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THE VEILED OTHER:
THE IMPACT OF GENDER AND CULTURE
ON
INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL THEORY
by
Jo-Anne Allison
B.A. (Joint Honours), McGill University, 1976
M.L.S., McGill University, 1978

THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF
THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
MASTER OF ARTS
in
GENDER STUDIES

o Jo-Anne Allison, 1998
THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTHERN BRITISH COLUMBIA
1998

All rights reserved. This work may not be
reproduced in whole or in part, by photocopy or
other means, without the permission of the author.

1^1

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ou autrement reproduits sans son
autorisation.

0-612-62463-3

Canada

APPROVAL
Name:

Jo-Anne Allison

Degree:

Master of Arts in Gender Studies

Thesis Title:

The Veiled Other: the Impact of Gender and
Culture on International Political Theory

Examining Committee:

Üf. Kèir-Prkachin
Chai(
Professor and Program Chair, Psychology

I p e r y i s o r : D r . Jo-Anne Fiske
)ciate Professor, Anthropology,
Gender/Women's Studies

Dr. Dee H o m e
Assistant Professor, English

J

-----------------Dr. Ellen Facey

V
Regional Chair & Program Coordinator,
Associate P m f e s a o r r ^ o l ^ g e of Arts, Social
& Health Sdlmces

External Exami:
Assistant

Date Approved:

r-' —

r. Greg Poelzer
, Political Science

"7"
/

11
ABSTRACT

In this thesis I propose that traditional
International Relations theory oversimplifies the
international political system.

An examination of some of

the basic dichotomies which ground International Relations
theory, such as domestic/international and nation/state,
reveals that they may not be as clear cut as previously
thought.

The primacy of the state, the construction of

nation and the concept of citizenship are explored in this
context.

The Islamic veil illustrates how a gendered

cultural symbol is constructed into a metaphor for
difference.

A feminist reading of Orientalism, along with

insights from postcolonial discourse, shows the impact of
difference on the state, the nation and on individuals.
Empirical evidence of these processes is illustrated through
images of veiled Muslim women as they occur in contemporary
Western popular culture.

I conclude that gender and culture

must be incorporated into theory if International Relations
is to achieve its goal of explaining and understanding
global political phenomena.

Ill
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract

ii

Table of Contents

iii

List of Figures

iv

Acknowledgement

vi

Preface

vii

Chapter One
Introduction

1

Chapter Two
The Veil in Western Popular Culture
The Primacy of the State
The Construction
of Nation
The Construction
of NationAsFemale
Citizenship

8
10
20
23
26

Chapter Three
The Construction
of Difference
The Veiled Woman
As Symbol
Conceptual Metaphor
Orientalism
A Feminist Reading of Orientalism
Constructing the Metaphor

29
32
35
39
42
50

Chapter Four
Meanings of the Veil - Historical Context
Orientalism in the Contemporary Context
Meaning of the Veil - ContemporaryContext
Hollywood and the Veil
The Media and the Veil
Canada and the Discourse of Difference

52
54
56
60
70
77

Chapter Five
Implications and Conclusions

86

Notes

92

Bibliography

98

Figures

111

IV

LIST OF FIGURES
Figure 1.

Book cover From far awav by Robert Munsch

111

Figure 2.

Art Card of Tuareg women by Irene Klar

112

Figure 3.

Compact disc jacket of Algerian folk music

113

Figure 4.

Illustration of product packaging

114

Figure 5.

Photocopy of one of Jean-Paul Gaultier's
dress designs

115

Figure 6.

LeComte de Nouy's L'esclave blanche

116

Figure 7.

7.1 Ingres's Odalisque
7.2 Debat-Posan's The massage

117

Figure 8.

Travel brochure from Insight Travel

118

Figure 9.

Cover from travel book on Egypt

119

Figure 10. Memories of Damascus product label

120

Figure 11. Islamic women soldiers

121

Figure 12. Algerian woman mourns family

122

Figure 13. Palestinian women fighting in the streets

123

Figure 14. Armed conflict in Galilee

124

Figure 15. Woman and wounded child in Afghanistan

125

Figure 16. Cover of special insert on Islam in
The Economist

126

Figure 17. Photo captioned "Islam and the West:
The next war they say"

127

Figure 18. Young women reject the black chador
in Iran

128

Figure 19. Yemeni women wait to vote

129

Figure 20. Editorial cartoon satirizing sexual
equality in the West

130

Figure 21. Cartoon mocking what Western women
will do in the name of equality

131

Figure 22.

