More choicey-choice choice: a woman in a hijab explains that it’s all about rejecting consumerism. It’s a choice to reject consumerism by (as she puts it) covering up.
The liberation lies in the choice.
She does admit, impatiently, that yes women in some places are forced to wear it, but then brushes that off to return to her main point, that the veil is not a symbol of oppression.
What a steaming bunch of bullshit that 75 percent of the people I know will accept and amplify.
I can see a couple of reasons for voluntarily choosing to wear a face covering.
1. For health reasons to protect against pollution or disease.
2. For privacy, given the ubiquity of cctv cameras and new face recognition technology.
The veil is not a symbol of oppression for her
And
3. She enjoys the style
In total, she enjoys wearing the hajib, and she may wear it for her personal comfort, style, and a myriad of other reasons as maddog1129 listed above. Okay? So what? Her statements do not eliminate the fact that it is a device of oppression for a hell of a lot of other women. She can choose. Others cannot, so she needs to add, “for me”.
And to that, I say congratulations but it is not the issue regarding the hajib.
If her head scarf were a feminist statement, she wouldn’t have to make a video “educating” people about that on the Guardian’s website.
Try these:
“As a Catholic nun, my habit is not a statement of subservience. It’s a statement of my liberation.”
“As an Amish woman, my head covering has nothing to do with oppression. It’s a feminist statement.”
I’m totally for her having the choice to wear it but not for her not have to live with the consequences of it. She deserves all the push back she may get from spewing that much bullshit. That’s a nice example of rationalization (and I’m taking the charitable view of her bullshit).
Rejecting one world view that demeans women through objectivization and replacing it with another one that oppresses women by making them second rate humans and trying to make them disappear is not the best trade off.
But that gets accepted by left leaning people because of fear of being labeled an islamophobe.
@Jean
How did you get the idea that she is accepting a world view that “oppresses women by making them second rate humans and trying to make them disappear” from that video?
You just cannot reason with someone who has so internalized their oppression that they no longer see it as oppression.
Well, in fairness, she does say “my hijab”, not “everyone’s hijab”…
@4 Josh, Official SpokesGay wrote: “If her head scarf were a feminist statement, she wouldn’t have to make a video “educating” people about that on the Guardian’s website.”
— Does that mean that every “feminist statement” is always recognized as such, and completely self explanatory?
@7 Gregory in Seattle wrote: “You just cannot reason with someone who has so internalized their oppression that they no longer see it as oppression.”
— OK. Maybe. But… I think that someone’s ability to see X as X can be separated from their ability to reason with others… otherwise it would be very hard for people to change their minds.
— Are you saying that this particular person is unable to reason with others? I know I’ve only seen this short video of her, but in the video I didn’t see any evidence of her being unable to reason with others. The video itself seems to be evidence of her trying to reason with others (by hearing people who say that the hijab is a symbol of oppression and that wearing it is not a choice and responding to them). Perhaps she’s been brainwashed and was told to say all of those things. But… I’m not sure we can just assume that.
@Beth
The hijab is one of the most obvious symbol of a version of Islam that is oppressive to women. She takes a symbol of that oppression and makes many claims that this is not what it is for her. She claims she’s too intelligent to be oppressed by it and by the western version of oppression.
You’re naive if you think she can defend such a symbol without ever really mentioning where the symbol comes from and not have accepted the underlying meaning. She asserts it’s her choice but everyone here should know how we are all blind to our own biases and will defend and rationalize them.
And I’m aware that I may be reading more into this due to my own biases. But even if I am wrong on her worldview, I think that using this symbol is still a bad idea because it banalizes the suffering of those who can’t choose.
I have an image of Lynn Redgrave twirling around with a red hijab going, “THIS is liberation!”
I should add that this: is the Confederate flag only a flag? Symbols are not meaningless even if you say they are.
Damn, there should be a way to edit messages. That should have read: is the Confederate flag only a flag?
To avoid some misunderstanding, let me say that I am not defending the hijab, or defending what has been called “choice feminism”. I agree that choices don’t happen in a cultural vacuum, and that we can/should investigate choices people make.
It is perfectly legitimate to question the choices people make, and to investigate the context in which choices are made. This woman seems to be responding to questions about her choice (or what she thinks is her choice?) to wear a hijab.
Being a woman with an opinion on the internet, especially a controversial opinion, is risky. (Or so I’ve heard). Knowing the kinds of “push back” the internet facilitates, I think we should be very careful before we say that she “deserves all the pushback she may get”.
That is not to say that no pushback is called for. Listen to what she says. Figure out what you agree with, what you disagree with, what you partially agree/disagree with, and why. Make an argument. Labelling her argument as “bullshit” or “spewing”, or dismissing her as someone who is so oppressed that they just don’t understand what she’s saying/thinking is counterproductive. Well, I think it’s counterproductive. What is it we hope to come out of conversations about (or with people like) this woman?
