While the genital regions of women in Princess Hijab’s ads are covered up (as seen in the hijabized Maya Barsony ad), the Dolce&Gabanna subvertised images hide faces, but leave many torsos and genitals accentuated, effectively drawing even more attention to these areas. It appears that the queering of the hijab does not recall or conflate male bodies with the absented women, as Ashtary’s photographs do, but in fact proposes a new order of targeted visual consumption: the queer sexual citizen that exists somewhere between the hijab’s unmoored attachment to the woman’s body and a contested heteronormative gaze.
This, perhaps, is what is most compelling about the Princess’s work and the absent response to her queering tactics—the images defy the flattened, “common sense” perception of the veil as it has been circulated by the mechanisms of globalized image wars. Here, I am deploying the idea of “common sense” as developed by Kara Keeling in her book, The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007). Throughout her investigation of the (non)representation of African-American lesbian homoeroticism in film, Keeling defines the cinematic “common sense” as an archive of historically vetted sensory-motor images that rationalize current perceptions of blackness. Keeling's application of this term is useful for further consideration of how and to what extent Princess Hijab's mutation of the veil challenges not only tropes of Western consumerism, but the larger archive of historically vetted images that similarly rationalize current perceptions of the veil and the bodies beneath.
Thus, the viewer of Princess Hijab's queering of the veil must become self-consciously aware of his/her own objectification of these newly commodified bodies that do not adhere to the historical archive of recognized identity positions. Through desiring entry into not the fetishized harem, or the intercessional spaces of the bathhouse (underscored by the modernized pool setting), but rather the metaphysical interiority and vulnerability of the veiled-yet-hypersexualized men within the ads, Princess Hijab's viewers are asked to acknowledge the self as simultaneously colonizer and Other; that is, they are pulled into the sexualized publicness of the hijabizing aesthetic, which when understood as such, presents a study of antatgonist spatial and emotional territories (described in "Part Three").