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ABSTRACT
Recent transdisciplinary formations in the humanities, including new materialisms and ANT, but also in black studies, are recalibrating our understanding of the human and the posthuman as categories of analysis. They have revealed the post-Enlightenment conceptualisation of the universal human to be both epistemologically untenable and violently Eurocentric, and furthermore laid bare how techniques of differentiation along axes of gender, race, sexuality, religion always also serve to institute the human and its nonhuman, posthuman, more-than-human, less-than-human counter parts. Theorising the material-semiotic figuration inhering in the German compound noun ‘Kopftuchmädchen’ (headscarfgirl) – a term that emerged out of and has become synecdotal for anti-Muslim public discourse – this article proposes that the human and the posthuman should be understood as structuring objects and subjects of knowledge in the study of Orientalism. After all, most contemporary Orientalisms mark cultural difference as a grander problem of (intra)human difference, one distinguishing between a (Western) culture of universal humanity and an (Orientalised) culture of problematic posthuman entanglement. The afore-mentioned compound noun points to a self-referential entanglement of matter and meaning that Occidentalises that which it posits as Universal Human and Orientalises its human-nonhuman Other, while thereby also concealing, in Latourian terms, ‘the West’s’ own nonmodern, human-nonhuman constitution(s).
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Notes
1 ‘Burquas, headscarfwomen and state-financed knifemen and other good-for-nothings will not secure our prosperity, economic growth and especially not the welfare state’ (my translation).
2 Incidentally, my project here aligns with what Salman Sayyid has declared as one of the primary goals of a Critical Muslim Studies, namely to demonstrate that ‘[w]ithin Western supremacist discourse the essence of what it is to be human is clearly identified by the practices of homo occidentalis, the idea being that it is only in the West that humans are truly human and everything else is either cultural accretion or a deviation from that norm’ (Citation2014, 73).
3 It should be noted that the compound has also been appropriated for deconstructive and empowering purposes by Muslim German women such as politician Lale Akgün (Citation2011), writer Kübra Gümüşay (Citation2017), and the life-writing project www.kopftuchmaedchen.com and its Instagram account. There are affinities with miriam cooke's critical term Muslimwoman, which ‘erases for non-Muslims the diversity among Muslim women and, indeed, among all Muslims’ but ‘might provide a paradoxical platform for action’ when ‘deconstructed and opened to contestation from within’ (Citation2008, 93). Such (re-)appropriations are not the focus of this article. Instead, my main objective is a critique of how the right utilizes this term in service of a particular construction of ‘the human’. Nevertheless, the article also follows Fawzia Ahmad's advice that ‘[w]hen the hijab is disassociated from “strategy” and (re)associated with an ontological dimension of Islam, it will become a nonissue’ (Citation2008, 101). Thus, if we begin to consider both religious (Orientalized) and non-religious (Westernized) sartorial materialisation as invariably posthuman(izing), as two culturally specific yet posthumanly generalizable ontological dimensions of interpreting what a community is, then, the Orientalization of the posthuman and the posthumanization of the headscarf will become a nonissue. Such a reading leaves the door open both for mutual respect in cultural difference, as well as a shared humanity not in some abstract humanism but a concrete posthumanism. What I propose is a mode of cross-cultural inquiry that does not so much compare Universal (Western) Humanity and its Others, as it does distinct but similar posthumanities, under which the headscarfgirl is not radically different or ‘foreign’ but ordinarily and ontologically posthuman like everyone else. It is crucial to note, though, that the right-wing example of the headscarfgirl is specifically aimed at rendering an ontological dimension of Islam as fundamentally opposed to an ontological dimension of Humanity, rather than simply denigrating it as a strategy of fashioning a supposedly anti-Western identity.
4 A quick search on Google Scholar will yield a variety of German- and English-language academic publications that use either compound without actually engaging its performativity, that is, without analysing the term beyond mentioning it.
5 Related posthumanist reading practices of veiled Muslimas’ Othering have been applied by Zarabadi and Ringrose (Citation2018) as well as Allen and Quinlivan (Citation2018) in the field of education. Their major intervention is to conceptualise the hijab as an informational agent or actant in the specific assemblages of everyday securitisation as well as of the sex education classroom. Describing the experience of an Afghan teenage girl in a New Zealand school, Allen and Quinlivian write, ‘[d]ifference in this case is made via the entanglement of her corporeality (skin, facial features, voice) and materiality (hijab, Afghan biscuits, classroom architecture) in intra-action with the humanness of her classmates (and their skin, facial features, voices, etc.). In this instance, it is not that the hijab is a symbol used to mark cultural difference, but the hijab as a material entity becomes a material force in the making of cultural difference’ (68). However, the project focuses mostly on the methodological relevance of the new materialisms within existing sexuality education frameworks and does not seek to ask how and why Orientalisms have taken such new materialist turns. Moreover, Zarabadi and Ringrose have described the hijab as an affective actant in the context of pre-emptive securitization: ‘The hijab thus has ‘thing power’ (Bennett 2010, xvi), it is an affective actant that has the capacity to affect and intervene’ (22). Indebted to Deleuze & Guattari as well as affect theory, their approach is mainly descriptive, meaning that it only indirectly addresses the question as to why the categories of the human and the posthuman have become relevant categories for Orientalism beyond questions of securitization. However, like this article, such research diverges from previous perspectives on the ideological functions of the veil to center its ontological and affective dimension: it makes clear that, within contemporary Orientalism, the veil is not simply considered as a sign or icon of cultural difference but as something that materially and sensuously perturbs the West's very (mis)understanding of human ontology. Within this framework, we might even say, in oversimplified terms, that just like posthumanism-as-discourse, the non-exceptionally veiled Muslim woman as non-intentional mattering body strikes a blow to the foundational European intellectual history of the human, at least the one that emerged in the public imagination since the Enlightenment. This blow is not intentional, not linguistic or articulate, but is there as a lived yet non-judgemental critique of this intellectual history's abuse as a universalism. My point is not at all that veiled Muslim bodies question or disrupt ontology per se; rather they reveal the West's misunderstanding of ontology as human rather than human-nonhuman, thus ‘generat[ing] new possibilities for rethinking ontology’, in the words of Zakiyyah Iman Jackson (Citation2020, 1).
