The Conundrum of the Veil and Mohja Kahf's Literary Representations of Hijab
Why this work is in the frame
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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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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it