Cartoon on the economic position of

Figure 23.

Illustration from From far awav byRobert
Munsch.

133

Cartoon by Lurie in Time Magazine.

134

Figure 24.

women

132

VI

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I thank my thesis supervisor Jo Fiske.

Her commitment

to this topic from its initial stages and her generosity as
I progressed towards my goal is deeply appreciated.

Thank

you to my committee members Dee Horne and Ellen Facey.

This

paper was substantially improved by their reviews emd
comments.
I would like to express my gratitude to Marika Ainley,
who as Chair of the Program welcomed me to Gender Studies at
a pivotal moment in my academic career.

I also thank Max

Blouw who made it possible for me to concentrate on the
intellectual task at hand.
Thank you to Christina Hunter, Wendy Marks, Jennifer
Burgis, and Andrea Allison for their invaluable feedback and
encouragement through the years.

I am grateful to Sue

Marjoribanks, Bridgitt Dawley, and Carol Yates.

This thesis

would not have been completed without the excellent child
care they provided.
And, a very special thank you to my family.

Words

cannot express what I owe to my husband Doug Heard and our
children Myrica and Brett.

This thesis is a testament to

their unwavering enthusiasm and patience.

vu
PREFACE

This thesis is a critique of traditional International
Relations theory or realism.

Traditional theory or realism

can be characterized by four main assumptions:

1) the state is the most important actor at the
international level.
2) the state is a unitary actor
3) states act in a rational manner in the best interests of
their citizens
4) within the hierarchy of issues states grapple with,
national security is the most important.

I wanted to do a critique because I conclude that
traditional International Relations theory oversimplifies
the international system.

I believe that the social

dimension of international political interaction is
overlooked in realism.

I also consider that the dichotomies

which are basic to traditional International Relations
theory, state/nation, public/private, and
international/domestic are not as clear cut as they might at
first seem.

Finally, I wanted to explore feminist and

postcolonial literature to see what they could contribute to
my understanding of international phenomena.

VXXl

My critique initially centred on two factors; gender
and culture.

But as I progressed in this project I realized

that these factors illuminate the agency of the individual
and that conversely looking at how individuals act
politically/internationally, yields information on the
dynamics of gender and culture.

So I decided to look at all

three factors.
However, I did hesitate and considered limiting my
study to gender and culture because as I explored the
literature I saw why scholars have considered one or another
of these factors rather than attempting more comprehensive
studies.

It is simpler!

However, since I was criticizing

the oversimplification of theory, I resisted the urge to
simplify my study.

I decided to formulate a study which

would highlight how gender, culture and the individual
intersect, to achieve my goal of better theory.
There were other reasons why I decided to go ahead.
There is substantial literature on each of these factors.

I

was interested in exploring the relationships between these
factors and how they twine together.

And, most importantly,

I was unable to find literature that dealt with these
factors in such a way as to fulfil what I see as the goal of
International Relations theory, which is explaining and
understanding international political processes and events.
How to frame a study which would allow me to pull the
"threads" of my critique together?

Perhaps because I am a

ix
visual learner or because I spent too much time in front of
the TV when I was a kid I became interested in the idea of
looking at symbols and their impact in the political arena.
Symbols reflect the culture they are created in, they are
most often gendered, they are created and manipulated to
send specific messages, and they can signify different
things at the same time.
Once I decided to look at symbols, the question became:
How can I set up a study of a symbol which would illustrate
the need to incorporate gender and culture into
International Relations theory?
I concluded that in order to do this, I had to answer
the following questions : Why are symbols created into
emblems of difference between states?
ascribed to these symbols?

How are meanings

And, what role does the

individual play in the creation, maintenance, manipulation
of these symbols?
Thus, I had to choose a symbol and a method of analysis
which would facilitate the exploration of how symbols get
their meanings. The symbol I chose to consider is the
Islamic veil and the method of analysis I use is conceptual
metaphor.
Conceptual metaphor is traditionally associated with
linguistics but in a broader context it is used to identify
and understand how we use gendered cultural concepts to
order our universe - to make sense of the world around us.