OMG! In a Facebook Group, I had a furious discussion on this exact vid yesterday. Ms. Yusuf, strangely, appears not to understand the power of symbols and iconography. Wearing a hijab is absolutely her choice; but what she says will be valid ONLY when not wearing a hijab also becomes a choice. It is currently not for women in certain regions.
Ms. Yusuf is projecting her unilateral decision to wear the hijab as her “choice”, to the exclusion and erasure of the agency of women in her community who are not afforded that choice, but are forced – on pain of torture and death – to accept the very same ways of life she is eulogizing.
And seriously, bikini and beachwear represent *only* sexualized objectification to her? What was that sanctimonious finger-pointing shtick at out-of-context scantily-clad women?
Well put, Jean @5. Especially… “But that gets accepted by left leaning people because of fear of being labeled an islamophobe.”
I wore a hijab for about a year and was a “muslimah” until about 15. And now I am a raging “islamophobe”. It’s dispiriting how many leftwing “useful idiots” there are to defend the most vicious ideology on Earth since the demise of Naziism and Stalinism.
@12 Jean wrote: “Symbols are not meaningless even if you say they are.”
I’m not sure who you are talking to here. Has anyone here said that symbols are meaningless? My understanding was that these hijab debates were over what symbols mean, not whether or not symbols have meaning or not…
I hope to contribute to a conversational atmosphere where nonsense ideas like this (in my opinion) are challenged, and, in the best possible world, minds are changed. I do not particularly care if this one woman changes her mind, because it’s unlikely we’d ever communicate that way. I’m willing to settle for making it conversationally harder to posit glib silliness like this.
@anon1152
That was not addressed at you. The woman in the video seems to think (or want us to believe) that the hijab should be meaningless and not a symbol. And Beth @6 seems to agree with that part or at least that we can’t infer anything from the symbols used.
Liberal xtians have done much the same things, reinterpret their religion to not be as misogyny ridden. Weave some feminism into their faith. Some people say they can’t be “proper” feminists, xtianity is steeped in misogyny etc etc. Well they have changed it, modernised it. I’ve always thought that if I was religious I’d be a fundamentalist, as logically if you accept the religion as true you should follow all its tenets. Seems a lot of atheists think like this, and also apply this mode of thinking to their analysis of how other people express their religious faith.
I also see a parallel with radical feminist analysis, all piv sex is rape for example. You can’t freely choose to have piv sex with a man in a patriarchal society, so by doing so you are upholding patriarchy and also being oppressed (In this case raped). The woman’s choice to have sex is disregarded as irrelevant to the overall societal context. This seems patently absurd, we’d never be able to get out of such a societal dynamic for one. Or no one can have PIV sex until the patriarchy level drops to acceptable background noise. No woman can truly choose to wear a hijab and it not be a symbol of her oppression until all women everywhere have the choice as well, or maybe 50% of them, 60%, a majority? I don’t see it myself.
IMO this is only a positive thing. She is changing her religion to be more liberal and accepting of choice from within. What’s wrong with that?
Beth @ 6 – You do realize that the hijab is treated as obligatory by Islamists, don’t you? That’s where ‘the idea that she is accepting a world view that “oppresses women by making them second rate humans and trying to make them disappear”’ comes from. Proselytizing for the hijab is an Islamist thing to do. She’s speaking for Islamism. Islamism is a world view that oppresses women by making them second rate humans and trying to make them disappear.
Surely that’s obvious.
That scarf adds very little in terms of sexual modesty to the rest of what she’s wearing. If she wishes to avoid male glances, and the condemnation of her more extreme sisters, I’m afraid only the burka will do.
@19 Jean wrote: “The woman in the video seems to think (or want us to believe) that the hijab should be meaningless and not a symbol.”
I have to strongly disagree. It is true that she says in within the first few seconds of the video that “it’s just a scarf that some women wear”, but I think that was more of a rhetorical strategy. She starts by saying that she’s wearing a hijab, and that it is probably one of the first things you notice about her when you first see her. So I think the “it’s just a scarf” line is a rhetorical strategy to get people to step back and listen to what she has to say rather than make immediate conclusions about it. (An unsuccessful strategy, apparently).
Everything after that “it’s just a scarf” comment was about what meaning the hijab had (at least in her view, from her position).
It is possible to make a “it’s meaningless” argument. In fact, that might be a kind of liberal argument: it’s a religious thing, people have religious freedom under our constitution, religion is a private thing, so as long as they aren’t clearly endangering anyone, they should be able to wear a headscarf, or cross, or turban, or kippa, or pasta strainer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_Spaghetti_Monster#Headgear_in_identity_photos).
