Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

The Postcolonial Veil: Bodies in Contact

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
The Political Psychology of the Veil

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Political Psychology ((PSPP))

  • 525 Accesses

Abstract

Anxious times are also paranoid times, and in its mood of suspicion, the veil’s proximity to the west is a provocation. This chapter explores how the impulse to both expel and cling to difference reveals the postcolonial impasse where the liberal west fails to universalise its moral vision of freedom and secure itself as the arbiter of all knowledge. The chapter examines how this crisis reveals a hypochondriac-like phobia manifested in Islamophobia of the “foreign” body, of all bodies, which both secures and disrupts the fantasy of unveiling the knowable body.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 84.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  • Allen, Christopher. Islamophobia. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2010.

    Google Scholar 

  • Aly, Anne. “Media Hegemony, Activism and Identity: Muslim Women Representing Muslim Women.” In Beyond the Hijab Debates: New Conversations on Gender, Race and Religion, edited by Tanja Dreher and Christina Ho. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2009.

    Google Scholar 

  • Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. London: Verso, 2006.

    Google Scholar 

  • Apetroaie, Vladiana. “The Trembling Veil: Issues of Gendered Islamophobia and Intolerance Towards Veiled Muslim Women, Current Issues of Islam.”

    Google Scholar 

  • Asad, Talal. On Suicide Bombing. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007.

    Google Scholar 

  • Asad, Talal. “Thinking About the Secular Body, Pain and Liberal Politics.” Cultural Anthropology 26, no. 4 (2011): 657–675.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Barossa, Julia, and Caroline Rooney. “Fortress Hypochondria: Health and Safety.” In Nationalism and the Body Politic: Psychoanalysis and the Rise of Eurocentrism and Xenophobia, edited by Lene Austead. London: Karnac, 2014.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bhatt, Chetan. “The Times of Movements: A Response.” The British Journal of Sociology 59, no. 1 (2008): 25–33.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York: Verso, 2004.

    Google Scholar 

  • Butler, Judith, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Who Sings the Nation-State? Language, Politics, Belonging. Kolkata: Seagull Books, 2007.

    Google Scholar 

  • Butler, Rex. Slavoj Žižek: Live Theory. New York: Continuum, 2005.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cheng, Anne Anlin. The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

    Google Scholar 

  • Derrida, Jacques. “Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides—A Dialogue of Jacques Derrida.” In Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgan Habermas and Jacques Derrida, by Giovanna Borradori. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

    Google Scholar 

  • Derrida, Jacques. Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fanon, Frantz. “Algeria Unveiled.” In Decolonisation: Perspectives From Now and Then: Rewriting Histories, edited by Prasenjit Duara. London: Routledge, 2003.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Perseus Books Group, 2007.

    Google Scholar 

  • Farris, Sara. In the Name of Women’s Rights: The Rise of Femonationalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fink, Bruce. “The Real Cause of Repetition.” In Reading Seminar XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, edited by Bruce Fink, Richard Feldstein, and Marie Jaanus. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995.

    Google Scholar 

  • Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan. New York: Random House, 1995.

    Google Scholar 

  • Foucault, Michel, and Colin Gordon. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977. Brighton, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1980.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fukuyama, Francis. End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press, 2006.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gellner, Ernest. Nations and Nationalism. New York: Cornell University Press, 1983.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gottschalk, Peter, and Gabriel Greenberg. Islamophobia: Making Muslims the Enemy. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hook, Derek. A Critical Psychology of the Postcolonial: The Mind of Apartheid. London: Psychology Press, 2012.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ibrahim, Yasmin. “Commodifying Terrorism: Body, Surveillance and the Everyday.” Journal of Media and Culture 10, no. 3 (2007).

    Google Scholar 

  • Kelly, Joe. “Hanson Labels Feminists Pathetic on Burka-Ban.” The Australian, September 13, 2018. https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/politics/pauline-hanson-labels-feminists-pathetic-on-burka-ban/news-story/370cc98ad66e0d9f2ab69cac412f0a81.

  • Khiabany, Gholam, and Milly Williamson. “Veiled Bodies—Naked Racism: Culture, Politics and Race in the Sun.” Race and Class 50, no. 2 (2008): 69–88.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lacan, Jacques, and Jacques-Alain Miller. The Four Fundamentals Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Translated by Alan Sheridan. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. London: Karnac, 1973.

    Google Scholar 

  • Larsen, Neil. “Determination: Postcolonialism, Poststructuralism, and the Problem of Ideology.” In The Preoccupation with Postcolonialism Studies, edited by Fawzia Afzal-Khan and Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000.

    Google Scholar 

  • Macdonald, Megan. “Sur/Veil: The Veil as Blank(et) Signifier.” In Muslim Women, Transnational Feminism and Ethics of Pedagogy: Contested Imaginaries in Post-9/11 Cultural Practice, edited by Lisa K. Taylor and Jasmine Zine. New York: Routledge, 2014.

