Sister: its your choice and your struggle. I have no say in it. An essential drive of feminist dialectic is that men cant reflexively grasp that they are trained from birth to tell women what to do and how to think- even in a seemingly benign and well-meaning way - and we men become upset when women refuse to conform to our masculine hegemonic expectations and subconscious power arrangements. The niqab therefore becomes a signifier of this dialectic and this power struggle. It is not about how it is represented in traditional Islam - whatever that is! - but how it is fought over in our own supposedly free and self-willed bourgeois culture that makes it significant. If a woman is “free” to torture her hair with bleach, pluck her eyebrows, pump her lips full of collagen, jab her brows with botox, cut open her breasts and fill them with balloons, have her labia “trimmed,” her skin pierced and tattooed, her legs waxed, her feet, calves and spine compromised by high heels, all for some subconscious ideal of conformity and “beauty” – then surely she can say she is free to wear a baggy bit of cloth if thats her urge, or to follow a religious compulsion driven by some unconscious cultural expectation.
Posted on: Wed, 08 Oct 2014 23:18:12 +0000
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