Naturalising, Neutralising Women's Bodies: The “Headscarf Affair” and the Politics of Representation

Bruck, Gabriele vom

doi:10.1080/10702890701801791

Cited by 10 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 21 publications

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“…This model of Western, secular society as ‘emancipatory’ and religion (particularly Islam) as ‘oppressive’ has been extensively contested (Cady and Fessenden, 2013). Additionally, women are often characterised as ‘symbolic repositories of national identity’ in public discourse (Vom Bruck, 2008: 53). It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that European media as well as academic research should be concerned by their ‘national symbols’ converting to a religion seen as contradicting the Western norm of gender equality.…”

Section: Studying Gender and Conversion To Islam In Documentariesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Documenting conversion: Framings of female converts to Islam in British and Swiss documentaries

Spoliar

Brandt

2020

European Journal of Women's Studies

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In response to the phenomenon of women converting to Islam, a body of research has emerged, engaging with the question, ‘Why are Western women, raised in liberal contexts, converting to Islam?’ This line of enquiry is not limited to academic literature. In recent years, converts to Islam have faced intense scrutiny in mainstream media across Europe. This article contributes an analysis of documentaries to the study of representations of female converts to Islam, focusing particularly on the British documentary Make Me a Muslim (2014) and the Swiss documentary Les Converties d’Allah (2017). We suggest that comparing these two documentaries illuminates certain common narrative threads in media representations of female converts to Islam across different European contexts. In this article, we firstly situate this research within existing literature on gender and conversion to Islam and outline our approach to the study of documentaries on women’s conversion to Islam. Secondly, we analyse the two documentaries, focusing on their shared concerns, namely gender equality and women’s oppression, and the familial environment of the female convert. We argue that paying attention to how female converts are represented illuminates some of the ways in which European framings of the ‘in-betweenness’ of female converts to Islam create notions of female converts as ‘vulnerable-fanatics’ prone to ‘radicalisation’, and threatened by ‘oppressive’ Islam. We demonstrate how female converts participating in documentaries at times complicate and talk back to apprehensions regarding equality, oppression and radicalisation. Finally, we focus in a similar way on understandings of female converts as ‘troublemakers’ within their family environments. Throughout the analysis, we show how the figure of the female convert as vulnerable-fanatic and as family troublemaker is gendered and interlaced with concerns about essentialised cultural difference and radicalisation.

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Section: Studying Gender and Conversion To Islam In Documentariesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Documenting conversion: Framings of female converts to Islam in British and Swiss documentaries

Spoliar

Brandt

2020

European Journal of Women's Studies

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“…Dress has been analysed as offering its wearer a means of communicating beliefs, desires, belonging, status, and ideologies (Aranya 2007;Keeler 2005;Turner 1993). However, it has also been documented to serve as a form of domination that reflects on the body as a site of social control Body-Gendrot 2007;Naidu 2009;Bruck 2008).…”

Section: Dressing the Invisible Bodymentioning

confidence: 99%

Dressing the Myanmar Migrant Body: (In-)Visibility and Empowerment in Thailand

Gruß

2019

TRaNS

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The invisibility of migrants has been widely analysed in relation to states’ policies and practices. I argue in this article that emphasising the role of states and institutions in marginalising vulnerable populations by rendering them invisible throws a shadow over the multifaceted ways in which migrants interpret and relate to invisibility. Among Myanmar migrants in Thailand, as we shall see here, the notion that invisibility provides a protective shield to migrant bodies is in fact widespread. While invisibility is at times perceived as a threat to the future of these people, conceiving of invisibility solely as a tool of domination precludes us from fully understanding the complexity of Myanmar migrants’ experiences in Thailand and, more specifically, the many forms of empowerment that shape these experiences. Privileging the discourses and practices of Myanmar migrants in Thailand about their sartorial choices reveals that migrants appreciate invisibility for its capacity to create control over their own bodies. Further, it reveals the complexities of negotiating and expressing diasporic sartorial conventions.

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Germany, Islam, and Education: Unveiling the Contested Meaning(s) of the Headscarf

Sandford-Gaebel

2012

Gender, Religion and Education in a Chaotic Postmodern World

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Naturalising, Neutralising Women's Bodies: The “Headscarf Affair” and the Politics of Representation

Cited by 10 publications

References 21 publications

Documenting conversion: Framings of female converts to Islam in British and Swiss documentaries

Documenting conversion: Framings of female converts to Islam in British and Swiss documentaries

Dressing the Myanmar Migrant Body: (In-)Visibility and Empowerment in Thailand

Germany, Islam, and Education: Unveiling the Contested Meaning(s) of the Headscarf

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