Anti-discrimination; Female Representation;
How about this story in terms of "our image is our own". Two young girls on trial in France for wearing the hijab to school.
It all started September 25, 2003
here's a few exerpts about their story taken from the Guardian:
Teenage sisters Alma and Lila were sent home from their lycee yesterday morning as punishment for breaking a nationwide ban on all displays of religious faith in the schoolroom.
"We are being asked to decide between our religion and our education; we want both," Alma Levy, 16, told local media, after the school decided to exclude her and her sister from classes for two weeks.
Current legislation permits the wearing of headscarves in schools if it is not "aggressive or proselytising", but individual schools are left to decide how this should be enforced.
Earlier attempts to compromise on how the sisters wear their headscarves have failed - despite their readiness to wear coloured and patterned scarves (deemed less aggressive by the school). "We are being asked to wear a veil that lets our earlobes show, and that reveals our hair and our necks," said Alma, whose mother is Muslim and whose father is an atheist Jew. "We don't agree with this."
Many of their schoolfriends are sympathetic. "Why stop them from demonstrating their religion? Nobody says anything to people who come dressed in gothic outfits wearing Satan T-shirts," one adolescent said.
for the full story go to:
The Guardian online
Anti-discrimination; Female Representation;
On Friday in France, the two young girls, Alma and Lila, lost their court battle for the right to wear a hijab in school. It seems wearing the hijab violates the separation of religion and state (and public schools being an extension of the state etc...etc....). On hearing this, it made me wonder if they were also going to be expelling young girls from school for wearing little gold crosses around their neck (my conclusion is... highly unlikely. It seems like the only sanctioned religion allowed in French schools these days is capitalism.
So the moral of the story....
While in France you may get away with wearing this to school:
and you can also wear this without any hassle:
you are forbidden to wear this:
What's going on here? Its clear that the hijab exposes an anxiety. The dominate symbolic order feels itself under attack from within. And it also shows that some religious identities are so given, so much a part of the very fabric of a society, that they are practically invisible. (gold crosses will not be yanked from the necks of little christian school girls) The BIG MESSAGE is: "you must look like us". Integration and assimilation become a means for quite literally stripping girls of their chosen identity.
Anti-discrimination; Female Representation;
Hearing about Alma and Lila's ordeal brought me back to the campaign circulated in Amsterdam. The poster is a symptom of the kind of xenophobic virus currently spreading across the EU and other countries. What does it mean when debate around Muslim women is framed so polemically as "power girl or problem case".
Also, what does it mean when the Amsterdam city government asks at the bottom of the image "What can we do to emancipate Muslim women?".
The very question works off a series of assumptions which can only be seen as prejudice. First of all, who is the collective "we". Are not Muslim women a part of the collective we? Are they not a part of the social fabric of Amsterdam? Or are "we" speaking solely of the "sanctioned-liberated-traditional-secular-or-Christian-Dutch kind of "we"? Secondly, this poster would have us believe that Muslims have a kind of monolithic identity, and that Islam is interpreted and practiced in a singular way. Its like saying Christians are all one thing...well yes they are, if you gloss over the differences of Catholics, Protestants, Fundamentalists etc.... Aside from the fact that Amsterdam is filled with Turkish Muslim women, Moroccan Muslim women etc... there are also differences within the Islamic faith, different understandings of what the practice of Islam means in their daily lives.
Finally, and perhaps most shockingly, the poster operates off the colonial premise that your enlightenment should look like our enlightenment, but today, enlightenment has been replaced with words like emancipation or liberation. Where under colonial rule the so-called "savage" was to be tamed to look like the Western image of civilization. Now, it is the image of Western emancipation or freedom that is being imposed upon others, in this case, the female immigrant practicing Islam (even when she may be a third or fourth generation inhabitant of the Netherlands...meaning, in the legal registry system, she is Dutch) Freedom is thus interpretated to mean "You are free to behave like we do, to look like we do". And in this sense the poster campaign in Amsterdam, is closely related to the court case recently lost by Alma and Lila in France.