Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Contents
- List of Cases
- List of Abbreviations
- List of Contributors
- An Introduction to the Interdisciplinary Considerations of the “Burqa Ban” Trend: Criminalizing the Trivial or Separating National and International Law?
- PART I Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Strategy of Prohibition
- PART II Legal Perspectives: Religious Clothing, Law, and a Veil-Wearer’s Experiential Account
- Part II Legal Perspectives: Human Rights Perspectives
- Part II Legal Perspectives: National Perspectives
- PART III Responses To Otherness: Gender, Race, And The Veil Factor
- Epilogue
- Index
- About the Editors
The Racial/Spatial Politics of Banning the Muslim Woman’s Niqāb: A Site/Sight We Cannot Bear
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 December 2021
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Contents
- List of Cases
- List of Abbreviations
- List of Contributors
- An Introduction to the Interdisciplinary Considerations of the “Burqa Ban” Trend: Criminalizing the Trivial or Separating National and International Law?
- PART I Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Strategy of Prohibition
- PART II Legal Perspectives: Religious Clothing, Law, and a Veil-Wearer’s Experiential Account
- Part II Legal Perspectives: Human Rights Perspectives
- Part II Legal Perspectives: National Perspectives
- PART III Responses To Otherness: Gender, Race, And The Veil Factor
- Epilogue
- Index
- About the Editors
Summary
Abstract
In proposals and measures to ban her from public space, the wearer of the niqāb (a cloth worn by a Muslim woman covering the body, with only the eyes remaining visible) has been the subject of considerable anxiety and legal regulation. In countries in Europe, there is a trend to criminalize the wearing of Islamic veils, be it the niqāb or the burqa. While Americans have not favored legal bans to the same degree as Europeans, the author mentions several examples, e.g. Canada/Quebec's Bill 62, which requires the uncovering of faces when giving or receiving a public service, a measure that severely restricts the wearer of the niqāb. In this chapter, the author makes the case that the niqāb -wearer's eviction from public space is premised on the visible disturbance that she presents. The niqāb signals the dominant group's loss of control, a literal invasion that disturbs the unity of the public sphere. Besides deep anxiety, the niqāb -wearer generates an intense repugnance; a response that is paradoxically about desire. In the West, the response revolves around knowing and possessing the woman who is covered. Bans on the niqāb express a command to Muslim women to yield to racial and sexual superiority. What is unbearable is the niqāb -wearer's refusal to yield to the Western white gaze. The author develops her argument, based on legal cases, to show the racialized, gendered, and sexualized dynamics surrounding possession. These cases show that the primary legal logic on which the bans rest is untenable. An interpretation pulls in the direction of psychoanalysis, although the author's account of what is at stake in the various legal moments where law abandons logic is not an attempt to explain phenomena in psychoanalytical terms; rather, the author pursues her own critical ideas about the sight of a covered woman, the role of fantasy, the sexual nature of the response to the niqāb -wearer, and the command to the Muslim woman to yield.
Introduction
In early 2017, an Australian television station sent a reporter dressed in a niq āb to a mall.
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- Information
- Law, Cultural Studies and the 'Burqa Ban' TrendAn Interdisciplinary Handbook, pp. 439 - 462Publisher: IntersentiaPrint publication year: 2021