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The Political Psychology of the Veil

The Impossible Body

  • Book
  • © 2020

Overview

Authors:
  1. Sahar Ghumkhor

    1. School of Social and Political Sciences, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia

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  • Combines notions of psychoanalysis and postcolonial theory to analyse the desire to know
  • Goes beyond epistemology to the preoccupation with the body and its nexus with liberal freedoms
  • Investigates the psycho-political nature of racism

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Political Psychology (PSPP)

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Table of contents (7 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xv
    Download chapter PDF

  2. Introduction: Bodies Without Shadows

    • Sahar Ghumkhor
    Pages 1-33

  3. The Unveiling Body

    • Sahar Ghumkhor
    Pages 35-72

  4. The ‘Pure Defence of the Innocent’ and Innocence Lost: Imagining the Veiled Woman in Human Rights

    • Sahar Ghumkhor
    Pages 73-116

  5. The Woman Question

    • Sahar Ghumkhor
    Pages 117-161

  6. The Postcolonial Veil: Bodies in Contact

    • Sahar Ghumkhor
    Pages 163-202

  7. The Confessional Body

    • Sahar Ghumkhor
    Pages 203-252

  8. Conclusion: The Final Veil

    • Sahar Ghumkhor
    Pages 253-262

  9. Back Matter

    Pages 263-274
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Keywords

About this book

Veiled women in the West appear menacing. Their visible invisibility is a cause of obsession. What is beneath the veil more than a woman? This book investigates the preoccupation with the veiled body through the imaging and imagining of Muslim women. It examines the relationship between the body and knowledge through the politics of freedom as grounded in a ‘natural’ body, in the index of flesh. The impulse to unveil is more than a desire to free the Muslim woman. What lies at the heart of the fantasy of saving the Muslim woman is the West’s desire to save itself. The preoccupation with the veiled woman is a defense that preserves neither the object of orientalism nor the difference embodied in women’s bodies, but inversely, insists on the corporeal boundaries of the West’s mode of knowing and truth-making. The book contends that the imagination of unveiling restores the West’s sense of its own power and enables it to intrude where it is ‘other’ – thus making it the centre and the agent by promising universal freedom, all the while stifling the question of what freedom is.

Reviews

“A lucid and devastating analysis of the psychic and political fantasies that fix Muslim veiling/ unveiling as obsessive affective images in Western media in a world driven by ideologies of national and global security, anxieties about immigration and multiculturalism, and liberal promises of freedom, women’s rights, and human rights.” (Lila Abu-Lughod, Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies, Columbia University, USA, and author of Do Muslim Women Need Saving?)

“This is a brilliant piece of work... It is a critical ‘dangerous supplement’ to the discourse on the veil.” (Jaco Barnard-Naudé, Professor of Jurisprudence and Co-Director of the Centre for Rhetoric Studies in the Department of Private Law, University of Cape Town, South Africa)

Authors and Affiliations

  • School of Social and Political Sciences, The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia

    Sahar Ghumkhor

About the author

Sahar Ghumkhor teaches and researches in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne, Australia.

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