Re: [閒聊] 法國真的禁止女性在公共場合穿著遮蓋全 …

看板Feminism (女性主義)作者stone1980 (塔裡的男孩 @LA)時間13年前 (2011/05/22 14:36)推噓0(0推 0噓 0→)

留言0則, 0人參與討論串17/19 (看更多)

以前讀到的後殖民理論家Robert Young關於面紗的一篇文章裡面他有說到關於面紗的詮釋政治問題他認為我們不應該忽略面紗對於當事人的社會文化意義當然這不代表當事人所處的社會文化沒有性別、權力等問題同時他也批判說逼一個人戴面紗是一種暴力逼一個人取下面紗也是 "The nature of the western response to the veil is to demand and desire its removal, so that strategies of liberation in the name of saving women supposedly forced to wear the veil coincide uncomfortably with the colonial violence of the veil's forcible removal." 以下是這篇文章文章有點長不過寫得真的很好有興趣的版友不妨花點時間讀一下... ------------------ Robert J. C. Young Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction. Pp.80-92. Oxford University Press, 2003 【The ambivalence of the veil】 Nothing symbolizes the differences between the western and the Muslim worlds more than the veil. Few items of clothing throughout history can have been given more meanings and political significances. For Europeans, the veil used to symbolize the erotic mysteries of the east. For Muslims, it signified social status. Today, the meaning of the veil has changed dramatically. For many westerners, the veil is a symbol of patriarchal Islamic societies in which women are assumed to be oppressed, subordinated, and made invisible. On the other hand, in Islamic societies, and among many Muslim women in non-Islamic societies, the veil (Jiijab) has come to symbolize a cultural and religious identity, and women have increasingly chosen to cover themselves as a matter of choice. As a result, the veil is more widely worn today than ever before. Today, depending who you are, the veil symbolizes control or defiance, oppression or autonomy, patriarchy or non-western communal values. How can we understand the veil, catch its meanings, and at the same time take hold of and interrogate our own automated responses? No one can read the veil from a neutral, disinterested space. Let us try by first looking at an image (Figure 12) that typifies the kind of European stereotypical representations of the east in the colonial period, of the kind characterized by Edward Said as 'Orientalism'. The image is entitled simply 'Arab woman'. A colour postcard, dating from around 1910, the high noon of imperialism, it was produced in Egypt by one of the many German photographic firms based in the Middle East at that time. The representation has objectified the woman it depicts. A real Egyptian woman, with a name, a family, a voice, and a history, has been transformed into an 'Oriental', a universal, generic 'Arab Woman'. The woman has been specially constructed for the eye of power suspended in the westerner's gaze, and precipitated into the one-way street of'the politics of recognition'. Is this a photograph or a painting? She wears a brown veil, with a yellow lining that falls over her shoulders and a cloth of bluishgreen. A burqa of black wrinkled cotton, held up by a basma, a piece of cloth that runs through the protruding 'oqla, made from a piece of a special kind of bamboo called Farsi, covers the lower part of her face, but leaves much of her forehead and upper cheekbones exposed. She is looking away from the camera, thus increasing her modesty while at the same time giving her a thoughtful, distracted look. Looking at the coarse bluish cloth of her galabiya that falls in folds over the rest of her body, it seems that the artist has subliminally cast her in the pose of the Virgin Mary. A Virgin Mary, decently veiled, as no doubt she was, and it might seem predominantly passive, receptive. All she lacks is the halo, but the aura of quietude around this woman is so strong that she hardly needs one. With her averted gaze, and her arms lowered and folded around her body, it is as if she could never speak, or act, for herself. Or is it we as viewers who assume this? Does this representation of a woman give us what the artist wanted us to see, a certain image of 'the Arab woman', an exotic oriental woman who can stand for all Arab women, as opposed to the reality of what this particular woman was really like? The image never asks us to think of her as a living human being in a social environment. It is constructed for a certain kind of western viewer who already knows from many other representations what an 'Arab woman' ought to look like - modest, pining, above all veiled. The European knows her instantly, just as today we recognize a picture of a cosy snow-covered scene as an image of Christmas. A representation of Christmas has to show us a snow-covered scene if it is going to evoke Christmas properly. This is the case even though in many, if not most, places of the world, Christmas actually never looks like that. In England, for example, it is generally a mild day with a bit of sunshine and drizzle. There is very rarely any snow To show a drizzly day on a card, however, would not evoke 'Christmas' in the way a snow-scene does - even when we know that, in terms of our experience, the mythical White