...the contemporary world, namely the hijab or veil of Muslim woman. Commenting on legislation passed in 2004 in France that bans the wearing of "conspicuous" religious insignia in public schools--a law that primarily targets girls who wear the hijab--three articles in this volume provide important contextual information for understanding the historical and cultural contingency of the veil. In her essay, "Gender and Secularism of Modernity: How Can a Muslim Woman Be French?" Afsaneh Najmabadi helps us destabilize singular understandings of the veil as a sign of oppression and deceit. She does so by unearthing and highlighting "some of the historical meanings of the veil that have been forgotten to make it the sign that it has now become." Drawing on historical examples from the Islamic Middle East and specifically Iran, as well as significations of the veil in Western Europe from the seventeenth century onward, Najmabadi reveals the ways in which veiling was indelibly caught up in the broader shifts in understanding, for example, from a focus on male bodies to female bodies through a shift in preoccupation and public debate about the beard to a debate focusing on the veil. Najmabadi also explores the relationship between veiling and the production of heteronormalization and gender segregation over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Not only do we need to pay attention to these shifts in meaning and the contexts through which veiling or not veiling has acquired significance, but, as Najmabadi notes, even within "modern" frames of reference, there have been multiple positions and alignments of an Islamic appeal to modernity, so that present-day meanings of the veil as synonymous with oppression have not always been the sole frame of interpretation, even in the so-called West. By delineating these "forgotten" meanings and contexts of signification, Najmabadi effectively highlights the historical contingency of the veil, allowing us to circumvent the "circular repetition of choice and oppression, religious and secular, national and extraterritorial" in which the current debate is inextricably mired.

The next two articles stake their claim as position pieces, one arguing for and the other against the headscarf ban in French public schools; but as importantly, they serve to historically contextualize the debates and to highlight the multiple voices (and issues) that manifest themselves through the lens of the...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



More articles from Feminist Studies
Gender and secularism of modernity: how can a Muslim woman be French?(..., June 22, 2006
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Gender and survival: a Jewish family in occupied France, 1940-1944.(th..., June 22, 2006
Feminist scholarship and the internationalization of women's studies.(..., June 22, 2006

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