Conference Abstracts
47. Tarlo, Emma; The Ferguson Centre for African
and Asian Studies, The OU, UK:
"Hijab in London"
The covering or uncovering of Muslim women’s
bodies has long occupied a central and controversial place in the
discourses and representations of Orientalism, feminism, religion
and Islamic revivalism. This paper will attempt to move beyond discourses
about Muslim women, to the discourses, practises and self-representations
of Muslim women living in London where the meaning of hijab is articulated
and contested in a number of different sites: homes, work places,
public institutions, religious spaces, the comedy club, the streets.
Based on ethnographic interviews with Muslim women from a variety
of backgrounds and on documentation of two recent “Hijab campaigns”
launched in London in response to the French proposal to prohibit
the wearing of religious symbols in state schools, the paper will
explore how ideas of public/private, religious/secular, universal/particular,
male/female, Islam/West are expressed and enacted through the hijab
in London and how these visual and verbal expressions are products
of a complex interplay of local and global forces, representations
and events.
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