerous—erotic nature ofthat which is covered and concealed from the casual gaze. Ingres’famous painting The Turkish Bath (1862), for instance, positions theviewer in a voyeuristic attitude towards oblivious naked Arabwomen (MacMaster and Lewis).

Such instances of cultural standardization and stereotypingwere reinforced substantially as rapid changes in technology, espe-cially photography and later cinema, helped diffuse more of theseOrientalist images on a much larger scale. As presented by Mac-Master and Lewis, more than 200 feature films were shot in NorthAfrica between 1911 and 1962; similarly, numerous Orientalistfilms were produced by Hollywood studios during the same period(such as Rudolph Valentino’s Son of the Sheik (1926), Beau Geste (1926),and The Garden of Allah (1935)). Common to all these representationsis the erotic fantasy of possessing the utterly “Other” Arab woman,captured, as she is, in the voluptuous clutches of her reclusion.

Much of the eroticization in the representation of the veilsuddenly disappeared following the decolonizing campaigns ofNorth African and Middle Eastern countries. The gruesome natureof the Algerian war (1954–1962), for instance, signaled a loomingdanger that helped subvert the obsession with the sensuality ofthe veil to a new fixation with maximum veiling as a symbol ofpolitical danger. The fundamental role played by Algerianwomen in the film The Battle of Algiers, directed by Gillo Pontecorvosubverted the view of Arab women as docile and submissive andin need of salvaging. There was a growing awareness among the


French that the annexation of Algeria failed because of theimpenetrability of the Muslim private sphere, the household, ofwhich the Muslim woman is a vivid symbol. As the gatekeepers oftraditions and indigenous culture, Algerian women came to beidentified as the driving force behind the cultural resistance tocolonial (patriarchal) hegemony. The significance of the veil inthis cultural confrontation took on different proportions as it wasdiscovered that, during the Battle of Algiers, women fightingalong with the Front de Libération National (FLN) took advantageof the large folds of the haik (another form of veil) to conceal weap-ons past the control points of the French military. Pontecorvo’sfilm excels in also underscoring the reversal of Orientalist stereo-types: in fact, in a later moment of the war, the Algerian womensucceeded in carrying bombs against the French by adopting thesame dress code of the colonizer. The previous stereotype ofveiled women held captive in the confines of the harem and wait-ing for a European Prince Charming to free them at last could nolonger be sustained. The image of the Muslim veiled woman has,since then, remained captive of this new politicized view thatregards Islam as a threat to the cultural foundations of Westerncivilization. Clearly, as argued by Ahmed, “in the discourse ofwomen and the veil another discourse is inscribed, the discourseof colonial domination, the struggle against it and the class div-isions around that struggle” (Ahmed 130).

Much of the essentialization that marked the Orientalistproject has survived beyond the colonial period in slightly differ-ent guises. The 1979 Iranian Revolution accentuated the polit-icization of the veil and augmented Western people’s fears aboutIslam. Some politicians in France, a country with a sizable Muslimimmigrant community, started voicing their concerns about thethreat that North Africans might pose to French culture and iden-tity. The over-blown accusations made by Front National (FN)and its leader Jean Marie Le Pen regarding the imminent dangerof accepting Muslim immigrants in France generated a suddenlyintensive press coverage of Islam and Muslims both in Islamic


countries and in France. Critics of this stepped-up coverage agreeon its sensational nature and its fixation with extreme instances ofIslamic fundamentalism. The prevalent images of the veil, in thisparochial representation, served to legitimize some well-establishedfears about the growing presence of Islam in French society.Through fabricated photographs on the covers of widely readmagazines and newspapers that highlight the most bizarre formsof veiling or hyperveiling, the veil has become an eloquent signi-fier not only of Islamic extremism, but also of an entire culturaland religious order—Islam itself. An example that is particularlyrevealing of the tendency to forge singular images of the veil is thefront cover of Le Nouvel Observateur of February 7, 1986. For itsspecial feature story on Islam in France, the magazine choseto present a close-up picture of a veiled woman whose face iscompletely covered except for the eyes. Using an admitted studiofabrication, the editors opted for a tricolore whereby the veil waspartitioned into the three colors of the French flag. The choice ofa fictional image that, in some ways, caricaturizes and brings toan extreme the choice of the veil is in clear concordance with theOrientalist discourse that eroticizes the veiled woman and centerson her eyes as a site of mystery/danger.