Christmas is completely untrue. So too with this woman. Though her veiling here is not as extreme as in the full burqa, the tubular loqla sticking out so prominently on the forehead, and the tightly drawn long black cloth round the cheekbones over the mouth, narrowing as it descends towards the waist like an enormous beak, give a strong impression to western eyes of imprisonment. She seems literally confined, caged, exhibiting every quality that many western women and men have considered that Muslim women need freeing from by the enlightened, unveiled west - the undressed west, which demands that women uncover themselves, whether they want to or not. In the 19th century, the west considered the wearing of clothes as the mark of civilization; it was 'savages' who went naked. In the 20th and 21st centuries, however, semi-nudity became the signifier of western superiority. The two layers of colour of the chromolithograph have not been swept over her eyes, leaving them almost matt, so that if you look closely at the pupils they are printed in black and white, staring out from behind the colours that veil her. You begin to see that her eyes are resourceful, strong, empowered, despite the aesthetic frame that has been put around her - which is far more repressive of what she really is than any veil could ever be. The stereotypical image becomes increasingly difficult to read. The woman who has been objectified seems to turn the tables and reassert herself against the power of the western gaze. In the course of the 20th century, the veil increasingly became a focus for those who sought to secularize Islamic societies. The French in Algeria and elsewhere initiated the 'Battle of the Veil', carrying out forced unveilings of local women. As part of his attempt to westernize Iran, the western-imposed Shah of Iran banned the chador, the black head-to-toe body wrap worn by rural and traditional urban women. In direct response, after the Islamic Revolution of 1978/79, women were required to wear it. If some women can be considered to be persecuted by being forced to wear the veil, as westerners generally assume, then other women are equally persecuted by secular laws that oblige them not to wear it. In France and Spain, for example, girls have to fight in the courts to go to school with their heads covered. Here, we are not talking about a veil like the one the Egyptian woman is wearing, where a few curls on the forehead are allowed to break the severity of the veil's boundary, but a veil that completely covers the hair (just as, until fairly recently, European Catholic women used to wear a mantle over their heads when going to church). In Turkey, the enlightened legislation of a secular state in a Muslim country at present prohibits the wearing of any kind of veil in public institutions such as schools, universities, and even hospitals. As a result, many women who have chosen to dress as covered women' are prevented from going to university at all. Ways round it can, of course, always be found. One woman, who is a doctor, appropriates an old Jewish custom for married women, and obeys the letter of the law by always wearing a wig, thus revealing hair but at the same time keeping her own hair hidden and out of sight. In the most recent Turkish election, an Islamic party gained power that promised finally to reverse this law that drives Turkish women to study in universities in Berlin, London, and Vienna (in Turkey, they joke that this second Siege of Vienna has been more successful than the first). Men can attend university in Turkey because there is no parallel law demanding that all male university students be hatless and clean-shaven so as to reveal all of their heads and faces. Having said that, it remains the case that Kemal Attaturk, the founder of modern Turkey, did ban the fez, and historically much of the legislation about dress in Turkey and Iran was focused on male dress. When people talk about 'the veil', they often end up talking about it as if it were a fixed thing, like a piece of uniform. There is not just 'the veil' - there are many kinds of veil, and in most societies at any given moment different women will be wearing a great variety of them, in untroubled heterogeneity. The veil itself is a fluid, ambivalent garment. There are the body veils, the abaya, the burqa, the chador, the chadri, the carsaf 'or khimar, the haik, and the sitara. Then there are the face or head veils, the batula, the boushiya, the burko, the dupatta, the hijab, the niqaab, the rouband, and the yasmak, to name only some of the most popular. While there are many different kinds of veil, and many different ways in which women wear any particular veil at different times, like any clothing, veils also change, shift, modify, and are adapted to different needs and new circumstances. Such as colonial occupation, for example. Fanon emphasized the liistoric dynamism of the veil', the ways in which it can be changed