My bit on niqabs and fear of the hidden face

David Mitchell wrote an opinion piece in the Observer this weekend about why banning burqas is unliberal. Other people say that burqas (I think they mean niqabs because I'm never seen a burqa outside of TV pictures of Afghanistan) are horrible because they show women being forced to do things by men or religion. I say:

We don't know that it's not a choice for women. Here's two reasons for a start: maybe women who cover dislike being looked at sexually by men (of course, the real solution would be men stop ogling and sexualising women); maybe the hair is constructed as being as personal, not for viewing in public, just as many cultures have constructed breasts/bottoms/genitals as personal and not for public show. The construction of shame and the need to cover certain parts of the body is exactly that, a construction, and totally arbitrary. So there is no way that anyone can judge Muslim women for constructing a need to cover the hair, unless they believe that there is an imperative for everyone to go naked all the time.

Mitchell's piece is problematic, mainly for this bit:
"those women who feel pressured into wearing burqas by cultural or familial forces might become aware that they're living in a society where questioning those forces is welcomed."

Way to assume low/zero education and knowledge of Britain in a group of women! How infantilising! I think women know where they live!

And he rests a lot of his argument on what he sees as his right to take the piss out of women who cover. As someone who intensely hates being made fun of, that's not really something I can get behind.

Here's some articles which present a better take on it; however, as one of them says, why don't we stop blathering about clothes and start discussing war or poverty or education! And stop using women as a way to dress Islamophobia up as liberation.

Racialicious

Muslimah Media Watch on a potential ban in Quebec

MMW again


Is choice not the issue? Should there be a debate about head to toe covering in Europe, if it can stop wringing it's hands over cultural relativism? Mona Eltahawy says this

I think she's right in reminding that Islam is not monolithic and that full coverings might be coming from only very right wing cultural interpretations of the religion, but I don't think Western governments and commenters can presume to kn...ow how many Western Muslim women are choosing to cover and how many are forced. Actually a woman wearing a niqab walked past me where I'm sat in Loughborough Uni library just ten minutes ago; I don't know whether she wishes to dress like that or not and it's not really my business because although niqabs and burqas might be a symbol of misogyny, talking about women's clothing is not going to stop violence against women, or racism, which Eltahawy seems to suggest will stop if women don't cover (the bit where she mentions the group Ni Poutes Ni Soumises). If the French were really bothered about misogynistic violence and racism then they would address those problems directly, but instead they focus on a fear of the unknown (a hidden face and a different type of clothing) and say the face is central to Western identity and human interaction. I don't want to be culturally relativist, because British Muslims don't live under a government that demands covering, therefore we might question why a woman feels the need to wear a niqab in a country like Britain, we might ask why she feels it necessary, but either way clothing doesn't bring social justice.

Sometimes I feel like covering my face (bad skin) and lots of women might hide their identity behind a shovel full of make up, and maybe some men use beards to hide behind. These are body presentations issues too but no one talks about liberating women from make up regimes because I am suspicious that for a lot of people the issue is that Muslimahs who cover are rejecting Western beauty trends and the imperative to dress for men, to be viewed by men. And Westerners don't get that.

Really the way to stop misogyny and racism and violence and work for tolerance and social justice is to address the causes of intolerance, bring education and stop fear. It's like the way that anti-rape campaigns preach to potential victims "don't go out late on your own, don't wear slutty clothes, etc" - but you don't stop rape by changing women's behaviour, you stop rape by getting men to stop raping. Likewise, you stop Islamophobia, racism and misogyny against Muslim women not by changing the women's behaviour or dress, but by stopping racists from meting out frightened violence, educating against violence against women, and solving the poverty, unemployment and segregation that is behind a lot of hatred of the Other.

Musical aside

I just came across an old notebook from my undergrad years and it in was a set list from a time I DJed for Offbeat in the Coventry Colosseum (now Casbah); gonna try to post some of it up here. From the looks of things, I DJed this around mid 2001.


Slightly-forgotten indie-rockers Silversun with 'Julia'


Catatonia while they were still alright, with 'Sweet Catatonia'


They are still my favourite band, Bluetones - 'Solomon Bites the Worm'


Another band/album I don't listen to anymore, Blue 'Tracy Jacks'


REM, 'Harborcoat'


The lovely 'Kate from Ben Folds Five


Tha Manics and 'From Despair to Where'


This probably wouldn't be allowed to be released these days, it's Travis' 'U-16 Girls'


This video shows two Gorky's songs but I just played the first, Patio Song:



This isn't as good as I remembered it. Ultrasound, 'Kurt Russell'


From Green Day's first album, twenty years old now, 'Knowledge'


Gomez 'Love Is Better Than A Warm Trombone'


Hefner - 'Hymn For the Cigarettes'


SFA - Chupacabras (I just learned today that this is named after an animal)


this was from a Levi's advert, the Sta-Prest ones I think. Lilys, 'Nanny in Manhattan'.


Enjoy!

Reflections on BSA Youth 2010

Oh dear, I neglected my blog again. Two weeks ago I attended the British Sociological Society's Youth 2010 conference in Guildford. I presented, for the first time, some findings from my data collection/production, and managed to speak ad lib about it fairly well I think.

