ABSTRACT
The ‘new’ Muslim veiling phenomenon represents a contemporary ‘equivalent’ to the growing epidemic of anorexia in the industrialised West, Mervat Nasser has argued (1999). Like anorexia, she contends, the new veiling, signalled by the growing number of young Muslim women wearing Islamic dress in universities, workplaces, urban centres and political organisations around the world, responds to multiple pressures felt by women globally, including ‘conflicting cultural messages and contradictory cultural expectations’ (407).1
Both embodied practices2 function as forms of problem solving which, in the absence of real power or control, help women cope with the competing demands of ambitious professional goals and pressure to maintain a traditional female identity. Yet both, she suggests, ultimately lead to the reproduction of tradition and the reinforcement of gender inequality. Similarly, Randi Gressgård (2006) argues that, on a structural level, the figures of ‘the veiled woman’ and ‘the anorexic’ reveal a ‘striking similarity’ (325): Through using their ‘freedom of choice to choose submission’ (336), both display an ambivalence between ‘transcendence’ and ‘immanence’ attached ‘to the notion of woman, within a hierarchical order’ (336). The establishment of ‘the anorexic’ as counterpart to ‘the veiled woman’
within these cross-cultural comparisons draws on a significant strand of feminist literature now pervasive in mainstream cultural discourse. Against constructions of ‘the West’ as the land of gender equality, liberation and freedom, feminist commentators have inaugurated the figure of ‘the anorexic’ as a metaphor for the continuing embodied oppression associated with gendered power relations in industrialised Western contexts (Orbach 1993/1986, 2006/1978; Wolf 1990; Bordo 1993).3 Within these texts, and comparisons between veiling and anorexia which employ their terms, ‘the anorexic’ represents the widespread subjugation of the female body within the industrialised
West’s patriarchal, capitalist beauty system – a system that impels women and girls to discipline their bodies in pursuit of an unachievable ideal.4 As Nasser comments, ‘weight phobia, fear of fatness and pursuit of thinness are modern terms that are now used interchangeably to refer to anorexia nervosa’ (1997: 1). She adds, ‘If eating disorders are indeed metaphors … it is likely that what they symbolize now encompasses this social disruption and cultural confusion’ (97). A general rhetorical message these cross-cultural comparisons impart is that when it comes to gender and the body, ‘Western cultures’ are no less patriarchal or oppressive, and may in fact be more so, than ‘Muslim cultures’. Contra essentialist constructions of ‘Western’ and ‘Muslim’ cultures as fundamentally different, they call attention to the similar gendered dilemmas and inequalities that girls and women face across cultural and geopolitical domains, and to the ways in which these struggles are so often played out through forms of bodily management and control. Theorists have also made comparisons between Muslim veiling and other
practices understood to be linked to the Western ‘beauty system’.5 Nancy Hirschmann (1998) suggests, for example, that Western feminists need to ask themselves whether the veil is more oppressive than fashion trends such as Wonderbras, mini-skirts and blue jeans (361). Similarly, Sheila Jeffreys (2005) contends that make-up and the veil represent ‘two sides of the same coin of women’s oppression’ – both have been seen as voluntary practices through which women can express their agency, yet both arise from pressures linked to male dominance (37). Linda Duits and Liesbet van Zoonen (2006) suggest, moreover, that while public debates about headscarves and contemporary ‘porno-chic’ styles are routinely ‘conducted independently from each other’ (104), these discourses are in fact ‘held together by the regulation of female sexuality’ (103). These types of comparison are now increasingly echoed within mainstream media and cultural discourse. In an article exploring veiling practices in the UK newspaper The Observer, for example, Andrew Anthony argues that ‘the veil and the bra top are really two sides of the same coin’ (2005: 17). The premature recognition of female sexuality implicated by the veiling of girls as young as seven or eight, he contends, ‘is every bit as significant, and disturbing, as dressing a child in a high-street approximation of Britney Spears, all bare midriff and attitude’ (17).6
