New Criticals

Recall the closing questions of the previous installment of Princess Hijab as Queer Inteventionalist:

1) What are the larger social and political implications of the Princess’s queering of commodified heteronormativity within the urban environment of the Paris metro stations? And 2) how does the viewer-as-commuter/tourist participate? In other words, what audience or public do these images create, and how does the viewership straddle or fuse both local and the global scales of queer sexual economy?

A brief history of the politics of the veil underscores how this item of clothing is, as Reina Lewis asserts, “dramatically overburdened with competing symbolism” [1].  Within the French context, debates about whether women could wear Islamic headscarves in public schools erupted at three separate times, in 1989, 1994, and 2003.  Yet, as Joan Wallach Scott explains, French Islamophobia “antedates not only the attacks of September 11 and the war on terrorism but also the Algerian War” [2].  As an aspect of the long history of French colonialism that began at least as early as the conquest of Algeria in 1830, the veil has been the sign of the seductive/fanaticized, “irreducible difference” between Islam and France ever since [3]. 

Late 19th century French postcards imaging veiled women as ‘Other’ provide just once instance of how the far-ranging history of these divisions circulated via visual culture and tourism. Alternatively, for women who choose to wear the veil in places where the headscarf is outlawed, the hijab may signify active protest and the reclaiming of independence, while for others, it remains a protecting shield from the penetrating indecency of the male gaze.

Princess Hijab’s work touches upon opposing ends of the hijab’s spectrum of symbolism. For French nationalists, the collapse of the hijab with Western values authorized by State-sanctioned advertising spaces frames the actual reducibility of the divide between East and West; alternatively, the implementation of the hijab within the ads and their re-purposing as accessories, speaks to the present-day commodification of the hijab through globalized economies of appearance, thereby undermining the hijab as a sign of resistance to Western culture.

One high school student, Maahum Chaudhry described this globalizing trend for the ethnic news agency, the New America Media blog, recalling, “As I would go to pray at the holy mosque, I saw many young women wearing brand named hijabs. I remember one women in particular wearing a Christian Dior headscarf with Gucci shades while carrying a black coach bag…After seeing her, I had to buy a brand name scarf, so I got a Calvin Klein one with CK printed all over it” [4].

Within a broader historical context, this tendency towards pervasive branding followed the 1990s when “the branding of culture took an especially strong step forward” [5].  As Naomi Klein writes in her book, No Logo, “the effect if not always the original intent of advanced branding is to nudge the hosting culture into the background and make the brand the star. It is not to sponsor culture but to be the culture” [6].  Consider this image of black veil worn by a Saudi woman bearing the Yves Saint Laurent logo with the claim made by Meyda Yegenoglu that the woman’s body “is not simply inside of the veil: it is of it; she is constituted in and by the fabrication of the veil” [7].  Following this logic, the woman’s body is both branded by and constituted in the commodity status of the hijab.

That Princess Hijab brings together the veil, branding/tagging, and Western advertisements for luxury goods through the hyper-fetishization of the hijab is no coincidence. Postcolonial and critical race theorist, Sara Ahmed, draws out the significance of this confluence of cultural forces in her discussion of the commodity and its resonance with the figuration of the “stranger” in Western society. In her equation, the stranger becomes a fetish consumed as something the object simply has [8]. In other words, the perception of objects as having difference is itself an effect of the very processes of production and exchange embedded in consumer culture. This process of exchange, Ahmed explains, marks a shift from biological racism to cultural racism that is endemic of the 20th and 21st century [9]. Princess Hijab's signature tag inclucates the wearable details of cultural racism and its mode of circulation via advertisements, consumer goods, and capitalist desires.

In light of the already slippery, overburdened arsenal of symbolism residing within the veil’s fetishized and increasingly commodified presence in popular culture, Princess Hijab’s adornment of male bodies further complicates the veil’s polysemic meaning. In the 1966 film directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, The Battle of Algiers, men, disguised as women donning hijabs, used the veil as a disguise to evade, or sneak up on soldiers and military police [10].  This film provides an early, canonical portrayal of the historical use of the veil as a disguise, or mode of escape for men, underscoring, as well, how the war of Algerian independence is always moored in a "war of images" and the performance of Western anxiety attached to the veiled body in public [11].