strategically and used instrumentally according to circumstance. This was particularly apparent during the Algerian War of Independence, when the division between the colons (settlers) and the natives was such that a woman affiliated herself to either side according to her style of dress. As in the famous scenes in Pontecorvo's film Battle of Algiers (1965), Algerian women could then be sent as invisible couriers to carry weapons or plant bombs in the European parts of the city. "The protective mantle of the Casbah, the almost organic curtain of safety that the Arab town weaves round the native, withdrew, and the Algerian woman, exposed, was sent forth into the conqueror's city." (Frantz Fanon) By turns, Algeria veiled and unveiled itself, playing against the assumptions of the colonial occupier. Although the French soldiers were officially given leaflets telling them to respect Muslim women, there were plenty of other well-documented occasions when the demands of their investigative processes, la torture, resulted in the rape, torture, and killing of suspects. Sometimes these women were paraded bound and naked by their captors, and photographed in that state before their death. Algeria unveiled - for the cruel eyes of French 'civilization'. This woman who sees without being seen frustrates the colonizer', says Fanon. She asserts a resisting refusal of knowledge comparable only to the impenetrability of the Casbah, the fortress in whose steep, narrow alleyways the ambivalent veiled woman is often pictured. The nature of the western response to the veil is to demand and desire its removal, so that strategies of liberation in the name of saving women supposedly forced to wear the veil coincide uncomfortably with the colonial violence of the veil's forcible removal. Fanon himself had to learn that despite his emphasis on community in his psychiatric hospital at Blida in northern Algeria, he had to allow the creation of a separate section in the hospital canteen for women. Is it veiling or unveiling that constitutes the radical assertive move against institutionalized forms of power? It is only recently, when it has been made clear that many women choose to wear the veil and will fight for the right to do so, that veiling has been associated with militancy amongst women. For men, by contrast, to wear the face veiled carries completely different connotations from those associated with the Arab woman. Take the photograph in Figure 13, for example, of Subcommandante Marcos of the Zapatistas riding triumphantly into Mexico City in 2001. Marcos has just criss-crossed the country in a 15-day march gathering support for his bill to increase rights of autonomy and land ownership for Mexico's still impoverished indigenous Indians. The government has finally agreed to negotiate with him, and Marcos rides into the city. It is a moment of popular frenzy. He is masked, garlanded, a popular hero. Notice, too, the homely, fatherly touch of the pipe, which emerges mysteriously from his hidden lips. To cover the face, for a man, carries all the connotations of wearing a masque - of romantic banditry, of being outlawed, adopting a disguise as a means of self-protection against the odds of the authority in power. The Zapatistas' war against the Mexican state on behalf of the indigenous peasantry of southern Mexico, who, despite rebellions throughout their history, have won few rights of land and property, has famously been one in which indigenous rights have been asserted through the most modern forms of technology. Marcos used to fax his demands to the government and the papers: now he sends them by email. At the same time, the Zapatistas have employed as their hallmark the balaclava helmet, a veil that, like the masks of the Intifada fighters in Palestine, both guards their identity from the security forces and gives them a militant uniform. The very uniformity that the veil appears to impose on the woman here increases the masculine subversive resonance. The male veil is assertive. Whereas the Arab woman keeps demurely still, the garlanded Marcos raises his open hand triumphantly high in the air, and though he too looks to the side of the camera, he is clearly saluting a crowd, not averting his eyes from the viewer. We, as onlookers, are reduced to being part of the spectacle of which he is the centre. Why does the veil appear to disempower a woman, but empower a man? The answer is that this is not intrinsically a gender issue but a situational one. There are also examples of veiling of Arab men, such as among the Berber Hamitic-speaking Tuareg, who regard the veil as an instrument of social status and masculinity. Tuareg men wear a white or blue veil called the tegelmoust The Egyptianborn anthropologist Fadwa El Guindi writes, "The veil is worn continually by men - at home, travelling, during the evening or day, eating or smoking, sleeping and even, according to some sources, during sexual