THE FRENCH PRESS COVERAGE OF “THE AFFAIR”

A religious and cultural dress code has clearly become the site ofpower struggle over national, cultural, and religious identity inFrance. The Orientalist libidinal pleasures derived from unveilingthe mystery behind the veiled woman have been replaced by anideological confrontation between the cultural values of Frenchsociety and Islam, of which the veil has become a powerfulmarker, as summarized here in the words of François Bayrou,former French Minister of Education: “Our choice is integrationto make a single nation, a country, a Republic composed of dif-ferent types of people [ . . . ] The message of the Islamic movement is


that there is no law above that of Islam itself, that this mustreplace all other laws. And the symbol of that civilization is theheadscarf” (Gumbel, qtd. in Vivian).

Bayrou’s statement is a reaction to a well-publicized eventthat developed from a local school problem to a major crisis ofFrench national identity. In the fall of 1989, three young womenstudents of North African descent in a public high school in thecity of Creil defied a national policy of secularism in publicschools and refused to remove their headscarves. Their suspensionfrom the school and their insistence on respecting the dress codeof their culture gained large-scale publicity in the French media,which titled the incident the headscarf affair and initiateda heated debate over religious tolerance and Islam in France.Interestingly enough, the school principal, Ernest Chenière, aFrenchman of Antilean origins, justified his decision by arguingthat it was not the headscarf per se he wanted to condemn, ratherthe way it was worn—with provocation and defiance.

I analyzed the response of the French press to the case of thehijab, focusing particularly on three main sources—the daily news-paper Le Monde and the two weeklies L’Express and Le Point—for atotal of 29 articles. Before moving to the themes found in the press,I would like to underscore the fact that the voices heard in the arti-cles are exclusively those of men—politicians, school principals,editorialists, and religious leaders. The only female voice acknow-ledged is Danièle Mitterand (wife of the president at the time), whois mentioned for opposing the school director’s decision. As for theyoung Muslim women, they are quoted only once and very briefly.

Terminology

The question of the terminology used to refer to this piece ofclothing significantly reveals the ambiguous reactions it provoked.At least four different terms were used to refer to this cloth, but allwere later rejected in favor of a timely neologism. As commented inLe Monde, the word “veil” evokes old phantoms from the colonial


era “foulard” or headscarf, instead, ignores any nuance of religi-osity that is customarily attached to this cloth, the third term,“tchador,” is reminiscent of the Iranian fanaticism; and the lastone, “hijab,” would certainly be the most appropriate—the originaryverb in Arabic means “to block the view (of the beholder)”—yet itsounds too “Arabized” and thus too threatening to be accepted inthe common usage. What then is left for the French press toadopt? The expression “Islamic or Koranic foulard/headscarf ” iscoined purposefully for this incident. Clearly, the latter choicewould emphasize the religious origin of the garment withoutembracing its controversial implication of veiling. The linguisticcontroversy masks a more deeply rooted ambiguity over themeaning of this practice and its place in secular French society.

Laïcité vs. Religiosity

The issue of secularism is undeniably central to an understanding ofFrench society and, consequently, its response to the headscarf affair.Laïcité or secularism is a deeply entrenched value in the Frenchculture and, as such, Muslim immigrants are bound to be considereddifferent, not because Islam is by definition incompatible with laïcité,but because it is often depicted through its most intransigent forms ofinterpretation. Such episodes in contemporary France as the head-scarf affair have been narrowly interpreted as a return to traditional-ism and a reaction to modernism. As argued earlier, many Muslimwomen have turned to the veil not as a sign of their docility, butrather as a symbol of resistance against confinement both in theprivate and public realms.1 The French notion of laïcité, however,restricts religion to the private sphere and requires a turgid unifor-mity that is not permissible in some religions. Such a narrow inter-pretation that is based upon essentialized conceptions of the secularand the religious is bound to undermine cultural plurality and dis-criminate against certain ethnic groups more than others.

At the heart of a secular republic, the French school system isbased upon this secular principle and rejects any “ostentatious”


symbol of religious belonging. It comes thus as no surprise thatone of the recurrent themes found in the press is the threat thiscase might wage against secularism. As stated in Le Point, “For acentury, thanks to laïcité, the French republic has worked like avery efficient integrationist machine, able to digest migrations andmutations” (Frappart “Trois foulards et un pay” 54). Seen in thislight, wearing the hijab becomes the externalization of defiancetowards this system that aims at annihilating those differences thatcannot be assimilated. The notion of laïcité seems to be at firstchallenged by Paul Thibaud, who in L’Express writes: “Laïcité pre-serves unity, but it results in the exclusion of those who do not con-form. Without any doubt it runs the risk of exacerbating thedifferences, at least marginally, of rendering the smallest peculiaritya sign of identity.” (Dec. 8, 1989, 18) Thibaud’s apparent dismissalof the secularist position is, however, quickly inverted towards the endof the article, where he opposes the use of the veil because “it makesdifficult, perhaps impossible, this interpersonal communication—the laïcité, above and beyond differences of sex and origin” (18).

The two articles I have briefly mentioned are clearly indica-tive of a tendency in the French press to deal with the headscarfaffair in abstract terms. In other words, the choice of the veilbecomes a metonymical signifier of larger socio-cultural issues. Assuch, the female voice at the origin of such debate is completelyobnubilated by the overwhelming size of such discourses.Women’s re-vindications are thus neutralized in favor of a moregeneralized—and perhaps less threatening—debate about immi-gration in an abstract sense.

Immigration and Integration?

The larger debate about immigration is inevitably at the heart ofthis much-publicized case. For a better understanding of the con-text in which the young Muslim women defended their choice,I deem it important to present an historical excursus of the Frenchnationality policy.


The first nationality code in France was enforced in 1889,a period that was characterized by a large presence of foreignersof Polish, Portuguese, and Italian origins. The code emphasizedthe importance of the jus sanguinis—descent from a French fatheror mother (in the case of illegitimate offspring)—as the principalcriterion for the acquisition of nationality. At the same time, italso reinforced the idea of jus soli, which established that children offoreigners born in France would become automatically French.

The nationality code of 1889 was extended to the Frenchcolonies only after the inhabitants of these territories weregranted French citizenship during the post World War II period.However, when Algeria gained its independence in 1962 (asa result of the eight-year-long war), Algerians were declared for-eigners and those who resided in France during that time had toopt for either one or the other nationality (Weil 11). By the mid-1970s, issues of French nationality and immigration had becomestrictly interrelated and almost inseparable in both public andpolitical discourse. Thus, as the anti-immigrant sentiment grewstronger, particularly towards North Africans whose diversity wasconsidered extreme, right-wing parties started to incessantlyattack the principle of the jus soli (Stolcke 9). Attempts to introducea citizenship law reform succeeded in 1993, when the conserva-tive government of Balladur introduced a code that maintainedthe prominence of the jus sanguinis and restricted the use of the cri-terion of domicile for the acquisition of nationality. Interestinglyenough, a child born in France from parents of North-Africanorigin would have the choice to claim the French nationality untilthe age of 16. After that age, it was argued, the child’s disinterestin having the French nationality would be seen as a clear symbolof his/her ineptitude as French citizen. Among the most powerfulrhetoric of the extreme rightist parties (especially Le Pen’s FrontNational) was what Taguieff calls “differential racism”: accordingto this doctrine, non-European immigrants possessed irreduciblecultural differences which presented a threat to the host country’snational identity. In this sense, the Other was singled out for the


absoluteness of his/her difference from the Self.2 The cultural fun-damentalism advanced by the right was counteracted by a politicsof assimilation coming from the progressive parties. According tothe latter, immigrants’ adaptation to the host society was to beunderstood in terms of the eradication of all traces of the “alien”culture, thus ruling out the possibility of immigrants integratinginto a national society while preserving their culture of origin.

In the light of such nationality policy, the choice of the veilby the three young Muslim women assumes a more complexnuance. Forced into a logic of irreconcilable binarisms, the youngBeurettes’ adoption of the veil at school needs to be analyzed as amore subtle attempt to reaffirm an identity too often suppressedby the press—and media at large.

Related to the issue of integration is the question of nationalidentity that is certainly central to migratory movements toFrance. The incoming presence of Muslim immigrants from theNorth African territories is often perceived as what I would call areversed colonial movement whereby the once-colonized peoplesbecome an integral part of French society per se. As the mostvocal advocate of French cultural “purity,” Jean-Marie Le Pencommented on the headscarf affair saying, “the foreign Islamists’revindication to wear the veil is a clear illustration of France’scolonization [ . . . ] allowing the presence of a foreign communityin our country opens for their countries the right of exercisingpressure on us” (M. Le Pen dénonce la ‘colonisation de laFrance’). Therefore, the women’s choice to adopt a symbol ofalterity that distances them from the mainstream becomes a pro-vocative act against a national identity based upon secularismand assimilation.