    Google Scholar 

  • Macmaster, Neil, and Toni Lewis. “Orientalism: From Unveiling to Hyperveiling.” Journal of European Studies 28, no. 1 (1998): 122–130.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Magnet, Shoshana, and Corinne Lysandra Mason. “Of Trojan Horses and Terrorist Representations: Mom Bombs, Cross-dressing Terrorists and Queer Orientalisms.” Canadian Journal of Communications 39, no. 2 (2014): 193–209.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mahmood, Saba. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.

    Google Scholar 

  • McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge, 1995.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mills, Jon. “Lacan on Paranoiac Knowledge.” Psychoanalytic Psychology 20, no. 1 (2003): 30–51.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mitchell, Timothy. “Picturing Terror: Derrida’s Autoimmunity.” Critical Inquiry 33 (2007): 277–290.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Moors, Annelies. “The Affective Power of the Face Veil: Between Disgust and Fascination.” In Things: Religion and the Question of Materiality, edited by Digit Houtman and Birgit Meyer. New York: Fordham University Press, 2012.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Moors, Annelies. “The Dutch and the Face-Veil: The Politics of Discomfort.” European Association of Social Anthropologists 17, no. 4 (2009): 393–408.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Norton, Anne. On the Muslim Question. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pollock, Griselda. Psychoanalysis and the Image: Transdisciplinary Perspectives. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge, 2008.

    Google Scholar 

  • Qureshi, Emran, and Michael A. Sells. “Introduction.” In The New Crusades: Constructions of the Muslim Enemy, edited by Emran Qureshi and Michael A. Sells. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ragland, Ellie. “The Hysteric’s Truth.” In Reflections on Seminar XVII: Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis, edited by Justin Clemens and Russel Grigg. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ranchod-Nilsson, Sita, and Mary Ann Tetreault. Women, States and Nationalism: At Home in the Nation? New York: Routledge, 2000.

    Google Scholar 

  • Razack, Sherene H. Casting Out: The Conviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008.

    Google Scholar 

  • Restuccia, Francis L. “Kristeva’s Intimate Revolt and Thought Specular: Encountering the (Mulholland) Drive.” In Psychoanalysis, Aesthetics and Politics in the Works of Julia Kristeva, edited by Kelly Oliver and S. K. Keltner. New York: SUNY Press, 2009.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rogers, Juliet. “Unquestionable Freedom in a Psychotic West.” Law, Culture and the Humanities 1 (2005): 186–207.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Saeed, Abdullah, and Shahram Akbarzadeh, ed. Challenging Identities: Muslim Women in Australia. Islamic Studies Series. Sydney: UNSW Press, 2010.

    Google Scholar 

  • Said, Edward W. Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World. Rev. ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1997.

    Google Scholar 

  • Said, Edward W. Orientalism. 1st ed. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sayyid, Salman. “Racism and Islamophobia.” In International Centre of Muslim and Non-Muslim Understanding. Adelaide: University of South Australia, 2011.

    Google Scholar 

  • Scott, Joan Wallach. “Symptomatic Politics: Banning Islamic Head Scarves in French Public School.” In Postcolonialism and Political Theory, edited by Nalini Persram. Lanham and Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2007.

    Google Scholar 

  • Scott, Joan Wallach. The Politics of the Veil. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.

    Google Scholar 

  • Shohat, Ella. “Notes on the ‘Postcolonial’.” In The Preoccupation with Postcolonial Studies, edited by Fawzia Afzal-Khan and Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks. Durham: Duke University Press 2000.

    Google Scholar 

  • Soler, Colette. What Lacan Said About Women: A Psychoanalytic Study. New York: Other Press, 2006.

    Google Scholar 

  • Trotter, David. Paranoid Modernism: Literary Experiment, Psychosis and the Professionalisation of English Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wilcox, Lauren B. Bodies of Violence: Theorising Embodies Subjects in International Relations. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.

    Google Scholar 

  • Winter, Stuart. “Exclusive: Remains of 9/11 Killers Found.” Sunday Express, January 11, 2009.

    Google Scholar 

  • Yeğenoğlu, Meyda. Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

    Google Scholar 

  • Yildiz, Yasemin. “Governing European Subjects: Tolerance and Guilt in the Discourse of ‘Muslim Women’.” Cultural Critique 77 (2011): 70–101.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Zayzafoon, Lamia Ben Youssef. The Production of the Muslim Woman: Negotiating Text, History, and Ideology. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005.

    Google Scholar 

  • Žižek, Slavoj. Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel and the Critique of Ideology. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993.

    Google Scholar 

  • Žižek, Slavoj. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso Books, 1989.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Social and Political Sciences, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia

    Sahar Ghumkhor

Authors
  1. Sahar Ghumkhor
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Sahar Ghumkhor .

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2020 The Author(s)

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Ghumkhor, S. (2020). The Postcolonial Veil: Bodies in Contact. 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_5

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation