Cultural and visual media do not happen in vacuums, and the deeper connotations behind these islamophobic images, expresses how western society positions Muslim women.
A Muslim woman wearing a Niqab walks in the British northern town of Blackburn, 2006 Getty Images.
Unemployment rife, our welfare state is being ravaged and the numbers that are turning to food banks is steadily rising. Creating an aversion by picking on Muslim women is easy political fodder; though the practice of a minuscule, minority of women being disproportionately portrayed as a pressing issue was achieved quite successfully, in part because of the imagery used.
Over the past two weeks we’ve seen the stock images of voiceless and nameless Muslim women on the front covers of newspapers and blogs in the UK, wearing the niqab. The wearing of a piece of cloth, in schools, hospitals and courtrooms, is suddenly a contentious issue; “Ban the veil!” we hear newspapers cry.
This contemporary dialogue obviously affects Muslim women here in the UK; it stokes our political climate of Islamophobia, with revived EDL marches, and creates legitimacy in attacking visibly Muslim women and communities. Though wider global narratives cannot be ignored, neither can popular visual culture. Cultural and visual media do not happen in vacuums, and the deeper connotations behind these islamophobic images, expresses how western society positions Muslim women.
The representation of women who wear the niqab, or burqa in prominent media is important in justifying these politics, but we can recognise, that they are themselves a byproduct of the imperialism from the past decade, revalidating racist ideology. Where actual Muslim women are derided as oppressed, uneducated and divorced from western society, this loaded garment and symbol of “oppression” is being co-opted in fashion, ready to be consumed.
Static symbols
The advertisement for Diesel, deliberately uses the power of this garment, and co-opts it with the white body in an attempt to create subversion, but falls short. In doing so, the Diesel advert almost assumes that white women are never Muslim, which is incorrect, and iterating that Muslim women somehow lack sexual or political agency. It employs the "fashion paradox" that needs to take place – where two supposedly jarring pieces of imagery are placed together to create new contexts ¬– is one of the white body being the unexpected factor under the burqa; such as the tattooed model, or Lady Gaga perhaps. It is in fact the white body that's meant to challenge us, not the burqa. A white body would never veil itself apparently – the image reinforces the racializing of Muslim identity.
The burqa is being used as a static symbol in the diesel advert to represent a desexualised dehumanised victim, oppressed by an alien, incompatible culture.
The reason the Diesel advert works, isto pin the burqa back to its default associations of the “oppressed Muslim woman”. It is then the white sexualised woman that emerges, which connotes that sexual liberation is in fact only for white bodies, and not brown bodies. There is immediate violence in the image revealing the bare body. Using imagery like this, polarizes Muslim women away from western models of “liberation” and femininity, and erases their autonomy to cover up – a feminist choice also. There is no new subversion, but rather well trodden territory
If you juxtapose the Diesel advert with this stock image: which shows a woman wearing a niqab and jilbab, walking through what looks like an empty market in a car park in "a northern town in Blackburn", with pallets of fruit discarded on the ground, and a small child in tow. The image clearly reinforces gendered, racial and class stereotypes, around what the niqab is synonymous with. It's painfully anonymous yet utterly telling at the same time. This image was used alongside an article that was written by a Muslim woman's experience of wearing the veil, yet it is not her at all. The interchangeability of images of niqab and burqa clad women, underscores again the projected anonymity of muslim women's identities, as well as their denied autonomy perceived by western society.
White bodies are able to wear the veil and possess the autonomy to take it off at will, whereas brown veiled bodies are presumed to be static, and homogeneous, devoid of agency. The tag line “I am not what I appear to be”, underlines that the sexualised woman under the burqa, is in fact a white woman. This is the logic that constantly devalues brown women’s bodies, against white ones, and seems to forget the memory of colonial violence that brown bodies carry.
If the Diesel ad were an image made by a Muslim woman herself, yes it would have been brilliant. If they'd used a brown body, I would have called it Orientalist and racist; because it still would have been an image constructed by a (white) man, and what you see is their representation of gender – which is racialised as white. Context is everything.
Gaga Orientalist
Lady Gaga who has been appropriating the veil for some time, sexualises it and yet taps into the fear of violence associated with it, reinforcing Orientalist dichotomies around the veil being the symbol of exoticised fantasy and the harbinger of violence. This repeated mixture of violence and sex is very much appealing as a marketing tool, but is reliant on the historic narratives of the colonial rapist; and of course much more recent imperialism in the middle east. The everyday perceptions of women in the UK who wear the niqab, are fuelled by this projection of fear and oppression, and popular culture feeds off of the zeitgeist
Feeds the system
The fact is, there are little to no representations of (brown) Muslim women in the US or the UK, other than stock stereotypical images, or ones that seek to purely distill Muslim identity, into a device for selling records and jeans. The veil is being appropriated as a tool to tap into a cultural currency in order to make extreme amounts of money that feeds a capitalist system, while millions of Muslim people have been and are still being, killed as we speak in wars funded by the very same system.