GENDERED DISCOURSES AND THE FEMALE BODY

As seen from the themes briefly summarized above, the (male)press discourse was polarized around the positions for and against


the veil through an appeal to the same values: secularism andindividual rights. This public debate thus became the terrain ofcontention of gendered divisions that seemed to mirror the samegendered logic that informed past colonial relations betweenFrance and the Maghreb. As discussed earlier, in the case ofAlgeria, veiled women were essentialized by male French colon-izers as possessing “the ultimate secret of Otherness, which Frenchmen ruthlessly suppressed or denied while defining their ownimperial identity.” (Bloul 119) The sense of colonial, patriarchalmastery of Muslim women recurs partially in the public debateabout the veil. Here, the outspoken young women are denieda voice and their choice is instead vicariously defended or opposedby the patriarchs: their father, male religious leaders (such as theimam of the Paris mosque, a Catholic archbishop, and a rabbi),politicians and school principals.

The two examples that best embody the overwhelming—andrather suffocating—presence of a male voice are two caricaturespublished in Le Monde. These images poignantly illustrate the lackof intellectual mobility to which the young Muslims are sup-posedly subjugated. While the first image portrays the physical lackof voice in a typical Muslim family, with an interesting parallelbetween the veil and the “kidnapper handkerchief ,” the secondvignette extends beyond the limits of the immigrant communityand includes both religious and secular sources of authority.Here, the controversial division between public and private spheresI mentioned above is symbolized by the public officials’ entranceinto the most intimate room in the house—the bathroom.

As seen in these two caricatures, the image portrayed by thepress is one of utmost negation of women’s voices—a negationthat is apparently perpetrated by Muslim as well as secular maleauthorities. Yet, I would argue the silencing of women so stronglycriticized here is the same silence to which the women are sub-jected by the press itself. In fact, among the 29 articles I analyzed,only one brief report focused on women’s rights (and not justindividual rights) and women’s roles in this incident. The article,


published in Le Monde and significantly titled “Plusieurs militantesdes droits de la femme dénoncent ‘un signe de discrimination sex-iste” (“Several militants of women’s rights denounce ‘a sign of sexistdiscrimination’ ”) represents a stage for the rejection of the veil bysome prominent militants of women’s rights. Since the reportoffers one of the rare perspectives on women’s viewpoints on theaffair, some interventions are worth quoting at length. Secretaryof State for women’s rights Michèle André positions the youngMuslim women as completely subjected to their male familymembers: “The adolescents don’t have to become the object ofan issue that goes beyond them, and the school of the Republicdoesn’t have to be subjugated to religious pressures by fathers andbrothers” (14). The hysteria caused by the adoption of the veil inpublic schools is similarly shared by the national secretary forwomen’s rights in the Socialist Party. Yvette Roudy warns againstthe veil in the following way: “The headscarf is a sign of subju-gation, consented upon or imposed, in fundamentalist Muslimsocieties [ . . . ] Accepting to wear the veil would mean agreeingwith women’s inequality in the Muslim French society” (ibid.).

After having extensively quoted these and other positionsagainst the veil, the brief article concludes by conceding a brusqueparagraph to the converse attitude of Danièle Mitterand: “Thesepositions clearly differ from that of Mrs. Danièle Mitterand, whoseintervention supporting the right of Muslim women to have a veilin school has been praised in the Muslim foreign press, particu-larly in Iran” (ibid.).

In the light of the present analysis, it seems important tolinger upon this article because of the suggestiveness of its mainthemes. As demonstrated by the above quotations, the reactionsof the interviewees stem from and are deeply embedded in a lackof knowledge of a culture—the Muslim one—which is seepinginto French society and becoming an integral part of it. Clearly,the veil here is only regarded as an explicit symbol of oppressiontowards the female gender. Any other connotation or significancethat might be embodied in this garment is purposefully erased in


these comments. As I will discuss later, such postures indicate anevident correlation between knowledge and visibility: that whichremains concealed from the view (of the beholder) cannot beknown—in a sense, be “appropriated”—and thus engenders asentiment of fear as well as intrigue.