6 Which, arguably, have been the dominant focus of the aforementioned research as well as Joan Wallach Scott's canonical The Politics of the Veil (Citation2007).
7 My argument here is directly in line with Sylvia Wynter's theory that the theological (Christendom) and the politico-economic (the nation and its political subjects) are just other names or descriptors for the conceptually dynamic cultural poetics of difference that is MAN and its Others.
8 The proto indicates work that, while not posthumanist in name, is certainly posthumanist in its approaches and conclusions in that it emphasizes the supposedly coherent human body's entanglement with external (material) factors. I would reserve this category, here, for all of the authors discussed in this section, but also Mahmood and Yeğenoğlu.
9 Weheliye owes his invocation of the flesh to Hortense Spillers, who has written, ‘I would make a distinction in this case between “body” and “flesh” and impose that distinction as the central one between captive and liberated subject-positions. In that sense, before the “body” there is the “flesh,” that zero degree of social conceptualisation that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse, or the reflexes of iconography’ (1987: 67).)
10 ‘Permanent fixtures on and in the human body’ refer to natal aspects of biovisuality (such as skin colour) or biohistory (such as Jewish heritage) that have been invented as scientifically objective markers of racial inferiority and justifications of political violence. In the racialising assemblage of Nazi eugenics the yellow star functions as a stately imposition supposed to signify purportedly inescapable genetic belonging to a parasite race, meaning that its role is/was merely significatory and retrospective: Jews had to be invented as sociogenetically non-white first, before the yellow star could function as a respective signifier. Weheliye's other nonbiological examples, the hijab, the turban, and non-gender-conforming clothing, however, are for the most part not state-imposed retrospective signifiers, but irreducible performatives of a person's lived embodiment and public existence. Thus, it seems crucial to read the hijab, the turban, and gender-non-conforming clothing not only as retrospective supporting but concurrent constitutive elements in the racialising assemblages of Islamophobia and cissexism, given that these assemblages are aimed at altering forms of nonbiological and biological embodiment according to Western and patriarchal biologist standards.
11 Mimi Thi Nguyen offers a brilliant analysis of the hoodie as ‘participat[ing] in the racial mattering and sovereignty of bodies in world-shaping ways’ (Citation2015, 792).
12 Gabriele Dietze has traced how the idea of a (sexually oppressed) Kopftuchfrau (headscarfwoman) works as an apotropaic sign to conceal Western deficits in emancipation (Emanzipationsdefizite). The Kopftuchfrau, then, performs a crucial role for Western sexual exceptionalism (2010: 37-41). However, if we were to seriously engage the compound-construction and concept-metaphor, it would become clear that what is at stake is not only the eviction of Muslim veiled women from the category of the proper sexual citizen but the category of the true human as such.
13 Historically, pantsuit and female politician (or career woman in general) have constituted a material-semiotic intra-action that, most notably in the case of Hillary Clinton, has been a fixation of both misogynist mockery and (white liberal) feminist solidarity, as in the Clinton-supporting Pantsuit Nation. The pantsuit clearly marks and produces gendered difference, but it also produces a sense of initiation into a historically Western qua universally human subject-position by way of an emancipation from normatively gendered dress-codes. The irony of one matterperson (pantsuitwoman) accusing another of being a matterperson (headscarfgirl) – rather than a real human – is not easily resolvable here, except by a vague speculation that the pantsuit(woman) is quietly whitewashed or washed clean of its posthuman foundations, precisely because wearer and matter are considered endemic to the project of the West and, thus, Humanity. Incidentally, exchanging headscarf for pantsuit would likely be seen as an act of Westernisation and emancipation.
14 Gabriele Dietze characterizes this as the sexualization of the concept of freedom in West European and German contexts: a historically specific, feminist struggle for the (legal) permission to wear less restrictive clothing in public places, gaining women more and more control over their bodies, gives way to legal and normative imperatives of a ‘skin exposure dispositif,’ which inscribes the unveiled body or unveiling (a wholesome striptease from burqa to bikini) as the self-invisibilising normative horizon of (sexually and corporeally) free and unrestricted womanhood as well as universal humanity (2010: 24). Additionally, the bikini-burka/veil binary is a recurrent litmus test of who is a free and modern subject and who is not in Germanic women's magazines (Hametner et al. Citation2020). While the AfD's sexualizing objectification of the unveiled female body is undeniable, this very objectification feeds on a culture in which the unveiled female body, often in explicit contradistinction to the veiled female body, is a platform for (emancipatory) subject formation.
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Christian David Zeitz
Christian David Zeitz is a PhD candidate at the University of Toronto’s Cinema Studies Institute. His research is on the intersections between Orientalism, Islamophobia and the posthuman in German and European media culture, especially (post)cinema.