Eastern veiling, Western freedom?

Review of Politics

Volumn 59, Issue 3, 1997, Pages 461-488

  Hirschmann, Nancy J ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 0010969005     PISSN: 00346705     EISSN: 17486858     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0034670500027686     Document Type: Article

References (82)

1. The terms Western and Eastern are, of course, almost absurdly broad, but they persist in common usage and popular imagination. Indeed, Western images of the East are part of what this paper seeks to disrupt; but such disruption ironically often entails the continued use of these terms. I have sought to make more specific references wherever possible.
2. Orlando Patterson, Freedom: Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1991).
3. See Stanlie M. James, "Challenging Patriarchal Privilege Through the Development of International Human Rights," Women's Studies International Forum 17 (1994): 563-578
4. Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 236.
5. Diana Coole, "Constructing and Deconstructing Liberty: A Feminist and Poststructuralist Analysis," Political Studies, 51 (1993): 83-95.
6. On the "quasi-universal" in feminism, see Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson, "Feminism Without Philosophy: An Encounter Between Feminism and Postmodernism," inFeminism/Postmodernism, ed. Linda Nicholson (New York: Routledge, 1990).
7. A complete list of such debates is impossible, but perhaps most significant for this article is the degree to which this debate has taken place within Western political theory. For instance, see Anna Elisabetta Galeotti, "Citizenship and Equality: The Place for Toleration," Political Theory 21 (1993): 585-605;
8. Norma Moruzzi, "A Problem With Headscarves: Contemporary Complexities of Political and Social Identity"; Galeotti, "A Problem With Theory: A Rejoinder to Moruzzi";
9. and Moruzzi, "Response to Galeotti," all in Political Theory 22 (1994). 8.1 follow bell hooks here, who argues that to define feminism as women's equality with men traps feminism within a discourse that is not only masculinist- because men become the neutral standard used to evaluate women's experience, thus erasing gender difference-but racist and classist as well-for which "men" do such feminists want to be equal to? Poor African-American men? Or wealthy white men? She maintains that a truly inclusive feminism should be defined as a struggle dedicated to "ending sexist oppression."
10. SeeFeminist Theory: From Margin to Center (Boston: South End Press, 1984).
11. Ahmed, Women and Gender, pp. 152,150.
12. Ibid., p. 220.
13. Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi, "Women of the West Imagined: The Farangi Other and the Emergence of the Woman Question in Iran," in Identity Politics and Women: Cultural Reassertions and Feminisms in International Perspective, ed. Valentine M. Moghadam (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994), p. 98.
14. Ibid., p. 99. It should be noted here that "positive" and "negative" conceptions of freedom do not draw on Berlin's notion of freedom as self-control versus freedom as absence of external obstacles (although those conceptions do have a loose relationship to her use of the terms here), but rather to the normative use of the terms, i.e., as "good" and "bad." Isaiah Berlin, "Two Concepts of Liberty" in Berlin, Four Essays on Liberty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971).
15. Ibid., p. 104.
16. Ibid., pp. 102,105.
17. Ibid., p. 99.
18. Ibid., p. 114.
19. Ibid., p. 99.
20. Ibid., p. 110.
21. Fatima Mernissi, "Virginity and Patriarchy" in Women and Islam, ed. Azizah al-Hibri (New York: Pergamon Press, 1982), p. 189.
22. Fatima Mernissi, Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in a Modern Muslim Society (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. vii.
23. See particularly Ahmed, Women and Gender, and Margot Badran, "Gender Activism: Feminists and Islamists in Egypt", in Gender and National Identity: Women and Politics in Muslim Societies, ed. Valentine M. Moghadam (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Zed Books Ltd., 1994), esp. p. 203.
24. Valentine M. Moghadam, "Reform, Revolution, and Reaction: The Trajectory of the 'Woman Question' in Afghanistan," in Moghadam, Gender and National Identity, p. 82. Her account also suggests that the heavier the veiling-the more covered women are, the stricter and more extensive the segregation-the more oppressed they are.
25. Marie-Aimie Helie-Lucas "The Preferential Symbol of Islamic Identity: Women in Muslim Personal Laws" in Moghadam, Identity Politics and Women, p. 399.
26. Ibid., 394.
27. See Ahmed, Women and Gender.
28. Helie-Lucas, "The Preferential Symbol," p. 395.
29. Leila Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments:Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 79.
30. Ibid., p. 87.
31. See Berlin, "Two Concepts of Liberty."
32. Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments, p. 79.
33. Mi., p. 88.
34. Ibid., p. 105.
35. Ibid., p. 46.
36. Ibid., p. 90.