Similarly, a 5-page article in Le Point dedicates only five linesto a direct quotation from one of the young women (“Faut-il lais-ser entrer l’islam à l’ école?”). Significantly, in this interview LeilaAchaboun argues: “It’s not a veil, it’s a headscarf.” The youngwomen’s adamant insistence on having an indisputable right tokeep their heads covered, no matter what the circumstances are,has been quickly translated into an example of insolence and dis-respect towards French institutions. The tenacity of their decisionand the passionate discourse that fuels their reasoning have beenstretched far enough to link the presence of the veil in Frenchschools to the increasing danger of Islamic fundamentalism onFrench soil. To further legitimize—and dramatize— this danger,the article mentions an example of a Roubaix school district,where 80% of the student body are from Maghrebi origins. Anaccompanying quote from the Principal of that district, who hassuccessfully prohibited the wearing of the veil in classes, commu-nicates this fear rather eloquently: “Hadn’t I taken this decision,in some classes, only the teacher wouldn’t have had something ontheir head.” What has been defined as the aggressive nature ofthese young women’s revindication seems thus to be at the root ofthis public uproar; in fact, previous incidents concerning theappropriateness of the headscarf in public schools had beenignored by the press altogether.

Leila’s defense of her choice as being a headscarf and not aveil opens up new possibilities for the interpretation of the head-scarf affair. As argued by several scholars (Dwyer 6), dress is avery important signifier of identity construction and embodimentof difference. At the intersection of two quite diverse cultures, theyoung women of Maghrebi origin find themselves in the midstof a secular school system where their ethnic background is


suffocated in the name of a more uniform (and less threatening)equality among the pupils. Here, their French Muslim identity isinevitably fragmented by the denial to express the latter part of thisbinarism. In this way, I would argue the need to move beyond themere religious stigma attached to the headscarf and interpret itrather as a more complex symbol of hybridity faced by the youngBeur population. The public discourse towards this revindicationis a clear witness to the French unwillingness to acknowledgehybridity and accept it as a constituent of French national iden-tity.

Dress for these adolescent young women is a contested signi-fier through which they both challenge and negotiate dominantmeanings attached to different dress styles (Dwyer 24). On theone hand, patriarchal discourses impose an ethnic and religiousidentity based on sexual propriety and innocence. Racializeddiscourses of exclusion, on the other hand, draw upon the samerepresentations of sexual femininity to highlight difference andotherness. Young women who face similar situations are con-stantly engaged in reworking the contradictions of these twomeanings. Their decision to experiment with the veil and adoptan explicitly religious identity is not necessarily an articulationof a self-consciously Islamic identity per se, as much as it is areaction to discourses of alterity and marginalization. Hall andDuGay argue persuasively that cultural identities are the productof different cultural references in perpetual interaction:

Though they [identities] seem to invoke an origin in a historical past with which they continueto correspond, actually identities are about questions of using the resources of history, lan-guage and culture in the process of becoming rather than being [ . . . ] We need to understandthem as produced in specific historical and institutional sites within specific discursive forma-tions and practices [ . . . ] They emerge within the play of specific modalities of power, andthus are more the product of the making of difference and exclusion, than they are the sign ofan identical naturally-constituted unity. (4)

Thus, reading the headscarf affair as a mere return to theroots of an Islamic fundamentalist identity is failing to account forthe ability of these young women to re-invent tradition, to investnew meanings into their tradition in an attempt to come to terms


with the contradictions it poses to their diasporic experiences.Many interpretations of this case have been concerned with thesubservience of Muslim women and the role of the veil in furthersubjugating them and restricting their autonomy. The absence ofthe three women’s voices, and that of any women at all, lendsample support to this patriarchal discourse that only enforcesdual or binary perspectives. What could have been interpreted aseloquence and re-vindication of women’s voices on the part of thethree adolescents in insisting on their choice to wear the veil hasbeen rather reduced to insolence and contempt. We are notallowed to read beyond the few words these women have beenpermitted to utter. Thus, when Leila Achaboun said emphat-ically, “It’s not a veil, it’s a headscarf,” the descriptions of her badtemper in uttering these words followed to underscore her inso-lence. Another possible reading of this statement, which waseffectively stifled in the media, could be related to the youngwomen’s willingness to express their hybridity and difference.They refuse the binary representation that characterizes themeaning of the veil both in the traditional patriarchal discourse oftheir parents—veil as synonymous of sexual propriety and inno-cence, its absence suggesting the opposite—and in the racializeddiscourse of the French press—veil meaning female subjugation,its absence meaning female empowerment. Hybrid subjects stillmobilize both discourses to form new identities informed by theinteraction of both. The foulard, as opposed to the veil, does notcarry the same negative connotations of that which blocks theview and therefore secludes those who wear it. It is not an inno-cent lexical preference, but rather a conscious play of words tosubvert any meaning of subjugation and replace it with newmeanings of empowerment and re-vindication of women’srights.