Metaphor is not simply a way of describing something, but
more, it is a way of describing something in terms of
something else.

I use conceptual metaphor to explain the

processes, contexts and history of why, when we see a
particular symbol, it calls to mind a whole range of
associations - associations that do not necessarily have
anything to do with the item itself.

That is why, in this

paper, I do not differentiate between different types of
Islamic coverings.

I use veil to include the hijab or

headscarf, the chador and other types of Islamic coverings.
The body of my thesis includes a critique of
traditional theory and its treatment of gender, culture and
the individual.

Then through a discussion of postcolonial

theory and a feminist interpretation of Orientalism I
contemplate how the veil is constructed into a metaphor of
difference in the West where the veiled woman is
conceptualized as the embodiment of exoticism, eroticism,
mystery, timelessness, backwardness, oppression, loathing,
fear, religious fanaticism, political extremism and
terrorist activity.

I also consider the political

implications of how meanings that have been ascribed to the
veil impact on individuals, especially when these meanings
are acted upon.
What did I l e a m by studying sexualized images of that
which is created Other?

What is there to understand from

considering the images of veiled women found in movies, on

xi
television, in an example of children's literature, some
school books and selected newspapers?
I found that constructions of difference epitomized
through the gendered cultural symbol of the veil affect the
political sphere.

I learned that women who wear the veil

are constructed into markers of difference and that this
affects their lives as they live in "our" neighbourhoods,
attend "our" schools and walk "our" streets.
Students who choose to wear the veil are sent home from
publicly funded schools in Quebec. Because they do not
conform to the collective national identity of the
sovereigntist Quebec government these women are denied their
citizenship rights in the form of access to education.
I learned that when veiled women are portrayed as the
embodiment of that which is foreign, the hierarchy between
those identified as "us" and those identified with "them" is
maintained and reinforced.
When veiled women are constructed into markers of
Other, they are denied their identity as women, and are
recognized only as members of their cultural group.

For

example the Canadian policy on multiculturalism does not
recognize the special concerns of ethnic women.

This

official position bolsters the construction of veiled women
into a metaphor of anti-western extremism.
The metaphors of the veil illustrate how vulnerable
women are when they are perceived to be out of place in the

Xll

public sphere.

Disguised behind anti-fundamentalist

remarks, the legacy of imperialist discourse, which used
women as pawns to demonstrate power over the Other,
continues to this day.

In Canada, véiled women are told

that because they wear the veil, and because it is a symbol
of oppression,

if they chose to wear it they are not

welcome in the Canadian "home".
The gendered politics of boundary making and the
sexualized nature of national identity are thrown into sharp
relief when images of that which is created Other are used
to rationalize continuing unequal relationships of power.
Similarly, images of veiled women are used in the West to
deliberately disguise the position of all women.

Thus the

veil is used to mask the gendered nature of power relations
between and within western states behind the rhetoric of
Orientalist discourse.

In seeking to find evidence that

supports the progressive image Western countries have
created for themselves, the East is again denigrated and
devalued.
My goal in writing this thesis was proving that gender
and culture must be included in International Relations
theory. How does this study contribute to this goal?

1) In this thesis I present an analysis of metaphor framed
within a feminist analysis of Orientalist discourse and
postcolonial theory.

I found that international politics is

xiii
affected by symbolic discourses where race is gendered and
gender is racialized.

This suggests that traditional theory

neglects variables which are significant to the
understanding of events in the international arena.

2) My use of conceptual metaphor allows us to see how
symbols become signifiers of power.

This permits

speculation about how unequal relationships of power are
maintained in the international sphere.

In addition,

conceptual metaphor and what it tells us about the culture
creating the metaphor, exposes the hierarchical thinking of
traditional International Relations theory which values the
international over the domestic and the public sphere over
the private.

3) I also demonstrate that traditional understandings of how
and why states interact are incomplete.

Realism does not

explain the "social" world, the space in which you and I and
the veiled woman down the street live.

