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Unruly Women (Philosophy of Race) Falguni A. Sheth full chapter instant download
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Unruly Women
PHILOSOPHY OF RACE
Series Editors
Linda Martín Alcoff, Hunter College and the Graduate Center CUNY
Chike Jeffers, Dalhousie University
Reconsidering Reparations
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Ontopolitics: Unruliness, Excruciation, and Dismissal
2. Anxieties of Liberalism: Secularism, Feminism, and Suitable
Muslim Women
3. A Genealogy of Neocolonial Social Comportment
4. The Hijab and the Sari: The Strange and the Sexy Between
Colonialism and Global Capitalism
5. Reversing the Gaze: The Racial-Cultural Aesthetics of Power
6. Transparency and the Deceptive Conceit of Liberalism
7. Discrimination, Neoliberalism, and Suitable Women
8. Dismissal: Neocolonialism, Race, and Anti-Blackness
Conclusion: Listening to the Silences
Appendix
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgments
A casual perusal of the news over the nearly two decades since the
events of September 11 shows the range of hostility directed toward
Muslim women and girls who wear the hijab or variants of the
“veil.”1 We read reports of attempts to pull off the hijab or niqab
from young girls or Muslim women walking down the street or
working as food delivery drivers. These are the public, visible,
verifiable events—translated as assaults, and in some cases treated
as such.2 These events are instances of religious or racial
discrimination—of violating women’s right to exist without injury in
society because they are Muslim.
North America has become increasingly dominated by the (global
and domestic) politics of national security as a defense against
“Islamic terrorism,” and even more so as the years have passed. Yet,
despite the visible presence of Muslim women who wear the hijab in
the United States, there have been few legal or state-led attempts to
regulate the hijab in the French (or Quebecois) sense of outlawing
conspicuous religious symbols. This is not to say that the hijab or
niqab are not considered threatening, subversive, and somehow
violating the principles of (a seemingly secular) liberalism. U.S.-
based Muslim women are still regulated and disciplined within the
social context in which they find themselves, as well as by the state,
but in less explicit ways than their European counterparts who find
the veil disturbing if not altogether offensive or transgressive of their
dominant, “secular” liberal culture.
In the United States, Muslim women who wear the hijab are
disciplined and regulated through a range of legal, economic, or
juridical approaches with reference to the liberal tenet that is being
contested or re-inscribed at various moments. Consider the following
catalogue: In 2003, a Muslim female police officer was fired for
wearing the hijab on the ground that she violated the Philadelphia
Police Department’s uniform policy.3 In 2005, two young Muslim
teens who were arrested, strip-searched, detained, and interrogated
for eight weeks on the suspicion of being potential suicide bombers
or terrorists (Bernstein 2005a; 2005b; 2005c; 2006; Sheth 2006). In
2007, the Transportation Security Association announced its intent to
screen and examine anyone who wore “headgear,” including men
who wear baseball caps, cowboy hats, and turbans.4
Muslim women who wear the hijab have been routinely employed
at companies that require some social visibility, whether in clothing
stores or nonprofit organizations. There have been multiple
occasions (and a few legal cases) involving Muslim women or teens
who wore the hijab who were either not hired, or fired, from clothing
stores because they did not conform to in-house dress policies (Aziz
2012). Muslim women are also employed by government
institutions: in one instance, the US Department of Justice filed and
settled a civil discrimination suit on behalf of a New Jersey
corrections officer who was fired for wearing the hijab.5 In other
instances, imprisoned Muslim women have been required to remove
their hijabs on the grounds that they could injure someone else6 or
themselves.7 Women have been pressured to remove their hijabs on
threat of being barred from the courtroom where they were
conducting unrelated business. One order came from the governing
judge on the grounds that the woman violated the courts’ need for
transparency, identity, public-ness8 (ACLU of Michigan 2009). As
mentioned previously, other women, and Muslim teens who wear
hijab, niqab, or burqas report having to deal with daily harassments
or fear of physical violence. In many cases, women were not able to
obtain redress for these injustices or other forms of harassment or
violence, even when they were the aggrieved parties.
The disruption of the hegemonic aesthetic norm through their
public presentation or comportment—especially by an already vilified
minority population—is encountered as an “unruly” threat to be
addressed and contained9 (Sheth 2009, chap. 1). On a global level,
this is how much of North America, Europe, and Australia have
responded to Muslims after the events of September 11, 2001,
whether through a domestic and global discourse of national security
(Akbar 2015), or “laïcité” (Laborde 2005), or a defense of long-
standing (Judeo-Christian) cultural and national dominance. This
response is—quite simply—the rejection of Muslims unless they are
seen to integrate into that racially unmarked dominance.