In the last section of the paper, I will focus on the way inwhich women’s bodies come to represent a site of struggle interms of national, gender, and political identity. Here, the rela-tionship between the female body and the phallocentric discourse


surrounding it will be analyzed. This will, furthermore, be relatedto the issues of (in)visibility and knowledge that seem to be at theheart of the French press’s response to l’affaire du foulard.

Inventing new possibilities for women’s voices to be heard,French feminists such as Cixous, Kristeva, and Irigaray opposewomen’s bodily experiences to the phallic patterns embedded inWestern cultures. Thus, for women to be able to discover and re-vindicate themselves they must resuscitate what a male-dominatedhistory has, for so long, suppressed and silenced. In “The Laughof the Medusa,” Cixous reclaims the feminine writing (l’écriture

féminine) as the possibility for women to return to their bodies:“[the body] which has been more than confiscated from her,which has been returned into the uncanny stranger on display—theailing or dead figure, which so often turns out to be nasty com-panion, the cause and location of inhibitions. Censor the bodyand you censor breath and speech at the same time” (Cixous 338emphasis added).

The uncanny stranger on display that Cixous individuates inthe female body as a symbol of alterity in a phallogocentric soci-ety assumes more complex nuances when applied to the youngMuslim women living (and born) in France. In their case, a his-tory of colonization and immigration complicates the readabilityof their bodies and subjects them to different (mis)understandingsand (mis)interpretations. As discussed earlier, during the colonialera, the colonized body of North-African women constituted asite of extreme mystery and danger, an impenetrable barrier thatresisted the ubiquitous power of the male colonizer. As such, thefemale (Muslim) body was either eroticized and thus transformedinto the object of a voyeuristic gaze or it was ignored altogetherby the phallic discourse of the colonizer. Clearly, the kind of cen-sorship of the body mentioned by Cixous becomes very palpableboth in the relationships between French ex-colonizers andMuslim ex-colonized women and, decades later, in the headscarfaffair. Here, the impossibility of the young women’s presenting &using their bodies in a certain way is evidently reminiscent of


a similar effort during the colonizing period. Yet, in 1989 theadolescents in Creil seemed to adopt a new way of writing theirhybrid identity by refusing to remove their veils at school. Thepublic dismay in the face of such decision is witness to ever-present anxiety towards the (partially) covered female body andwomen’s attempts to “write themselves” through their body.

The question of (un)covering of the female body becomescontroversial when it is situated in a strict relation to the gazeof the (mostly male) beholder. As argued by Mulvey and othersà propos cinema, the voyeuristic male gaze, objectifies thewoman in front of the camera. In the 1988 film Images of the World

and Inscription of the War, Harun Farocki’s camera leafs througha French book of photographs of unveiled Algerian women. Asthe viewer’s eye lingers upon the women’s faces, the femalevoice-over comments: “How to face a camera. The horror ofbeing photographed for the first time. The year 1960 in Algeria:women are photographed for the first time. They are to beissued with identity cards. Faces which up until then had wornthe veil.”

In this sequence, the unveiled Algerian women are doublysubjected to a scrutinizing gaze—that of the photographer andthat of the film spectator—whose presence testifies to the unmis-takable identity of the women. In fact, it is only after the removalof their veils (which one could consider a part of their culturalidentity) that the women are assigned a Westernized form ofrecognition. As exemplified in Farocki’s film, the naked face ofthe colonized woman conforms to the expectations of the Frenchcolonizer and thus is no longer a site of possible danger anduncertainty. In this way, the act of seeing becomes the necessarycondition for the re-appropriation of an Other who had been, tillthen, completely un-appropriable. In this sense, the act of makingsomething visible results in the act of knowing; “the relationbetween what we see and what we know is never settled.” (Berger 7)The Algerian women in Farocki’s film are thus allowed a place inFrench history (as well as in the film) because they are made


visible—they are, in a way, distanced from an identity that theFrenchmen could not see nor understand (Alter 172).