If we open up theory

to individual identity, we also open the door to considering
what is stake for the state in the production of nationalist
ideology.
In the conclusion I consider how a realist might scoff
and say that an exploration of the images of veiled women is
unrealistic and obscure and even too frivolous to be taken
seriously in International Relations.

After all realists

xiv
would have us believe that it is a hard, harsh and very cold
world out there.

However, as I consider the potential

explanatory value of other ways of thinking and knowing on
international political theory, an analysis of sexualized
imagery is not what some realists might call "wide-eyed
idealism".

I submit that this thesis is a step towards

better theory.

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

How do people live their lives together on this planet
we call earth?

What are the forces that guide our

interaction, our attempts at cooperation, our failures
called wars?

International Relations as a discipline

addresses such questions.

Balance of power politics, the

relations between and among states, economic relations and
terrorist activity are all components of International
Relations.
Theory guides International Relations scholars in their
investigations by providing mechanisms for explaining,
understanding and predicting global incidents and events
(Couloumbis and Wolfe 1990; Hollis and Smith 1991).

Four

basic assumptions ground the traditional realist approach to
International Relations theory.

First, the state is the

principal or most important actor on the world scene;
second, states are unitary actors interacting with the
outside world as an integrated unit;

third, states act

rationally; and lastly, within the hierarchy of
international issues, national security is most important
(Viotti and Kauppi 1993).
Given the diversity of issues studied it is reasonable
to expect that how these concerns and occurrences are

2
investigated would be diverse as well'.

However, even

though some schools of thought dispute the unitary nature of
the state, grant agency to non-state actors, and seek to
expand the definition of security, the traditional realist
state-centric paradigm continues to exert influence over
models of international decision-making and behaviour
(Beckman 1994).

It is this traditional inclination that I

address in this thesis.
My belief that traditional International Relations
oversimplifies the international political system was
confirmed one evening in a trendy Vancouver restaurant.

A

sudden hesitation in the noise level caused heads to turn
and voices to still.

An extended family was being seated

and while they chatted gaily to each other, the room around
them hushed.

Within seconds the momentary quiet was drowned

by the renewed hubbub of voices and kitchen noises.

As I

considered what occurred, I was forcefully struck at the
thought that the hijab^-wearing women in that group were at
the root of the room's brief disquiet.
Without a doubt, international politics intruded into a
Vancouver restaurant that evening, in a real, immediate, and
momentarily threatening way.

The veil, the potent symbol of

Islam for the West, and the women wearing it, invaded our
collective consciousness and affirmed the relationship
between the personal and the international.

3
However, within the confines of traditional theory,
this incident is not worthy of consideration beyond the
anecdotal since it occurred in the private world of personal
experience.

Realists regard International Relations as a

discipline concerned with the high politics of international
order occupied exclusively with trade, war, official
decision-makers, academics, soldiers and kings (Sylvester
1996).

However, Cynthia Enloe (1993) entreats us to shift

the focus of political theory so we might see what is really
happening "out there."

She maintains that International

Relations theory needs to create an intellectual space where
the impact of international events on daily lives and the
influence of the individual on the international system is
assessed.

If we consider international events from the

perspective of the individual, the inclusion of gendered
cultural identities into theoretical models becomes
possible.
International Relations scholars have suggested that a
number of dichotomies embedded in traditional theory reduce
its explanatory power^.

The dichotomies identified include

the separation between the international/domestic realms,
state/non-state actors, public/private spheres, high/low
politics, and political/cultural processes.

Further, the

body of literature on the masculinized nature of
International Relations' theoretical foundations suggests
that different explanatory methods would produce

4
emancipatory and enhanced explanations for international
political interaction^.

This thesis follows in this lively

tradition of debate and critique which explores other modes
of thinking and explaining.

My hope is that this work will

lead to increased understanding as we grapple with the
environmental, social, economic and political challenges of
the new millennium.
The episode in Vancouver lends urgency to my interest
in the potential explanatory value of gender and culture to
the understanding of international political events.
Individuals and states are involved in image making.
Conversely, states and individuals react to images.

In this

thesis I address traditional theory's treatment of gender
and culture through an investigation of the Islamic veil.
This allows me to speculate on the impact of gendered
cultural signifiers on international decision-making.