In effect, this discourse, and the policies that follow from them,
are practices of legal, social, and cultural containment through which
the Western world has mounted an ever-increasing challenge to
Muslims’ moral, cultural, or religious commitments; but this
challenge is translated as a necessary political defense against
“political Islam” or “Islamic terrorism”10 (Ammann 2009; Akbar
2015; Beydoun 2017). As such, to subscribe visibly to Islam is to
always already be a problem. Yet, there is something else at stake
as well: the disruptions, while overtly received as threats to security,
secularism, or (liberal) democracy, are in fact threats to something
longer-standing and much more entrenched. These are challenges to
the long-standing received and unchallenged authority of American
imperialism and settler-colonialism. These projects go hand in hand
with a long-standing capitalist economy that is embedded in a
political and legal liberalism, which can thus demand obedience
through the machinations of legal procedures and neutrality.
At the beginning of his essay “Algeria Unveiled,” Frantz Fanon
asserts that “[i]t is by their apparel that societies first become known
. . .” (Fanon 1965, 35). It is through women’s apparel that a society’s
“civility” or their “civilizability” is often evaluated. Such judgments
occur covertly, subconsciously, but ubiquitously. The bodies and
sartorial practices of women have always been strategically read and
judged,11 but in the case of dark, foreign, or marginalized women,
these readings are made in light of a prior history of colonialism and
imperial enterprises. On this understanding, the sartorial aesthetic
that reflects the cultural hegemony of Europe or the United States
demarcates and highlights the backwardness of the sartorial
aesthetic of “Other” cultures, in this case of Muslim women. As in
the case of the French and other European nations’ explicit
legislative stances against the veil, whether the hijab or niqab, often
by insisting that it is repressive or anti-secular, there is an invocation
of colonial power, used to correct, reform . . . or evacuate a culture
through Muslim women’s bodies/garments—in the name of
Western/liberal/civilizational moral superiority. Here, I draw on
Edward Said’s discussion of the Western gaze, or of Orientalism,
namely that “European culture gained in strength and identity by
setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even
underground self” (Said 1978, 3). As Said insisted, “Orientalism is
more particularly valuable as a sign of European-Atlantic power over
the Orient than it is as a veridic discourse about the Orient” (Said
1978, 6).
Yet, the “Muslim question,” as symbolized through the hijab, is
about something much deeper, more existential, . . . more corrosive.
The Muslim question is not merely about religion. Even as I have
written about the racialization of Muslims, I didn’t understand the
extent to which the Muslim question—as explored through the lens
of Muslim hijabis in the United States—is fundamentally about race,
immigration, diaspora, belonging. It is about the management of
women of color. It is about the unspoken juridical and existential
dismissal of Black Muslim women. It is about the sterilized
production and disciplining of Muslim women through juridical and
procedural regimes, articulated through culturally secular and neutral
norms.
In the United States, Muslim women are disciplined and regulated
through, among other ways, anti-discrimination laws. However, this
regulation is embedded in a longer, deeper history of
neocolonialism.12 I searched for a term that would illustrate the
hierarchical dynamics and comportments found in the relationships
between colonial administrators and a colonized people as these
continue transgenerationally and diasporically, that is, well after
colonialism has “ended” and far beyond the society in question. By
neocolonialism, I mean not only a repetition of colonialism, but a
repetition that embodies the seemingly neutral and objective
articulation of the rule of law and procedure. In so doing, this
repetition conveniently rests on a stylized history specific to the
United States, going so far as to distance itself entirely from
colonialism on the grounds that it was not involved in colonizing the
current descendants of other (French, Spanish, British, Portuguese,
Dutch) societies. By disavowing colonialism, U.S. narratives of
liberalism re-anchored the objectivity of liberal juridical and cultural
regimes in that distanced space through a focused amnesia. This
amnesia frames and eclipses relevant events that connect
colonialism and conquest elsewhere to the stories of how Black and
brown subjects find themselves in another space and time—still
haunted by geopolitical, intergenerational histories that are the
legacies of colonialism. These legacies carry on intergenerationally,
bringing forth and retaining a range of cultural and political dynamics
of condescension and degradation, even in the absence of explicit
registers of colonialism. Barnor Hesse identifies this tension between
the planes of racism and colonialism when he says,