Veiled bodies — naked racism: culture, politics and race in the Sun

Abstract

The context in which the current `debate' about Muslim women and the veil is taking place, in Britain and elsewhere in Europe, is that of the new orthodoxy, the `clash of civilisations'. This attempts to explain much of the world's political turmoil in terms of a clash between the (`secular modern') West and the (`traditionalist religion') Islam. The increased visibility of veiled bodies in Britain today has stirred a response that draws on long-standing orientalist oppositions and reworks them in the current climate of the `war on terror', connecting them to parallel racist discourses about `threats' to British culture. Sections of the British media have homogenised the variety of Muslim veiling practices and have presented the veil as an obstacle to meaningful `communication'; an example of Islamic `refusal' to embrace `modernity'. Veiled women are considered to be ungrateful subjects who have failed to assimilate and are deemed to threaten the `British' way of life. This paper reviews the debate over the veil in Britain in the context of British foreign policy, attacks on civil liberties, the further marginalisation of poor communities and the politicisation of British Muslims, where the veil is an increasingly political image of both difference and defiance.

Unveiling the myth of the Muslim woman: a postcolonial critique

“…In this paper, we use a postcolonial feminist lens (Mohanty, 1998, Spivak, 1987, Dube 2002) to trace -through print and digital media -the discursive character of contemporary hostility towards the and colonial discourses are evident in popular press (Prasad, 1997;Prasad & Mills, 1997;Bullock, 2007;Khiabany & Williamson, 2008;Dye, 2011). The voices of the "other," the Muslim women, are less evident (Golnaraghi & Dye, 2012) and thus we seek to identify and tease out these voices in order to better understand anti-colonial resistance.…”

Ways of Seeing: Sexism the Forgotten Prejudice?

“…In the British (Khiabany and Williamson 2008;Meer, Dwyer, and Modood 2010) and German media (Ehrkamp 2010), the veil is commonly represented as irreconcilable with gender equality, notwithstanding the fact that, as has been well documented in Gender, Place and Culture and elsewhere, the reasons women in Europe chose to wear the veil are complex (including as a way of dealing with Islamophobia) and differ from those living in countries which insist on it (e.g. Dwyer 1999;Siraj 2011;McGinty 2013).…”

“…Dwyer 1999;Siraj 2011;McGinty 2013). Muslim women are usually portrayed as undifferentiated lacking agency and as victims of what is perceived as a patriarchal and culturally backward Islam -unable to think or act for themselves (Khiabany and Williamson 2008;Meer, Dwyer, and Modood 2010;Ehrkamp 2010).…”

Ethnic Deviant Labels within a Terror-Panic Context: Excusing White Deviance

“…Recent work has focused on the mass media's mis-representation of brown bodies, and in particular how this has served to sustain Islamophobic sentiments and anti-Muslim racism, so much so that it is now a common feature of contemporary society -see for instance the work of Ahmad (2006); Khiabany and Williamson (2008); Moore et al (2008); Poole (2002); Poole and Richardson (2006); Richardson (2004);and Saeed (2007). The presentation of brown bodies 'through images of danger, violence and anger' (Alexander 2005, p. 200), are further embodied and re-imagined within the context of 'the enemy within', itself linked to debates about 'community cohesion' (Alexander 2005;Dwyer et al 2008), and steeped in 'domestic repression, carried out in the name of national security' (Mathur 2006, p. 34).…”