The Racial/Spatial Politics of Banning the Muslim Woman’s Niqāb: A Site/Sight We Cannot Bear
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In proposals and measures to ban her from public space, the wearer of the niqāb (a cloth worn by a Muslim woman covering the body, with only the eyes remaining visible) has been the subject of considerable anxiety and legal regulation. In countries in Europe, there is a trend to criminalize the wearing of Islamic veils, be it the niqāb or the burqa . While Americans have not favored legal bans to the same degree as Europeans, the author mentions several examples, e.g. Canada/Quebec's Bill 62, which requires the uncovering of faces when giving or receiving a public service, a measure that severely restricts the wearer of the niqāb . In this chapter, the author makes the case that the niqāb -wearer's eviction from public space is premised on the visible disturbance that she presents. The niqāb signals the dominant group's loss of control, a literal invasion that disturbs the unity of the public sphere. Besides deep anxiety, the niqāb -wearer generates an intense repugnance; a response that is paradoxically about desire. In the West, the response revolves around knowing and possessing the woman who is covered. Bans on the niqāb express a command to Muslim women to yield to racial and sexual superiority. What is unbearable is the niqāb -wearer's refusal to yield to the Western white gaze. The author develops her argument, based on legal cases, to show the racialized, gendered, and sexualized dynamics surrounding possession. These cases show that the primary legal logic on which the bans rest is untenable. An interpretation pulls in the direction of psychoanalysis, although the author's account of what is at stake in the various legal moments where law abandons logic is not an attempt to explain phenomena in psychoanalytical terms; rather, the author pursues her own critical ideas about the sight of a covered woman, the role of fantasy, the sexual nature of the response to the niqāb -wearer, and the command to the Muslim woman to yield. Introduction In early 2017, an Australian television station sent a reporter dressed in a niq āb to a mall.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
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".