It may
seem counterintuitive for many to hear an icon of feminism defending the Muslim
veil. But don’t expect to receive conventional wisdom when you discuss issues
such as the role of women in the Middle East with Judith Butler. She is the
Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative
Literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of the
acclaimed Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.
Butler
believes that the veils worn by some
Muslim women have unjustly become universal symbols of female disempowerment.
For her, veiling is partly an expression of cultural belonging, signifying a
variety of meanings that must be understood through different religions,
cultures, and regions. Sometimes, she says, the veil also signifies a way of
resisting compulsory assimilation to so-called ‘Western’ norms. “I think women
around the world are now trying to figure out how they honor certain practices,
religious traditions, and the communities where they belong,” Butler explained
over tea with the Cairo Review in November, before
delivering the sixth Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture at the American University
in Cairo. “What I think is misunderstood is that the veil signifies a mode of
cultural belonging and values. There are, of course, many forms of agency
through the veil.”
At the
same time, Butler believes, many Muslim women are trying to negotiate autonomy
for themselves, to enter into the public sphere. “There’s always some degree of
anxiety and fear of punishment in departing
from gender norms,” she argues, as she has so often before about the
difficulties inherent in those negotiations. “That’s as true for an effeminate
boy in Wyoming as it is for a woman in Cairo.”
Butler is
harsh on the tendency in the West, especially among feminists, to categorically
condemn the veil. “Negotiating questions of sexuality and gender is not always
done according to the same language you find in the U.S. or in France,” she
explains. “It’s not always a rights discourse. It’s a different kind of
negotiation, but critics very often don’t have the patience to learn about it.
The idea of liberating Afghan women under the Bush presidency was to tear off
the veil in front of the global media. But that comes very close to a new form
of cultural possession: ‘You now belong to the West. We get to consume your
visual beauty as we wish.’ We need to be a little more careful before we assume
that the veil signifies the loss of autonomy.”
Adds
Butler: “If we allow Islam or the problem of women in Islam to stand for
contemporary problems of women’s inequality, then I think we’re scapegoating.
We’re not actually thinking more concretely about the many sources of relative
inequality in the West, which include
the sexual division of labor, the disproportionate number of women who suffer
across the globe from poverty and illiteracy. We need to think about gender
regulations in a global and comparative way so that some abstract idea of a
woman with the veil does not become the signifier of sexual oppression. It
really gets the so-called
West off the hook and it displays extraordinary ignorance about the history and
present of Muslim practices.”