The Headscarf as an Artifact and Its Functional Use Beyond Faith

Ayşenur Benevento, ERC PRIME Youth Project Post-doc Researcher, European Institute, İstanbul Bilgi University 

30 May 2021

The representation of experience in talk is discussed widely in feminist scholarship (DeVault, 1990; Kruks, 2001). In our ERC project on youth radicalization in Europe, one of our preliminary observations was that the young and pious Muslim women we interviewed in Germany, the Netherlands, France, and Belgium emphasized the independence one has when deciding to wear or not to wear a headscarf. They highlighted the importance of proving “yourself for your own integrity” and “self-worth”, including being trustworthy, showing competence, being sincere, true to oneself, conscientious, honest, kind, careful with one’s appearance, growing and becoming independent. On the journey of declaring this independence, the headscarf appeared as a useful tool, sometimes despite and sometimes with the full support of its cultural and political meanings. In this blog post, I chose to make pious Muslim women’s headscarf-wearing experience the ‘‘origin of explanation’’ (Scott, 1991). Using the concept of affordances (Gibson, 1982), I am hoping to challenge the existing interpretations of headscarf use and bring the experiences and ideas of Muslim women to the front.  Because of the underrepresentation of Muslim women within psychology, I believe a discussion focusing solely on these women’s personal experiences is necessary to humanize the practice of veiling.

Religious experiences and their expressions are important aspects of processes of identifications and therefore have an impact on how religious communities are perceived.  Many unanswered questions persist in terms of the function the headscarf has in women’s lives. Does a headscarf symbolize something for everyone? Yes, based on our understanding of culture and use of materials and tools to indicate aspects of culture, we can easily claim that as a piece of clothing, a headscarf might afford different functions for different people. As much as the author of this short piece does not believe that headscarves should be compared with other pieces of clothing taken up by women like G-strings (see Duits & van Zoonen, 2006), such an analogy might be useful to provide a perspective on the unique yet ordinary state of headscarves in women’s lives.  By wearing a particular piece of clothing, individuals join communities of discourse and sentiments, and reflect their own understandings of the existing cultural developments.

Affordances of headscarves. Theoretical considerations of affordance originate at the intersection of perceptual and cognitive psychology, specifically within the context of Gibson’s (1982) work from the mid-60s onwards. According to Gibson (1982), affordance intends to account for the actionable properties of a physical object or environment. An object’s affordances, in other words, describe its phenomenological qualities, projecting potential uses, delimiting possible actions, and signaling perceived functions.  The concept is generally used to describe what tools, such as headscarves, allow people to do. A headscarf is basically an object that a woman uses to cover her hair. In the following paragraphs, I explore three affordances to portray various functions of headscarves while claiming that wearing one is a cultural activity and not simply an act of indicating identity:

Reference to personal devotion to God: For some, wearing headscarf is nothing more than asserting devotion to God. A headscarf, as a piece of clothing, might be providing an opportunity for a religious woman to make sense, accept and declare her religious beliefs. Many feminist scholars working with veiled women have difficulty taking veiled women’s independent decision-making capacity seriously because “those women already ascribed their agency to God” (Hollywood, 2004). How could someone claim agency while they have already devoted themselves to a supernatural force? What I read in the interviews conducted by our research team in Germany, France, Belgium and the Netherlands helps me observe that women can conceive of their own decisions and actions independent from whether they attribute responsibility for events to individuals, to fate, to deities, or other animate or inanimate forces. High educational status and motivation to participate in actions related to social change (e.g., interest in voting and street demonstrations, involvement in political organizations, etc.) hint to me that they believe they can influence their own life and fate.

Protective: As a means of public modesty, a headscarf might have protected women from harm. Local environmental characteristics might be a contributing factor to a woman’s decision to wear a headscarf. Especially in neighborhoods where the crime rates are high and the population is diverse, women might choose to be veiled to shield themselves against the male gaze. The use of a headscarf as a shield is based on the assumption that men withdraw or, at least, hesitate to “touch” a Muslim woman. On a spiritual level, Islamic doctrine dictates utmost respect towards every human being but especially towards women and children, which are considered vulnerable and in need of adult men’s defense of their rights if not simply their protection. By covering, women might be attempting to remind their observers of the value of respect and ask for their further consideration in case they are tempted by ‘the devil’. In small places where everybody knows each other, the threat men pose outside the home is not as big as in places where there is a flow of different men every day.

Supportive: The relationships that people develop through their fashion choices are not new. The affordances of wearing a headscarf enable vast numbers of women to participate in a community. While wearing a headscarf might be indicative of an interest in Islam, it also shows awareness of a particular clothing style as hair is only a small part of body. There are many more places to cover on one’s body. Belonging to a minority group, women might be sharing tips, brands, and styles in covering themselves. Fellow headscarf wearers, who are already a minority in Western countries, might be using the headscarf as a tool to identify each other. They may never attend social gatherings together, visit over coffee, or carry on a complete conversation. But, nonetheless the imagined relationships may be meaningful and akin to mentoring.

Conclusion: Despite the literature dealing with the complexity of contemporary headscarf/veil cultures two frameworks still prevail in feminist scholarship: the veil as a symbol of submission of women to men, and the veil as a symbol of resistance against Western domination, commodification of women’s bodies and Islamophobia (Bilge, 2010; Yegenoglu, 1998). This dichotomous meaning-making of the Muslim veil aims to speak for women and fails to attend to the reasons given by veiled women; questions of piety, morality, modesty, virtue and divinity (Mahmood, 2005). Instead, the scholars writing about veiled Muslim women attempt to interpret what they hear from the women they speak to and assert the “real” motivations behind the uses of the headscarf. This brief blog post is an effort to challenge the inclination of justifying the practice of veiling and to present the experience in an empathetic way.

References

Bilge, Sirma. 2010. “Beyond Subordination vs. Resistance: An Intersectional Approach to the Agency of Veiled Muslim Women.” Journal of Intercultural Studies 31 (1): 9–28.

DeVault, M. L. (1990). Talking and listening from women's standpoint: Feminist strategies for interviewing and analysis. Social problems, 37(1), 96-116.

Duits, L., & Van Zoonen, L. (2006). Headscarves and porno-chic: Disciplining girls' bodies in the European multicultural society. European Journal of Women's Studies, 13(2), 103-117.

Gibson, J. J. (1982). Notes on affordances. Reasons for realism. E. Reed, R. Jones (Eds.), Reasons for realism: The selected essays of James J. Gibson, Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ (1982), pp. 401-418

Hollywood, A. (2002). Performativity, citationality, ritualization. History of religions, 42(2), 93-115. Kruks, S. (2001). Retrieving Experience: Subjectivity and Recognition in Feminist Politics.

Mahmood, S. (2011). Politics of piety: The Islamic revival and the feminist subject. Princeton University Press.

Scott, J.W. (1991) The evidence of experience. Critical Inquiry, 17,4, 772–97.

Yegenoglu, M. (1998). Colonial fantasies: Towards a feminist reading of Orientalism. Cambridge University Press.