intercourse." Tuareg women, on the other hand, are not face-veiled at all, though they use their shawls to cover the lower part of the face rather as older women in South Asia use the dupatta. What is striking about Tuareg male veiling is the way that it is also used as a mobile signifier to denote meanings in everyday ordinary social intercourse. The veil is drawn up to the eyes before women, strangers, or prestigious persons, lowered amongst those for whom the wearer feels less respect. Rather as with the dhoti in southern India, which men unconsciously adjust, fold, wrap, and hitch up to knee length, then unfold and drop, as they stand talking to each other, Tuareg men are continually adjusting and readjusting their veils, heightening and tightening them, lowering and slackening, tugging and straightening them, as they go about their daily business. The veil, in other words, can only be read in terms of its local meanings, which are generated within its own social space. A reading from outside will always tend to impose meanings from the social space of the viewer. For westerners, the veil is about the subordination and oppression of women. In Arabic societies, as El Guindi comments, 'the veil is about privacy, identity, kinship status, rank and class'. Whereas the western viewer, therefore, typically sees the photograph of the veiled Arab woman as a symbol of women's oppression under Islam, for an Egyptian looking at her image in 1910, the veil would have symbolized the woman's social rank. Women of the lowest class, particularly the peasantry in the countryside and the bedouin women of the desert, would not have worn a veil at all. Within the cities, women of different classes wore different kinds of veil. Upper-class Egyptian women wore the Turkish-style bisha, made of white muslin. The woman in the postcard, by contrast, wears a traditional black face-veil and 'oqla, which, together with her galabiya, suggests that she belongs to the lower classes of artisans, labourers, or market women. While to the western viewer, therefore, her image may suggest either biblical resonances or an oppressive patriarchal social system, to an Egyptian, her veil first and foremost would have defined her social status. The western viewer, in other words, with no local cultural knowledge, would give a completely different interpretation of the photograph to that of the contemporary Egyptian woman whom it represented. Nowadays the veil involves a different kind of cultural power, particularly with respect to western societies. Take Figure 14, for example, in which the veiled black woman clearly communicates her challenge directly to the viewer. Her eyes are wide open, and she looks straight at the camera. Notice, too, how the image is taken close up, in an in-your-face way, rather than inviting the aesthetic distance through which we saw the Arab woman. Our response is mediated by the information provided by the title, which tells us that she is a Muslim woman photographed in Brooklyn, New York. The fact that she is in New York encourages the viewer to assume that she is an African-American woman who is probably a member of the Nation of Islam. She has chosen the veil, in the society in which it currently has the most confrontational meaning. Veil, mask: compliance or defiance? And agency: who chooses to veil themselves? In fact, the women's and the Zapatistas' choice of veiling are responses to the society in which they live. It might seem that the Egyptian woman has no option within a patriarchal system but to veil herself, while Marcos has been a free agent who makes a choice. However, as we have seen, in fact in Egypt in the earlier part of the 20th century, veiling for a woman was generally a mark of status, and in that sense was therefore regarded as empowering rather than disempowering. One reason veiling became more widespread was because more and more women wanted to assert social status, particularly to other women. For Marcos, as a revolutionary fighting his government, his anonymity is a strategic requirement. He chose to wear the balaclava, but not as an act of free choice. In modern times, covering the face has become a widespread means of avoiding identification by police cameras, a device always used, for example, at IRA funerals. It also represents an act of defiance and assertion, as veiling increasingly does for Islamic women today. The meaning of the veil, when it has one, is never stable. Fanon recalls how under colonial rule Moroccan women changed the colour of their veil from white to black to express solidarity with their exiled king: they chose to give the veil a meaning by transforming its colour. More often, reading the veil amounts to how the veil looks out of its own social context, to what the exterior viewer puts into his or her interpretation, and has very little to do with what the veil means for the actual woman who is wearing it. -- ※ 發信站: 批踢踢實業坊(ptt.cc) ◆ From: 99.97.226.147