Veil Pulling as Orientalist and Colonial Violence: Contemporary Case Studies in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The veil occupies a significant position within Western discourses as a symbol of Islam and a representation of Muslim women’s perceived oppression. Rooted in historical and contemporary narratives, the veil’s portrayal often intersects with colonial and post-colonial discourses. This paper explores the violent act of veil-pulling, a hate crime involving the forced removal of a Muslim woman’s veil, as an extension of colonial ideologies and racialized oppression. Using the theoretical frameworks of Franz Fanon’s analysis of French-colonized Algeria and Edward Said’s Orientalism, this study investigates the enduring legacy of colonial attitudes toward the veil and their manifestation in modern contexts. The analysis highlights the nuanced connections between the historical practice of unveiling as a colonial tool and the contemporary targeting of veiled Muslim women. Drawing on case studies such as incidents at a Tennessee secondary school, the development of “Hijab Emergency Kits” at Dalhousie University, and occurrences at pro-Palestinian protests, this paper argues that veil-pulling is not merely a random act of aggression, but a deeply embedded act of violence rooted in colonial and racist intentions. This research underscores the need to recognize and address veil-pulling as a systemic issue requiring a critical and informed analysis.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".