A similar attitude seems to have shaped the public discourseabout l’affaire du foulard. As discussed earlier, the anxiety of havinghigh-school students with headscarves informs the mainstreampress response to this case. Here, editorialists and politiciansexpress the peril embedded in what could become an overwhelm-ing presence of headscarves. In this discourse, the headscarfbecomes the metonymical sign of an identity that escapes all(Western) parameters of understanding, precisely because of itsconcealing part of the site of identity par excellence—the face.

CONCLUSION

The 1989 headscarf affair cannot be interpreted as an a-temporalfear of Islamic fundamentalism and religious fanaticism. Rather,this case needs to be situated within the complex socio-historicalframe that seems to be at the origin of its uproar.

As I have argued throughout this paper, the Orientalist dis-course of the French colonizer in North-African territories pre-sented a patriarchal/phallic perspective that is, in a different way,carried over in the French press covering of the Creil events.Here, for instance, the veil still embodies the controversial conno-tations it used to have during the Algerian war. In spite of thecomplex net of identities that characterizes the young Muslimwomen, the French press refused to address any questions ofhybridity and double-identity, retrenched, as it was, in the stiffbinarism of religion vs. laïcité.

It is my argument that interpreting the headscarf worn bythese adolescents as an epitome of incumbent religious fundamen-talism offers an already-known target for French public anxiety.In other words, the scapegoat of Islamic fanaticism seems to pro-vide the press (and the media at large) with a more easily identifi-able source of struggle. Conversely, the hybrid identity of young


Beur women and the re-vindication of their bodies as a manifes-tation of such identity constitute a much more intricate terrain ofanalysis. As discussed earlier, women’s bodies have always beenposited as a site of uncertainty and unknowability and have thusbeen censored. The issue assumes a deeper level of implicationwhen the female body is “ostentatiously” Muslim and ex-colonized.Here, the desire to unveil the women hides a widespread fear ofthe amorphousness of the phenomenon. The inability to locateexactly the source of the decision to wear the headscarf induces thepress and the public discourse to recur to what has, to some extent,already been analyzed: religious fundamentalism. Clearly, suchreactions bespeak the need to acknowledge the existence of a hybrididentity that is neither completely French nor North-African and tore-create a space for the female body to express this identity.

NOTES

1. The cases of women’s re-veiling in Egypt and veiled Turkish women in Germanydemonstrate “the historical dynamism of the veil and the ways in which it is bothan overdetermined signifier against which individual women must negotiatetheir own identities in relation to a complex of different meaning and the possi-bilities which the reworking of the veil can have for forging new political, reli-gious or symbolic identities.” (Dwyer 4)

2. Charles Pasqua, the Gaullist minister of the interior who designed the reform tothe code nationality, expressed similar feelings towards the incipient Europeanpolitical integration: “In France, the right to vote is inseparable from citizenshipand this from nationality. There are 5 million foreigners here, 1.5 million ofthem communitarians. Our communitarian guests are welcome, but we are notwilling to share our national sovereignty with them. France is an exceptionalpeople and not an amalgam of tribes” (qtd. in Stolcke 10).

REFERENCES

“500 intégristes ont imposé leur loi à 58 millions de Français.” Le Point 30 Oct. 1989. Ahmed, Leila. Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate. London:

Yale U P, 1992. Alter, Nora. “The Political Im/perceptible in the Essay Film: Farocki’s ‘Images of

the World and the Inscription of War’.” New German Critique 68 (1996): 165–193.


Battle of Algiers. Dir. Gillo Pontecorvo. Perf. Jean Martin, Yacef Sadi, BrahimHaggiag, Casbah, 1965.

“Beau Geste” (1926) dir. Herbert Brenon.Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin, 1972. Bloul, Rachel. “Veiled Objects of (Post)-Colonial Desire: Forbidden Women Dis-

rupt the Republican Fraternal Space.” Australian Journal of Anthropology 5.1/2(1994): 113–123.

Cixous, Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary The-ory and Criticism. Eds. Robyn Warhol and Diane Price Herndl. New Brunswick,NJ: Rutgers U P, 1991 334–349.

