Abstract
This chapter interrogates the political imagination that imbues unveiling with the values of liberal progressive politics. It asks, why is the removal of the veil and the revelation of flesh, an expression of freedom? Why is freedom imagined unveiled? The chapter argues western fixation on the veil is a symptom of modernism’s investment in knowing the body by imagining its natural “secular” condition. The chapter traces the secular body, a body that has no racial shadow, in the fantasy of unveiling freedom which imagines a universal prescription for securing the body.
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Ghumkhor, S. (2020). The Unveiling Body. In: The Political Psychology of the Veil. Palgrave Studies in Political Psychology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32061-4_2
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