"In short, this is how thoroughly they are not the same:
When a woman’s community acceptance, respect, dignity, employability, marriagiability, physical safety, enfranchisement, social mobility, access to social institutions, freedom, and autonomy hinge upon her daily, unwavering, public adherence to the bikini, then we can make this comparison.
When a woman cannot leave her home in anything other than a bikini without being deemed immoral and her human worth and family’s honor compromised, then we can make this comparison.
When there are severe legal, social, and extrajudicial forces holding a woman’s safety, wellbeing, and livelihood hostage to her adherence to the bikini, then we can make this comparison...
Sanctioned modesty is very, very much a pressing and relevant issue in Muslim communities in the West. Women suffering from this are largely invisible, closeted, and unheard, and unfortunately unless one is immersed in the problem, or has access to safe ex-Muslim or reformist Muslim spaces, one is not liable be exposed to this problem, its mechanics, to understand how deep it runs. The Muslim women who have visibility and whose voices are elevated and endorsed by their communities? They are not the ones dissenting to their community’s norms. Is that not intuitive?...
When I see disproportionate outrage about a minority of women from Muslim communities in France subjected to clothing policing in certain contexts vs equivocation (with a background soundtrack of crickets) about themillions of women subjected to clothing policing globally in the general public in Muslim majority countries and communities,
and when I see rhetoric about the former being used to obscure and deny and minimize mechanics of oppression regarding the latter,
I’m kind of feeling favorably about this sentiment, that it’s unjust to talk about the former without acknowledging the latter.
Because liberal discourse has tended to uncritically sanitize the hijab by effectively stripping it of its social and cultural context."
~is that not intuitive~
Mmmmmm. I really like that cartoon for the way that it demonstrates different perspectives, but I realize that I never looked at it fully.
And I am definitely part of the audience hungry for stories of women defending the Hijab, in the context of anti-Islamophobia, and I need to be more critical of that - I need to be more critical of ways I want something to not be a problem, the ways I can be fragile in the face of others' oppressions.
Also an interesting point, so well stated - "Sometimes I feel like ‘there is no hierarchy of oppression’ is a principle that serves only those whose oppression does not lack relative focus to begin with.
In fact, it sounds suspiciously like All Lives Matter to me. Not in theory, but in application."
FB: I found this essay really, really important "Policing bodily conduct is oppressive (how I believe this is never justified pertaining to the hijab in particular is explicated here); therefore the burkini ban is oppressive.
And yet, liberal rhetoric condemning the ban seems to find it necessary to sanitize and defend hijab itself in order to oppose banning it."
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