Not-/Unveiling as An Ethical Practice

Abstract

The practice of Islamic veiling has over the last ten years emerged into a popular site of investigation. Different researchers have focused on the various significations of this bodily practice, both in its gendered dimensions, its identity components, its empowering potentials, as a satorial practice or as part of a broader economy of bodily practices which shape pious dispositions in accordance with the Islamic tradition. Lesser, however, has this been the case for the practice of not veiling or unveiling. If and when attention is accorded to the latter, it is often grasped as a product of integration or an effect secular governmentality, but only rarely as a bodily practice. Drawing on narratives of second generation secular and religious Maghrebi Muslims in Belgium, this paper pursues this second perspective by examining to which extent not-veiling can be understood as a technique of the self (Foucault) that is functional to shaping a liberal (Musilm) subject. While a first part of this article will unpack the ethical substance of such discursive interrogations and point to the ways in which they are intertwined with the enactment of a liberal self, the second part will examine the embodied contours of this problematization, which appeared through the labour upon one's affect and bodily dispositions that this refusal of the hijab, or the act of unveiling, implies.

Being a “Good” Son and a “Good” Daughter: Voices of Muslim Immigrant Adolescents

“…They suggested that several different meanings coexist: the veil is a primary part of Muslim female identity (Hopkins and Greenwood 2013), it is frequently personal the choice to use it, and it not necessarily forced by in-group members (Lorasdagi 2009). Moreover, it is a ritual act that qualifies women as practicing the Muslim religion (Fadil 2011), or it is perceived as a religious duty (Killian 2003). It is moreover perceived an instrument useful to act in a pious way when there is a temptation to engage in non-religious acts (Patel 2012).…”

There is a Sexular Body: Introducing a Material Approach to the Secular

“…It does not focus on exploring and revealing particular secular norms that instruct, discipline, and confine religious bodies in current secular societies (e.g. Göle 2010;Fadil 2011;Selby 2014;Fernando 2014;AmirMoazami 2016) but instead directly looks at the secular body itself.…”

Visible Others': A Reading of the European Obsession with the Female Veil

“…To maintain democracy, as Schmitt observes, the boundary between 'insider' and 'outsider' becomes crucial and the identification and expulsion of the 'other' from the public sphere necessary. As Fadil [44] puts it in relation to the banning of the full-face veil in Belgium, "the exclusion of 10 The dichotomy between 'friend' and 'enemy' is clear in Germany, in which five German Landers have allowed the display of Christian symbols, but not Islamic ones and in the Begum case [3] in which a young British student in the UK was forbidden to attend her school because she started to wear a jilbab and not a shalwar kameeze, considered the most appropriate uniform for Muslim women by three local imams. This is particularly indicative of western binary perceptions of Muslims as the court implied the existence of two kinds of Muslim: those 'accommodated' in liberal/democratic societies, and Islamic fundamentalists from whom western democracy has to be defended [18].…”