Cover page. Le Nouvel Observateur 7 Feb. 1989.Duhamel, O. “Tolère le foulard.” L’Express 3 Nov. 1989. Dwyer, Claire. “Veiled Meanings: Young British Muslim Women and the Negoti-

ation of Differences.” Gender Place and Culture 6.1 (1999): 5–27. “Faut-il laisser entrer l’islam à l’école?” Le Point 16 Oct. 1989. “France: les mosaïques de l’islam.” Le Point 30 Oct. 1989. Frappat, B. “Trois foulards et un pays.” Le Monde 28 Oct. 1989. Hall, Stuart and Paul Du Gay, eds. Questions of Cultural Identity. London: Sage, 1996. Images of the World and the Inscription of War. Dir. Harun Farocki, Facets Video,

1989. Imbert, C. “Les limites de la tolérance.” L’Express 10 Nov. 1989. Ingres, Jean-Auguste Dominique. “The Turkish Bath” (1862), Musée du Louvre,

Paris.“Intégrisme et intégration.” Le Monde 28 Oct. 1989. “Intégriste: L’islam face à la République.” Le Point 30 Oct. 1989. Irigaray, Luce. To Speak is never neutral. London and New York: Continuum, 2002.“Islam et laïcité.” Le Monde 21 Oct. 1989. Jasser, Ghaiss and Tobe Levin. “The Twin Evils of the Veil.” Social Identities 5.1

(1999): 31–46. Kristeva, Julia. The portable Kristeva. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.“La femme face au Coran.” Le Point 30 Oct. 1989. “Laïcité: enfin un débat d’idées.” L’Express 10 Nov. 1989. “La surenchère intégriste.” L’Express 10 Nov. 1989. “Le Maghreb face à l’islamisme.” Le Point 27 Nov. 1989. “Le mystère du voile.” Le Point 30 Oct. 1989. “Le regain du Front national.” Le Monde 28 Nov. 1989. “Les consignes du Sphinx.” L’Express 17 Nov. 1989. “Les trois musulmanes de Creil de nouveau exclues des cours.” Le Monde 21 Oct.

1989. “Les réactions des responsables religieux.” Le Monde 21 Oct. 1989. “L’intégration, oui, l’intégrisme, non.” Le Point 30 Oct. 1989. “L’islam dans l’école de la République.” Le Monde 7 Oct. 1989. MacMaster, Neil and Toni Lewis. “Orientalism: From Unveiling to Hyperveiling.”

Journal of European Studies xxviii (1998): 121–135. “Marseille: la bataille des mosquées.” Le Point 30 Oct. 1989. “M. Le Pen célèbre ‘la capitale de la résistance à l’occupation islamique’.” Le Monde

28 Nov. 1989.


“M. Le Pen demande la dissolution de l’Assemblée nationale et l’organisation d’unréférendum sur l’immigration.” Le Monde 6 Dec. 1989.

“M. Le Pen dénonce la ‘colonisation de la France’.” Le Monde 28 Oct. 1989. “M. Le Pen invite à la ‘résistance’ contre l’immigration.” Le Monde 14 Nov. 1989. Mulvey, Laura, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Gerald Mast, Marshall

Cohen, and Leo Braudy, eds., Film Theory and Criticism, New York: Oxford Uni-versity Press, 1992.

“Plusieurs militantes des droits de la femme dénoncent ‘un signe de discriminationsexiste’.” Le Monde 28 Oct. 1989.

Rerolle, Raphaelle. “Trois foulards contre la ‘sérénité laïque’.” Le Monde 7 Oct.1989.

“Sans voile.” Le Monde 6 Oct. 1989. “Son of the Sheik” (1926), dir. George Fitzmaurice.“SOS-Racisme réclame une politique d’intégration des immigrés.” Le Monde 14

Nov. 1989. Stolcke, Verena. “Talking Culture: New Boundaries, New Rhetorics of Exclusion

in Europe.” Current Anthropology 36.1 (1995): 1–21. Taguieff, Pierre. La force du préjugé: essai sur le racisme et ses doubles. Paris: La Découverte,

1988. “The Garden of Allah” (1935) dir. Richard Boleslawski.Thibaud, P. “Quelle laïcité?” L’Express 8 Dec. 1989. Tincq, Henri. “Une leçon de religion au lycée Buffon.” Le Monde 25 Oct. 1989. Vivian, Bradford. “The Veil and the Visible.” Western Journal of Communication 63.2

(1999): 115–140. Weil, Patrick. La France et ses étrangers. Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1991.

Copyright of Women's Studies is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to

multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users

may print, download, or email articles for individual use.

Unveiling the Veil: Gendered Discourses and the (In)Visibility of the Female Body in France.

Documents

Transcript of Unveiling the Veil: Gendered Discourses and the (In)Visibility of the Female Body in France.