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Abstract
This paper presents a conceptual undertaking into the sexuating logics of post-9/11 surveillance that are deployed to racialize Muslim-fem bodies. From the aesthetic imaginary that artist Zuhra Hilal constructs across her two artworks – An Exploration of the Nameless Anatomy (2015) and Surface (2018-ongoing) – I ask how the veil, as a kind of surrogate and sometimes erotogenic skin, gets read as a racial object not by its color but by the mutability and abstraction of its contiguous surfaces, and by the supplementarity between (imagined) essence and (projected) covering. Through Hilal’s artistic compositions, I demonstrate how the veil might capture a different sight of, and relation to, Muslim-fem bodies, one that participates in a larger speculative project on pleasure, visuality and desire.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 See for instance: Bullock Citation2003; Cooke Citation2007; Grace Citation2004; Scott Citation2007; Heath Citation2008; Moors Citation2012; Geczy Citation2019.
2 Such as drone warfare, aerial surveillance, and touchless torture. See Parks and Kaplan Citation2017.
3 As per TSA’s own wording, see Beauchamp Citation2019, 149n2.
4 In attempting such a reading that foregrounds the violence of racialized surveillance perpetrated by the U.S. security state however, I am weary of the risks of reifying the rise and consolidation of U.S. empire that could foreclose alternate, even provincial, engagements with Hilal’s works. To this end, in the final section of this paper, I gesture to a more expansive consideration of the artworks that orient away from western hegemonic frameworks for thinking about Muslim-fem engagements with the veil.
5 I am drawing on Silverman’s (Citation1986) notion that clothing, which includes the veil as one such style, is one of the most important cultural devices for mapping the erotogenic zones of human corporeality (146).
6 This is a question about the proximity of the “other” and the danger posed to the west. See Norton Citation2013, 2–3.
7 The likes of which proliferate in iconographies of Muslim women needing to be saved from their “cultures.” For more on this see Ghumkhor (Citation2020).
8 I am referencing here the perpetual “ban the burqa” debates; see Yasmeen Citation2013. I am also signalling to the fact that Hilal’s figures are faceless.
9 Cheng (Citation2009) suggests that “it is the crisis of visuality, rather than the allocation of visibility” that constitutes contemporary liberal discourses on recognition (115).
10 I am indebted to Stephens (Citation2014) for bringing this concept to my attention (196–199).
11 Artist Rajkamal Kahlon also uses this figure of the ecorche in a series of ink drawings titled Did You Kiss the Dead Body? (2012–2013). The drawings are based on the artist’s analysis of reports from postmortem examinations of Iraqi and Afghan people incarcerated in domestic and offshore U.S. prisons since 9/11. See also Kahlon Citation2014.
12 Magnet and Rodgers (Citation2012) use this turn of phrase to describe body imaging technologies that “serve up particular bodies for the viewing pleasure of TSA officers in ways that result in stratified mobilities for particular communities” (105).
13 The menstrual pad similarly poses as a structure contiguous with the body, containing and infused with its sweat, skin cells and dead mucosal endometrial tissue.
14 Tuhkanen (Citation2009) discusses the interchanged usage between livery and uniform, noting differences in translation, where in A Dying Colonialism, “livery” is denoted by the French “uniforme”, and in Black Skin White Masks, “livery” appears in the French as “livrée” (79–80).
15 This is the first chapter of Fanon’s A Dying Colonialism; [Citation1994] Citation1959, 35.
16 In thinking about the gendered and sexual logics of this colonial encounter, particularly of the entangled relation between land and body (and their constitutive dispossessions), I want to note that my study and writing here takes place on the unceded sovereign lands of the Kulin Nations, whose land-based struggles for decolonization in so-called “Australia” are being led by warrior-fems and non-binary folks who continue to be rendered materially and discursively invisible by the settler state and by persisting Eurocentric, colonial epistemes alike. This (belated) acknowledgment hopes to affect a reparative pause, in order to foreground how Indigenous political claims to self-governance and rematriation are not a single example of anti-racist discourse (as is often problematically perceived in much feminist and queer scholarship; see Dhamoon Citation2015, 21), but are the foundation of a grander anti-racist and anti-colonial struggle in which this paper, as well as my broader academic investments, are situated.
17 I want to note that this figure of the “hymen” invoked by Yeǧenoǧlu is radically different to that of, for instance, Mona Eltahawy’s in her book Headscarves and Hymens: Why The Middle East Needs A Sexual Revolution (Citation2015). The latter, through a “native informant” stance, urges a politics of sexual emancipation for invariably “oppressed” and “repressed” Muslim cis-women that recycles tired orientalist tropes about a monolithic and atavistic cultural Islam, that conflates “uncut” and visible bodies with freedom, and that is mired in narrow neoliberal logics of commoditized individuality and secular modernity that not only obscures the biopolitics and necropolitics of gendered, racialized and sexualized bodies globally, but that sidesteps ongoing anti-imperial, decolonial and transnational queer and feminist agendas concerned with solidarity and combatting cis-heteropatriarchy. See also Ghumkhor and Rogers (Citation2014) for an important critique of how spectacular images of unveiling and of “female genital mutilation” – the very imaginaries that form the crux of Eltahawy’s tirade – are conscripted to teleological accounts of human rights.
18 I am invoking the conventional understanding of the airport as indexing national/state “borders.” See also Browne Citation2015, 28.
19 Here I am drawing on my personal Muslim-fem experience, as well as those shared with other Muslim-fems with whom I am in community.
20 See Daulatzai (Citation2016) for a brilliant and urgent analysis on Pontecorvo’s film in the context of the war on terror.
21 That is, they tap into an aesthetic regime and repertoire informed by diasporic Muslim-fem engagements with, and contestations of, feminist critiques of imperial ventures (both at home and abroad), without conceding ground to the chronopolitical inflections – which construct a teleology of progress or its counterpart as a rejection of western values – that such projects are often embroiled in. They further invoke the intergenerational qualities of Hilal’s praxis, which she describes as inheriting from her seamstress mother.
22 As has been the overwhelming preoccupation of western liberal feminism, especially in relation to “the Muslim woman” in need of “saving”, see Abu-Lughod Citation2013.
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Sumaiya Muyeen
Sumaiya Muyeen is a PhD candidate in Gender Studies at The University of Melbourne. Her research explores philosophical performances of desire in Muslim queer/femme aesthetics and expressive cultures.