We live in strange times. >Last week a woman in Nice who was wearing a burkini was forced to remove her “offensive” clothing . This week Tourism and Culture Minister Mahesh Sharma issued an informal advisory to foreign women to not wear skirts to avoid violence. The discussion on this needs to be situated in the general misogyny that undergirds not only all religions, but also infiltrates the secular state that is closely linked to capitalism, which has effectively commodified the female form. The traditional debate on robing/disrobing of the female form is located in a false binary, that is, the false idea that religious and cultural norms will dictate women being robed while secular forms of thinking like liberalism that focus on choice will advocate a freedom for women based on their ability to strip at will, which is then interpreted by men as a form of sexual consent.
France takes its secularism, or laicite, very seriously. Politicians who favour bringing religion back into the public sphere are criticised, and the practice of religion privately is seen as a public good. In this schematic of secularism there is no place for a public assertion of one’s religious identity, which when combined with attacks on France’s public spaces by terrorists pledged to the Islamic State has resulted in a spiteful policy of banning one particular form of Islamic dress, the burkini, from public spaces like beaches.
Subjugation of female bodies
France is not alone; the masculine gazes seeks to garb the female form in particular imaginations. These imaginations are quite clearly linked to projects of state power, cultural assertions or ideological change and revolution. When women’s outfits become linked to projects of political power, both robing and disrobing become forms of subjugation of female bodies, or the exercise of biopower by states. Women are policed physically and sexually through what they wear. In India and West Asia, outfits are meant to conceal bodies. A woman is taught that disrobing brings shame to their families, especially the patriarch, since he is the only person (apart from the state) who can exert power over female bodies linked to him by blood or marriage. The state supports the patriarch’s claims.
In advanced countries, the opposite happens. Women are allowed to strip as part of a much-needed sexual revolution. Even so, this freedom has been appropriated by a male gaze where the purpose of being female has been reduced to being a commodity. This was recently evinced in a news discussion on American female Olympians and their make-up and outfits, with male commentators encouraging the use of make-up and not evaluating the athletes on their sporting prowess.
In this sense, when looked at through the lens of biopower, robing/disrobing becomes a technique of managing and limiting female desire, power, nutrition, politics, health and ambition. Disrobing is, in a capitalist world, seen as liberation, as a form of feminine power and an assertion of non-religious modernity. Robing through the burqa is seen as the exact opposite — it becomes a form of ugliness; it becomes medieval.
In a world where wars of strategy have increasingly become entangled with ethnic and religious ideologies, a woman’s body has become the battleground where wars of doctrine are being fought. So, an Islamic cleric and an Indian khap, while asserting their cultural purity at the service of a right-wing political movement, will decree that women cannot show skin. On the other hand, a Time magazine cover from 2010 showing the mutilated face of an Afghanistani woman asks, “What will happen if we leave Afghanistan”? as an assertion of the argument that the U.S. troop concentration in Afghanistan must be preserved to save the robed women of that nation.
The female form is caught between these war-making imperatives between groups of men who share fellowships of certitude about their ideologies and their relationship to womankind. To win a strategic war is becoming increasingly difficult; therefore, wars are being waged through the militant deployment of ideologies where they can be quickly seen and discussed. The female form is collateral damage in this larger war, where choice is no longer something a woman actively chooses, but her choice becomes residual, a casualty of a larger political battle. In France, Muslim women’s “choice” to wear specialised bathing suits has become a casualty to the global war on the Islamic State. In India, men police women’s outfits and actively punish women who do not conform. Even the state will treat women dressed in a non-Indian way, differently. This is all done in the name of protecting Indian culture. In the West, women exercise their “choice” to disrobe, but are not too sure if it is an active choice, or patriarchal social conditioning combined with good advertising and a fear of being socially rejected if they do not conform to some ideal standard of beauty.
The question that should be asked of the French state is this, >by forcibly disrobing a woman in a burkini , is the state not reobjectifying her in a different way and according to a culturally different male gaze? In the same way, a woman forced to wear a burqa is also being objectified and constrained, as is a woman forced to drape a sari or a woman forced to wear a bikini. In this way, to forcibly robe or to disrobe are both not very liberating as they only seek to transfer the woman from one condition of male objectification to another. To find a way out, there needs to be an awakening amongst women to consistently and relentlessly interrogate the relationship of the “choices” they make to the immediate structures of domination that surround them. This is the only way to reclaim real and active choices from other structured choices.
Vasundhara Sirnate Drennan is the Chief Coordinator of Research at The Hindu Centre for Politics and Public Policy.