In December 2009, hundreds of men in Iran voluntarily donned hijabs in protest of the arrest of leading Iranian student activist Majid Tavakoli; the hijabs were worn in response to an Iranian news agency’s slandering publication of an image of the activist in a headscarf juxtaposed on screen with an image of former President Banisadre, whom officials had accused of escaping the country in veiled female disguise in 1981 [12]. In this way, the protestors’ reappropriation of the shame of men in chadors reversed the insult through a visual collective of embodied, performed support and empathy, exploiting in a way the visibility of the veil (while deemphasizing its sexual energy, perhaps a product of the naturalized privilege of men to exist as idealized, unmarked universal subjects, rather than over-determined, sexualized bodies).

Princess Hijab is not the first, nor will she be the last, to explore the visualization of taboos and religious connotations embedded within the veil. Among many examples, Iranian artist Kamran Ashtary explored the taboo of men in veils through a series of photographs juxtaposing men and women in traditional chadors in 2007.

Rather than appropriating the veils as a sign of protest, Tori Egherman described how Ashtary’s images remain anchored to the restricted/contained female body. She writes: “Photographing men in veils is another way to photograph what is not there: the women who are required to veil themselves. Seeing men in veils helps us see the women more clearly. The photographs aim to erase the boundaries between women in veils and us” [13].  Functioning within a dialogic space inhabited by the 2009 Iranian protestors who voluntarily employed the taboo of the veil as disguise to heighten the power of their visual collective, the title of Ashtary’s series, “one hand holds the chador closed,” calls attention to the sitter’s own participation in the dress code, again emphasizing the operative element of choice on the part of the individuals pictured.

The Iranian protestors and Ashtary’s application of the veil to male bodies carries a different message than that proposed by Princess Hijab, however: Princess Hijab’s work posthumously imposes a drag performance through an imperative of obstructed/enhanced visibility steeped in the anxiety-ridden tactility of decomposing, tattered hijabs. Most importantly, it is clear that these men have absolutely no say in the matter. Unlike the reappropriation of the hijab by men as an act of agency or rebellion, these “hijabized” men do not escape from the public sphere, but become intensely present, their exteriority underwritten by an added layer of interiority afforded by the introspective hijab.

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").

While I do not yet feel comfortable advancing these images as potential fodder for what Jose Esteban Muñoz imagines as “queer utopian memory” [14]  or as case studies for Ibrahim Abraham’s intriguing comparison of the closet and the veil [15],  Princess Hijab’s visual and spatial interventions emphasis the importance of addressing a queer subject identity within the specific terms of its creation. For this reason, I now turn to “place-making” conceptualizations of bodies performing acts of migration and transport, and the identity informing memories they incur within the specific social environment of the Paris metro [16].

Notes

[1] Reina Lewis, “Preface,” Veil: Veiling, Representation and Contemporary Art eds. David Baily and Gilane Tawadros (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 10. 

[2] Joan Wallach Scott. The Politics of the Veil  (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 21.

[3] Wallach Scott, 41.

[4] Maahum Chaudhry, “Wearing the Hijab—A Fashionably Spiritual Look,” Culture Feature, New American Media (17 October 2006). <http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=7cd6fdd4f9d931345702c7351d6e2345>

[5] Nato Thompson, ed. The Interventionists: Users’ manual for the creative disruption of everyday life (North Adams, Mass.: MassMoCA, distributed by MIT Press, 2004), 15.

[6] Naomi Klein. No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies (New York: Picador, 2000), 30.

[7] Meyda Yegenoglu. Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 118-19.

[8] Sara Ahmed. Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality (New York: Routledge, 2000), 116.

[9] Ahmed, 117.

[10] Wallach Scott, 65.

[11] For further discussion of the war of images refer to Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War by Retort [Iain Boal, T.J. Clark, Joseph Matthews, Michael Watts] (New York: Verso, 2005).

[12] Alexandra Sandles, “Babylon and Beyond,” Los Angeles Times (17 December 2009).

[13] Tori Egherman, “Kamran Ashtary: Photography Review,” originally published in Dutch photography magazine, Hollands Licht; reproduced on webpage: <http://ashtaryonline.com/2008/chador/>

[14] The notion of “queer utopian memory” is developed by Jose Esteban Munoz in his book Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), p.35-45.

[15] Ibrahim Abraham. “The Veil and the Closet: Islam and the Production of Queer Space,” paper presented at Queer Space: Centres and Peripheries symposium, UTS 2007.

[16] Concept of “place-making” borrowed form Anna Tsing. “The Global Situation,” Cultural Anthropology  Vol. 15 No. 3 (August, 2000): 338.