Ḣarim and Ḣijab: Seclusive and exclusive aspects of traditional Muslim dwelling and dress

Architectural constructs of the family dwelling and styles of women's outer garments for public wear are intricately intertwined with the sociocultural framework within which both women and men function. Although conventionally regarded as restrictions on women's free movement in society, it is also apparent that in the Muslim world dwelling and dress may be, and indeed are, used to advantage by women as a means of retaining privacy from male intrusion and for exerting power in a society ostensibly controlled by men.     

Beyond 90°: the angularities of black/queer/women/lean

This essay argues for detailed attention to the materiality of black queer women’s spatial coordinates, the literal points of contact with the surfaces we traverse, as sites where categories of race, gender, and sexuality are disciplined and negotiated. It does so through a brief history of how Man’s 90° relationship to the ground, a verticality and perpendicularity that valorizes a physical comportment that is also the structuring condition for one’s political capacities, is produced by enforcing black and indigenous subjects to the ground, invariably defining the categories of Otherness as 0° and 180°. Through a reading of Rashaad Newsome’s performance Shade Compositions, the author argues a reading of the angles that exceed 0°/90°/180° may provide paths for reorienting the possibilities of black queer presence in the field of the political. If 90° signals a delimited political field, then, one governed by notions of rational civility that are always exclusive of black and black queer bodies, might the angularities surrounding, say, 120° reveal sites of productive incivility that are inextricable from the lives, experiences, and certainly bodies of black queer women themselves?     

Irish/woman/artwork: Selective readings

This paper concentrates upon particular artworks from Irish women artists. It demonstrates that there are certain themes which recur in their artwork. These include dislocation, particularities about place and contestation around language, all of which are rooted in the lived experience of being Irish, being female and being an artist. At the same time the paper provides readings of this artwork which demonstrate that these experiences are diverse, and that the areas of representation within which the artists are working are socially produced constructs. There is therefore no romantic essentialist category of ‘Irish woman artist’, but rather the richly interplaying histories, readings and contexts of Irish/woman/artwork.     

The Public/Private — The Imagined Boundary in the Imagined Nation/State/Community: The Lebanese case

The article confronts two issues, first the question of women and consumption and second the fashion industry as a feminized sector. In the first instance the argument is that recent scholarship on consumption has been weakened by an inattention to questions of exclusion from consumption and the production of consumption. Income differentials as well as questions of poverty have dropped off the agenda in this debate. Attention instead has been paid to the meaning systems which come into play around items of consumption. This has led to a sense of political complacency as though consumption is not a problem. For the many thousands of women bringing up children at or below the poverty line it clearly is. The second part of the article takes the fashion industry as an example of a field where perspectives on both production and consumption are rarely brought together. This produces a sense of political hopelessness in relation to improving its employment practices, especially for very low paid women workers. The argument here is that greater integration and debate across the production and consumption divide could conceivably result in policies which would make this sector whose employees on a global basis are predominantly female, a better place of work.     

Sexual/textual subversions

Elizabeth Grosz, Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists (Allen and Unwín) Sydney, 1989.     

not-/unveiling as an ethical practice

The practice of Islamic veiling has over the last ten years emerged into a popular site of investigation. Different researchers have focused on the various significations of this bodily practice, both in its gendered dimensions, its identity components, its empowering potentials, as a satorial practice or as part of a broader economy of bodily practices which shape pious dispositions in accordance with the Islamic tradition. Lesser, however, has this been the case for the practice of not veiling or unveiling. If and when attention is accorded to the latter, it is often grasped as a product of integration or an effect secular governmentality, but only rarely as a bodily practice. Drawing on narratives of second generation secular and religious Maghrebi Muslims in Belgium, this paper pursues this second perspective by examining to which extent not-veiling can be understood as a technique of the self (Foucault) that is functional to shaping a liberal (Musilm) subject. While a first part of this article will unpack the ethical substance of such discursive interrogations and point to the ways in which they are intertwined with the enactment of a liberal self, the second part will examine the embodied contours of this problematization, which appeared through the labour upon one's affect and bodily dispositions that this refusal of the hijab, or the act of unveiling, implies.