But she doesn’t make that argument. She offers criticisms of western culture and capitalism and frames her hijab-wearing as a response to that.
If we disagree with her hijab, fine. Let’s disagree and explain why. If we think that she doesn’t adequately address what it means for other women in other contexts (something that she does address, briefly) fine. Let’s say so. Let’s give our reasons. But let’s not ignore her reasons. I fear that we are not even seeing that she is offering reasons, making arguments.
A rhetorical strategy isn’t the same thing as an argument. It’s often the opposite.
@24 Ophelia Benson wrote: “A rhetorical strategy isn’t the same thing as an argument. It’s often the opposite.”
I agree. But I was trying to say that the only thing she said that could be interpreted as “the hijab is meaningless” was something she spent a few seconds on at the start of the video. I was trying to point to the arguments that she was making (which did not even try to make a case for viewing the hijab as meaningless).
Everyone rationalizes their own choices. But you don’t necessarily make the choices you make for the reasons you give; they’re after the fact reasons.
If I go back to my examples of the Confederate flag, if I chose to have one on my car because I like the Dukes of Hazzards and I’m Canadian and I don’t understand the history and symbolism, that’s one thing. But if I stay with my desire to have it after many people explain why that may not be a good idea, what does that say? Is it because I like it and I don’t give a damn about those people in another country or is it because I also like what it represents but won’t admit it (even to myself)? No one can answer that but me but it’s still a crappy symbol and a crappy way of behaving.
Using symbols of oppression as a personal way of affirming yourself while denying that it is not such a symbol in your case might be liberating for some. But there are other ways to do so which makes such a position suspect in my view. And regardless of the reasons, it has a negative impact on many as it makes it hard to denounce the symbol everywhere and then go beyond the symbol to actually correct the situation.
There are quite a few Muslims in and around Los Angeles, and they’re a sizable minority at the college near me. I’ve only got the head shot to go on (too impatient to watch videos), but she looks very familiar to me. I see young Muslim hijab-wearing women like her all the time. Nice hijab, professionally styled eyebrows, good makeup, form-fitting tops, and those jeans you get poured into.
Remind me again what the idea behind the hijab is?
All I can think when I see them is the whole tradition of naughty nuns’ habits.
Ophelia #
No. I don’t know that. However, I do know Muslim women who don’t wear it. I presume it is obligatory the same way it is obligatory for Christian women to not cut their hair and wear long dresses. I understand those customs are obligatory in other countries. They are not in ours. She’s not the first young women to state that she wears the hijab willingly. I read an essay by a young Canadian woman recently with a similar perspective. As I read them, all they are asking is that they not be judged as ‘brainwashed’ or supporting a culture that ‘oppresses women by making them second rate humans and trying to make them disappear’. It seem to me a form of ‘reclaiming’ in the popular parlance.
No. It seems to me that the request is valid. Don’t judge her by what she wears. Having spent my teen years in decidedly unattractive and unfashionable home-made clothing my mother deemed suitably modest, I am sympathetic to that point of view.
Christ, are you people really making a fuss about this woman choosing to wear a veil? Just as she says, it’s just a scarf. Yes, Islamic extremists want women to cover up, though they usually take it considerably farther than just a veil (see burqa/niqab). So what is your argument? Bad people want women to do X, so doing anything resembling X amounts to giving in to the bad people? Pro-lifers want to ban abortion so pregnant women will be forced to give birth. Should women stop giving birth? Perverts want women to walk around scantily clad. Should women cover all of their body now?
Am I stretching this too much? Here’s a more obvious comparison: The Anglican Church used to demand that women cover their head in church. (Remember all those hats at the Royal Wedding? Traditions die hard, it seems.) So if a woman wears a hat in Britain, does that mean she’s oppressed? No, of course not, there’s plenty of other reasons she could be wearing a hat. And the ways accepted in Western culture for women to cover their head haven’t become symbols of oppression. Similar to the swastika (a prominent symbol in Indian religions long before the Nazis appropriated it), it seems the reason why the hijab is so stigmatized in Western culture is because it’s a foreign object that people have only been limitedly exposed to, and those limited exposures were usually associated with oppression and extremism. But hey, how often do you see Muslims getting featured in the news for being polite, law-abiding citizens? You don’t, but not because Islam is unilaterally violent and oppressive, but because reporters don’t consider people living peacefully newsworthy.
Going back to what I said a little earlier, if you insist on doing the exact opposite of what the oppressors want, then they still end up controlling your life. Maybe you’re not doing the things they want you to do, but that doesn’t automatically mean you’re doing the things you want to do. If you want to cover your hair because you reject Western culture’s beauty standards and dress code for women, what’s wrong with that? You don’t need to dress according to Western fashion in order to make valid political/moral statements. What a silly world would we be living in if that were the case?
