ABSTRACT

Medical anthropologist Arthur Frank argues in “Standpoint of the storyteller” that people who tell stories about their own illness perform a “political and ethical act of self-reflection” (2000, p. 356). The standpoint “both reflects one’s own unique experience and asserts membership in a community of those who understand shared experiences in mutually supportive ways” (p. 356). In this film, Samah and K can be seen as asserting a standpoint in a greater community of Muslim women who struggle for freedom of religion and self-expression. Instead of an illness, it is the veil that unites these women and their distinct stories. Like illness, the veil becomes a target for each woman’s society to pathologize, stigmatize, and fear. In France, school girls are deemed disobedient outsiders if they wear the veil, and in Iran, women are considered deviant, sacrilegious, and even criminal if they do not wear it. Furthermore, the film implements what Lisa Cartwright identifies as the “surveillant and analytical medical gaze” (1995, p. xv). In both of these women’s stories, the police occupy the role of the doctor, who seeks out, analyzes, and extinguishes the pathology by either compelling women to wear or to take off the veil.