The Conundrum of the Veil and Mohja Kahf's Literary Representations of Hijab
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay examines the semiotic complexities involved in the Muslim veil as an object that has almost invariably become a defining feature of Muslim female subjectivity. More specifically, I endeavour to show that the veil has acquired a monstrous power to the extent that even within a transcultural ambit of norms, the Muslim woman – whether veiling or not – is seen either positively or negatively through the presence or the absence of the veil and thus appears as always already improperly covered. I will draw on Peter Schwenger's study of the gaze of the object as a useful analytical tool to probe into the complexities regarding the visual power of the veil. To demonstrate this argument, I will then examine the ways in which Syrian–American writer and scholar Mohja Kahf engages in the scholarly conversation on dress and identity in the context of diaspora and thereby reimagines new ways of being Muslim, Arab and American. Kahf's work intervenes in the trite yet dominant binary manner of thinking about the veil as invariably symbolizing oppression or emancipation. I end the essay with a reference to the works of the French guerrilla artist Princess Hijab and the ways s/he queers the dominant meanings attached to the veil in the field of visual culture. Both Kahf and Princess Hijab draw on the visual power of the veil in an attempt to defamiliarize it. They problematize deep-seated assumptions about the centrality of the veil as a major defining feature of Muslim female subjectivity.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".