37. Ibid., p. 115.
38. Ibid., p. 111.
39. Ibid., p. 33.
40. Ibid., p. 164.
41. Ibid., p. 89.
42. Ibid., p. 154.
43. Ibid., p. 215.
44. Ibid., p. 153.
45. Reproduction is another justifiable motive, though it is related to status, which women gain by being the mothers of sons.
46. Throughout Veiled Sentiments, Abu-Lughod emphasizes Bedouins' stoicist association of strength with control over one's feelings. Yet she also devotes a significant portion of the book to a consideration of Bedouin poetry, which is the socially accepted form through which men and women alike may express the emotions and feelings that they are socially proscribed from expressing verbally to others; the idea is that poetry expresses the feelings of the writer by putting them into words at the same time it "veils" them by making this expression in abstract, symbolic, and artistic forms. Despite its important place in the culture, however, it seems rarely to effect concrete change. She offers one example of a man who responded to his wife after reading a poem that Abu-Lughod had transcribed; but the point of poetry is precisely that it is recited, not written, and the appropriate circle in which women's recitations are acceptable does not usually result in change.
47. Ibid., p. 165.
48. Ibid., p. 159.
49. Ibid., p. 238
50. See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1979)
51. and Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972- 1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980).
52. Arlene Elowe MacLeod, Accommodating Protest: Working Women, the New Veiling, and Change in Cairo (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. xiv.
53. Ibid., p. 41.
54. Ibid., p. 105.
55. Ibid., p. 109.
56. Ibid., p. 110.
57. Ibid., p. 101.
58. Ibid., p. 133;
59. it is not clear whether the veil really does protect women from street harassment, or whether this is simply a rationalization. For instance, when a man tells MacLeod that a woman "walking alone" on the street is inviting sex, she mentioned that his sisters often walk alone coming home from work; he immediately replies "That is completely different!" (p. 84). But there is no linking of this "difference" to the veil; it is not the case that the man was referring to unveiled women walking alone, nor did he assert that his sisters are not "inviting sex" simply because they are veiled. Rates of sexual assault vary from country to country whether veiled or not, and low statistical findings of sexual assault could result from sexist standards of reporting and prosecution (for instance in Iran, a charge of rape requires verification from three male witnesses, virtually making rape a logical impossibility) as easily as it could from an actually low assault incidence.
60. Ibid., pp. 100-101.
61. Ibid., p. 71.
62. Ibid., p. 120.
63. As one woman puts it, "Muslim women are careful about their reputation. Egypt is not like America! In America women are too free in their behavior.... This is not our way" (ibid., p. 109).
64. Ibid., p. 133.
65. Ibid., p. 120.
66. Ibid., p. 115.
67. Ibid., p. 140.
68. Ibid., p. 107;
69. MacLeod also asserts that "Veiling allows women into the workplace by, in essence, removing the reminders of gender" (p. 107), but unless she means sex-i.e., by hiding women's sexuality-then she would seem to contradict herself, since the veil is a distinct mark of gender, and indeed, would seem to reinscribe gender difference. If she means "sex," then I agree with her, because it is the desexualization of women that seems to lie at the heart of the veil's facilitation of women's movement in the public realm.
70. Ibid., p. 171.
71. Ibid., p. 139.
72. Ibid., p. 111.
73. Ibid., p. 83.
74. See Nancy J. Hirschmann, "Toward a Feminist Theory of Freedom," Political Theory 24 (1996): 46-67.
75. See ibid.;
76. and Charles Taylor, "What's Wrong with Negative Liberty?" in The Idea of Freedom: Essays in Honor of Isaiah Berlin, ed. Alan Ryan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).
77. See Fatima Mernissi, The Veil and the Male Elite (Reading, MA: Addison- Wesley Publisher, 1991).
78. Ahmed Women and Gender, pp. 226-228
79. Ibid.; Ahmed suggests that the "misunderstandings" mentioned above of the gender repression the reimposition of sharia would entail stem precisely from Islam's tendency toward gender-equality. Indeed, she maintains that women's "misunderstandings" are less about Islam than about politics in the patriarchal state. Similarly, in The Veil and the Male Elite, Mernissi argues that patriarchy runs contrary to the tenets of Islam, and develops a reading of the Qu'ran that is egalitarian in terms of gender.
80. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses," in Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, ed. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991).
81. Ahmed, Women and Gender; Tavakoli-Targhi, "Women of the West Imagined."
82. Maria Lugones and Elizabeth V. Spelman, "Have We Got a Theory for You! Feminist Theory, Cultural Imperialism, and the Demand for the Women's Voice," Women's Studies International Forum 6 (1983): 573-581