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Joan Wallach Scott: The Politics of the Veil

Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 2007, 208 pp, Price £19.95 (PB), ISBN 978-1-4008-2789-3

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Notes

  1. It is (probably) important to clarify what I mean by the use of the term ‘white subject’ or ‘white man’ in this review essay. I do not use the term literally; but rather, like the term ‘black man’, to refer to an ontological state that has material consequences and political realities. As Fanon writes in chapter one of Black Skin White Masks (1967, p. 12): “Many Negroes will not find themselves in what follows. This is equally true of many whites… The attitudes that I propose to describe are real. I have encountered them numerous times… Those who recognise themselves in it, I think, will have made a step forward.” Fanon writes of whiteness and blackness as attitudes and states of being that (whether we like it or not) hold us in their grip, to be distinguished from our existence, and significantly our struggle to exist, as human beings beyond and outside of a thoroughly racialised ontology.

  2. We can take two paradigmatic texts of black philosophy: Fanon’s phenomenology in Black Skin White Masks (1967) and Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man (1952). These texts explore, respectively, the hyper-visibility experienced as a black man and the invisibility or erasure of one’s existence as a black man, both consequences of the asphyxiating racism each author sought to think through.

  3. Much has been written about the sexualisation of Arab men as licentious and corrupt; and more generally, about the triangulation of colonial desire, race and sexuality (see, e.g., McClintock 1995; Farley 1997).

  4. [2007] EWHC 289 (Admin).

  5. Ibid, para 8.

  6. Gurinder Chadha engages in some fantasising about a multicultural France in her contribution to the Paris Je T’Aime collection of short films (2006). In an obscenely trite narrative, she manages to capture the visual imagery of a white boy clumsily veiling and unveiling a young Muslim woman while she speaks about how it is her choice to veil, as an expression of her French-Muslim identity. The power of the image, which is evocative of the most violent and colonial practices of unveiling (and veiling) women is supposedly negated by the dialogue in which the young, beautiful, white French boy wonders why she hides her beauty behind the veil, and the young, beautiful Muslim woman asserts her autonomy and rational agency in describing how she chooses to wear the veil. By allowing him to (attempt) to veil her after her veil has accidentally fallen to her shoulders (he has in the previous scene helped her up from the ground after she trips on a stone), but at the same time asserting her autonomous agency, she is the contemporary Orientalist fantasy, or at least the best of both worlds: exotic in appearance yet assimilated ideologically and politically.

  7. The Guardian, 23 June 2009.

References

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Kent Law School, Univesity of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7NS, UK

    Brenna Bhandar

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  1. Brenna Bhandar
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Correspondence to Brenna Bhandar.

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Bhandar, B. Joan Wallach Scott: The Politics of the Veil. Fem Leg Stud 17, 345–351 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10691-009-9130-9

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