Releasing the Visualesque and Symbolic: Reconstructing ‘Muslim Women’
published in Beyond the Hijab
Image from Hijab/Her, 2014
Of late, the term ‘hijab’ has been used pervasively across different contexts of discussion, from that of religion, ‘Islamization’, the symbolic, in movements and representation, and especially in relation to the discussion of women, ‘Muslim women’. The latter is a most contested term as it is often relegated a single identity of a highly visualesque nature: that the ‘Muslim woman’ is a body seen donning a hijab, shawls of black or colors draped over the head and chest. The ‘hijab-ed’ body becomes a visual and ideological representation of the ‘Muslim woman’ – one largely shaped by an outsider perspective as opposed to stemming from self-definition – and inevitably so, used as discourse on issues concerning women and Islam. This sparks an imagination of ‘Muslim women’ as communities of the ‘hijabi’, defined solely by the visibility of the hijab, and in antithesis to it, the ‘non-hijabi’ or other. The dichotomous existence of these two imagined communities map them as visual opposites, and assumes a largely single narrative for each, one that focuses solely on the issue of hijab as symbolic identifier and definer, disregarding and nullifying all other possible narrative threads that make up ‘Muslim women’.
Read the full article on the Beyond the Hijab site here
Of late, the term ‘hijab’ has been used pervasively across different contexts of discussion, from that of religion, ‘Islamization’, the symbolic, in movements and representation, and especially in relation to the discussion of women, ‘Muslim women’. The latter is a most contested term as it is often relegated a single identity of a highly visualesque nature: that the ‘Muslim woman’ is a body seen donning a hijab, shawls of black or colors draped over the head and chest. The ‘hijab-ed’ body becomes a visual and ideological representation of the ‘Muslim woman’ – one largely shaped by an outsider perspective as opposed to stemming from self-definition – and inevitably so, used as discourse on issues concerning women and Islam. This sparks an imagination of ‘Muslim women’ as communities of the ‘hijabi’, defined solely by the visibility of the hijab, and in antithesis to it, the ‘non-hijabi’ or other. The dichotomous existence of these two imagined communities map them as visual opposites, and assumes a largely single narrative for each, one that focuses solely on the issue of hijab as symbolic identifier and definer, disregarding and nullifying all other possible narrative threads that make up ‘Muslim women’.
Read the full article on the Beyond the Hijab site here
