The assignment for the ANT 415: Understanding Secularism course is on the hijab in Bangladesh. And I would like to look into the performativity aspect of the hijab and the extent to which it affects the lives of the women who wear them. The hijab, or the headscarf, is a visible marker that helps construct and embody a woman’s Muslim identity and all around the world, this identity has an image associated with it. This image as it is seen here, will be explored as I spend a week in Dhaka wearing a hijab in its’ various forms and documenting the response. This experience will be used to contrast my own performativity as a visibly queer woman on the streets and to understand how the image is portrayed and received in the ‘secular’ spaces that
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The common narrative that women are forced into wearing headscarves stems from the West’s white saviour complex and white feminism’s need to liberate ‘third-world’ women, but it is true that even in a moderately religious country like ours, this narrative is still extremely common. But each woman’s story is uniquely hers and each perspective has a myriad of reasons and motivations behind it, so we need to take into consideration that women can, and do, take this decision for themselves.
My very first interviewee embodies this narrative but with a slight twist. She is a third year private university student who started wearing the hijab because her family, specifically her father, had forced her to. For safety reasons, she is not allowed to go out on her own and since she joined university, in the absence of her parents, the hijab serves to protect her in public spaces. But even though, she’s gotten used to the presence of the headscarf in her life, it was also in this same span of time that she began to stop identifying as a Muslim. There was a time when she was religious but she stopped believing in organized religion as she had trouble associating the fear that she was told is necessary with her belief in god. She is …show more content…
And that drastically dropped when I started to cover up. During my time wearing the hijab, I tried out the different variations of headscarves to try and and map how perceptions differed. Quite predictably, salwar kameez and panjabis were perfectly acceptable but t-shirts and even fatuas were not, however loose. And even though, it’s easy to make assumptions like hijabi women are less sexualized or feel safer in public, none of the women I asked felt this way. They were still women in the eyes of society and so were duly objectified. I, however, felt safer when going home at night whilst wearing whatever form of head covering, not as much as I do when I can pass as a guy but still more than when I look like a unconventional
The common narrative that women are forced into wearing headscarves stems from the West’s white saviour complex and white feminism’s need to liberate ‘third-world’ women, but it is true that even in a moderately religious country like ours, this narrative is still extremely common. But each woman’s story is uniquely hers and each perspective has a myriad of reasons and motivations behind it, so we need to take into consideration that women can, and do, take this decision for themselves.
My very first interviewee embodies this narrative but with a slight twist. She is a third year private university student who started wearing the hijab because her family, specifically her father, had forced her to. For safety reasons, she is not allowed to go out on her own and since she joined university, in the absence of her parents, the hijab serves to protect her in public spaces. But even though, she’s gotten used to the presence of the headscarf in her life, it was also in this same span of time that she began to stop identifying as a Muslim. There was a time when she was religious but she stopped believing in organized religion as she had trouble associating the fear that she was told is necessary with her belief in god. She is …show more content…
And that drastically dropped when I started to cover up. During my time wearing the hijab, I tried out the different variations of headscarves to try and and map how perceptions differed. Quite predictably, salwar kameez and panjabis were perfectly acceptable but t-shirts and even fatuas were not, however loose. And even though, it’s easy to make assumptions like hijabi women are less sexualized or feel safer in public, none of the women I asked felt this way. They were still women in the eyes of society and so were duly objectified. I, however, felt safer when going home at night whilst wearing whatever form of head covering, not as much as I do when I can pass as a guy but still more than when I look like a unconventional