There I met Max Mauro from Dublin Institute of Technology, creating a video ethnography of transnational identities of boys in football clubs. He reflected, with surprise and a little dismay or puzzlement, that he and I were the only two speakers working on sport or physical activity issues, which for a conference on youth might be considered strange; the overall theme of the week was 'Transitions, Identities and Cultures' and this had been predominantly interpreted as sub-cultures, music, clubs, although youth un(der)employment was also an issue in some talks. There were plenty of things about accessing identities and cultures which I found useful, anyway. It seems like a nice group to get involved in ... which leads me onto thinking about another issue:

As I search for articles for reading, I find lots of book chapters, reviews, etc. written by PhD students and I wonder whether the way you get into this type of writing is a case of who you know? Being asked to write a chapter in a book by an acquaintance? Aside from the central areas of my PhD, I wouldn't know what to write about, or I wouldn't know anything to write! But I keep thinking about it as something important. Maybe movies about women in sport, being something tying women's equality in sport, and visual cultures/cultural resources, together... Need to find something other than Bend It Like Beckham ...

Second letter to my MP

After the disastrous election results and my constituency turned blue I thought I'd better have a bit more involvement and ask for things - MPs are supposed to work for us, after all. So I've been writing to the new MP. First letter's had no response, it was a request against the speculated reduction of abortion time limits that Cameron has indicated he would support. Although I now have a woman MP I worry she would also support a reduction in the time limit so I wrote to ask. But no reply yet.

Today I wrote again, asking her to support the Early Day Motion against the proposal to grant anonymity to rape defendants. Disgusting bit of injustice that would be. Let's see if I get a reply. 57 MPs have already signed the EDM. This is a good article by former solicitor general Vera Baird about it.

Roses grown in concrete

A couple of weeks' ago I was at the American Educational Research Association's Annual Conference in Denver, Colorado. I've not had a chance to say much about that yet, and I do have things to say. On the whole there were some inspiring, if not relevant to my research, talks that I went to, and I had a positive experience at the whole thing. The last talk I went to was Jeff Duncan-Andrade talking about hope through the metaphor of roses grown in concrete, taken from a Tupac song. It was very powerful and a great note to end the conference on - made me want to go more into social justice work. I found it on YouTube too - a longer version of the talk from a previous conference. Highly worth watching. Here it is.

PhD stalemate

I'm having this big problem in thinking lately that I'm not doing anything new or different with my research. It may have partly come from having droppped the reading and writing schedule in order to get on with data collection/production, and just now I picked up an article to read for the seminars I'm taking tomorrow (first teaching! Woo!) and it got me all worried that I'm repeating others' work - I certainly don't just want to repeat my supervisor's work. A quick lookn at the abstracts of many writers in the field (any field?) and you see that their own work is often similar, and they share many methods, theories and so on with lots of other writers around the world. But I think I need something different in order to get a PhD and I'm not doing that I fear. I also struggle with a rationale and the aim - that is, where I'm coming from, what I'm building on, the questions that are unanswered, and what I plan to do about them.

Maybe it's not as bad as I think but looking at my research questions and objectives they don't inspire me that much because they don't seem new, or they don't seem to be quite what I'm trying to put my finger on.

Or perhaps I should stop trying to read journal articles at 11pm. Because i can't articulate the thoughts I'm having that are coming out of the reading, about rationalising my own work...

Reflections on “Forgotten Bodies”

To use the words of someone I met there, the Forgotten Bodies conference was affirming, to see that there are other postgrads working on feminist and gender studies research. Of course I knew they existed, but something about sitting down this morning made me remember it, like I'd forgotten while being in a department that centres on scientific and professional research.

I also remembered that I didn't need to preach to the converted about feminist theory, but by then I had already written my paper with a huge theories section, and I couldn't find easy bits to cut out. By leaving it in I then ran out of time for the methods section and rushed it, and that was probably the most interesting or different part of the paper. I had a few people tell me that my work was interesting and a good paper that gave a different perspective to the session. I had felt a bit like I wouldn't fit or that people wouldn't be interested because it was a session on “Fat” and the other two speakers were doing eating disorders and the place of fat bodies in society. Not sure I successfully answered the questions I got at the end either, with my rambling.

Other interesting presentations were Vikki Chalkin's work on queer femininity using an auto-ethnography, for she talked about putting the researcher at the heart of the research alongside the participants, for her embodiment and knowledge must be recognised in the production of research. She also talked about being marginalised in her Media department for being too creative and not doing proper research, and marginalised in Arts for being too theoretical, which I could sort of identify with because I feel like I am not doing the sort of work that my department expects, that they think of when they think pedagogy. I don't think I'm doing the sort of work I would think of if I thought of pedagogy! Results and recommendations and things like that. I'm quite cognizant of the wishes of the teachers at school at have a report that gives them some answers to the questions they have hinted at during my data collection, and I think of how I can do this report from my data. It occasionally influences the questions I ask of the students.

But, nice to see the world of gender studies and arts beyond my own department. Yesterday I went to a seminar by a social science student on learning in communities of practice, very interesting and slightly with relevance to my methods. And I was interviewed recently for a project on Third Wave feminists so it's a bit of a week for seeing other worlds, actually. I think my responses reflected on, as I have said here, the position I am in as an academic.