Sorry Beth, but defending the hijab is defending the misogyny of Islamism. Nothing less. The hijab is not (literally) compulsory and my mother never wore it until about 15 years ago, under pressure from the contemporary resurgence in muslim religiosity. (She now just wears it outdoors.) You can decide why Hanna Yusuf is doing it — people will make all sorts of excuses for subservience — but there’s no getting around the fact that men are under no similar obligation. All religions are bad but Islam is especially oppressive.
She’s rejecting consumerism by choosing to wear a hijab? Bullshit! There are loads of shops that sell the cloths for hijabs, women wear a variety of brightly coloured, glittery headscarves, held up with different types of pins and clips — it is just another way to indulge in consumerism!
You know how some days ago we were talking on Ophelia’s facebook about morality-posturing? This hijab-championing is a kind of modesty-posturing or piety-posturing.
Beth @ 6 – You do realize that the hijab is treated as obligatory by Islamists, don’t you? That’s where ‘the idea that she is accepting a world view that “oppresses women by making them second rate humans and trying to make them disappear”’ comes from. Proselytizing for the hijab is an Islamist thing to do. She’s speaking for Islamism. Islamism is a world view that oppresses women by making them second rate humans and trying to make them disappear.
— I don’t think we can call that video “proselytizing”. As far as I can tell, she is explaining publicly why she “chooses” to wear the hijab. She is not telling other people that they should or must wear the hijab.
— If you asked the woman in the video if she thought that she accepted “a world view that oppresses women by making them second rate humans”, do you think she would agree? I suspect that she would strongly disagree. I suspect that you suspect what I suspect. (If not, please let me know).
— If you asked the woman in the video if she thought that wearing the hijab was about “making them [women] disappear”, do you think she’d agree? I suspect that she’d disagree. And, again, I think you would expect her to disagree. (But if not, please let me know).
There is an important distinction between veiled Muslim women in, say, Saudi Arabia, and in “the West”. It is easier to argue that, in Saudi Arabia, the veil is part of a system which is about making women “disappear.” But in western countries, hijabs/niqabs/burkas, etc don’t work that way. In the west, veiled muslim women stand out.
@31 S Mukherjee
Thank you. That is the kind of response to the video that I was hoping to see.
oolon @ 20 – What do you do, get all your ideas of what “radical feminism” is from the Sun? Or from a copy of Time magazine from 40 years ago? That ridiculous caricature of “radical feminist analysis” would look right at home on an MRA blog.
What you think is your new expertise on feminism isn’t.
anon @ 32 – it wasn’t Beth who said that, and you forgot to mark the quoted passage as such. Please use blockquotes.
S Mukherjee @31,
Yes, yes. Posturing. Of one sort or another. Having gone through a hijab phase myself, I have some sympathy for women coerced to wear it. The social pressure is very, very strong. And I’m sure some women actually believe in it or have internalized its wearing. But a “feminist statement”?! Utter bullshit, to be sure.
And, furthermore, I see the hijab as a continuum with what has happened today around the world… the horrific murders in France, Tunisia, Kuwait and Somalia (not to mention Syria). The hijab is Islam’s Confederate flag.
Oops. Sorry. I haven’t had much experience with HTML tags. But I might have figured something out just now. I will try to be more careful in the future.
Thanks; no problem. It’s just angle bracket (less than) + blockquote + opposite angle bracket, then at the end, the same thing but with / to close.
I can always tidy up if things go wrong.
But no “feminist” hijabs in some places.
http://mickhartley.typepad.com/blog/2015/06/100-virgins-in-just-one-morning.html
Helene @36
Perfectly put.
… if that flag was worn by an African-American.
@Ophelia, no where did I say that was the sum of radical feminism. Not sure where you got that from. But it is an unfortunate fact that people calling themselves radical feminists do indeed write things like this. Although it is the extreme! I avoid saying women calling themselves radical feminists and being anti-sex work, anti-trans etc etc are not really “radical feminists”. They certainly say they are.
Just go away, oolon. I remember the days when all you did was giggle at the slime pit, and now you’re policing feminism. I can’t take you seriously as an expert on the subject. Go away.
Meeeanwhile back on topic…
Hijabs are tricky. There’s plenty of cultures where traditional dress for women has included head coverings; it’s not as blatantly horrible as a burka. And frankly I’d rather wear a hijab than makeup and heels any day. Where Muslim people are treated badly it can be a sign of community solidarity. It’s similar to the black churches, it seems: a cultural pride thing, not just a religious thing.
But where it’s compulsory it can’t be about pride. And it’s pretty gross taking a thing that’s forced on people and claiming it’s all about freedom of choice.