ABSTRACT
The metaphorical force of the hijab, the Arabic word for what is more commonly called a veil in English, belies its quite mundane, quotidian uses. One of the most salient examples of this, particularly in relation to girls, is the French headscarf debate, which is hardly a debate but rather a complex discursive formation that demonstrates the ways in which contested meanings of nationalism, secularism, liberalism, and piety become animated in and against the highly constructed symbol of the hijab. Bordering on a caricature of the way that adolescence can “become a very useful public problem,” the hijab has certainly served (somewhat ironically) as a “handy and promiscuous social space” (Lesko, 2001, p. 6). The seeming contradiction between perceptions of the hijab as an oppressive, stifling custom and the promiscuous fascination with it in the Western European, U.S., and Canadian contexts is all the more reified by the multitude of scholarly works, documentaries, and trade publications that seek to get “behind” the veil, or that play with the metaphors of concealing and revealing, and covering and uncovering, those who wear it. For this reason, various meanings of the hijab often seem to be constrained—warehoused, even—within the stark framework of binary oppositions. There seems to always be much to say about the hijab and little to say that is meaningful, perhaps due to the way various meanings tend to sediment onto the garment, rendering it unintelligible by virtue of its hypervisibility.