I

also comment on the interconnections between the
international/domestic and public/private spheres as they
yield insight into the agency of the individual at the
international level.
The challenge in structuring a study which has as its
intent the inclusion of new variables into theory is
substantial.

The goal is to develop generalizations about

these variables, so that they may become part of
international theoretical modelling.

Implicit in this is

the need for an approach which permits reflection on gender

5
and culture beyond the specificity of particular cultural
contexts.

This thesis represents an initial effort toward

this goal.
There is a wealth of ethnographic studies concerned
with the various historical and cultural contexts of
veiling^.

However, in order to diffuse the rhetoric

surrounding the wearing of the veil and its identification
with fundamentalist Islamic states, I decided on a more
general approach.

In this thesis I assess how integral the

veil is to the construction of metaphors which represent the
feminized Other in order to demonstrate the connections
between the public and private spheres and the role that
gendered cultural symbols play in the construction and
maintenance of unequal power relationships.
In order to accomplish this, I decided to study the
veil's meanings as articulated in the West.

I use

conceptual metaphor to analyze Western representations of
the veil because it permits the evaluation of the impact of
gender and culture on individuals as they negotiate the
margins between the domestic nation and the international
state.

Metaphor also helps to expose the invisibility of

gendered power relations in traditional International
Relations by highlighting how the veil has been constructed
into a symbol of difference in the West.
I demonstrate that the metaphorical meanings attributed
to the gendered cultural signifier, the Islamic veil.

6
whether or not they are an accurate reflection of Muslim
women's reality, shed light on the processes involved in
international decision-making.

Lazreg (1994) maintains that

while social science may not be perfect, it is the quality
of the question that determines the viability of the answer.
Thus, how can I, a Westerner working within the frame of
Western social science, shed light on the reality behind the
veil?

My assumption is that if I assess the impact of the

veil as a gendered cultural symbol on the international
political system, I will be able to speculate on the
gendered nature of power relationships and the sexualized
discourse of national identity.

For the purposes of this

paper I use Fiske's definition of discourse as a
"conversation or political dialogue between unequal parties,
with the superordinate party holding the resources economic, human, and cultural - that determine the context
and the content of the discourses" (1996:87).
Chapter two provides examples of how the veil has
become incorporated into Western popular culture.

It

proceeds with a feminist critique of the traditional
International Relations perspective and concludes with an
exploration of the concepts of nation and citizenship.
Chapter three considers the construction of difference and
describes the use of conceptual metaphor as an analytical
method.

In this chapter Said's (1979) Orientalism and

Mutman's (1993) feminist reading of the discourse of

7
difference informs a discussion on the creation of nation
and how individuals intersect with the state.

Chapter four

is devoted to the presentation and analysis of selected
images of the veil.

In the conclusion, I consider the

implications of incorporating gender and culture into
international political theory.

I also speculate on areas

of further research that are required to achieve
International Relations theory's goal of understanding and
explaining international political events (Hollis and Smith
1991).

CHAPTER TWO

The Veil in Western Popular Culture

Why is a veiled woman chosen to epitomize immigrant
women in Canada in Robert Munsch's book entitled From Far
Away (Fig.l)?

Why does a fashionable Granville Island art

gallery exhibiting paintings of ethnic women prominently
display a painting of veiled Tuareg women (Fig.2)?

Why does

a compact disc of traditional Algerian folk songs packaged
for the European market have veiled women on the jacket
(Fig.3)? Why should a trip to the grocery store be
punctuated by an encounter with a veiled woman looking out
at me from a box of couscous (Fig.4)?

Why does Jean-Paul

Gaultier, the fashion designer, integrate the veil into one
of his creations (Fig.5)?

And, why is it that news reports

of Islamic terrorists invariably include a wailing woman
wearing the veil (Tremonti 1997)?
I return to some of these images in detail in chapter
four to propose that these types of images construct the
veiled Muslim woman into a public symbol of Islam.

In

chapter four I also illustrate that one ramification of the
blurring of public and private spheres is to position the
individual at the centre of a new discourse where the
traditional lines between the domestic and the international

9
spheres are erased.

First, however, I demonstrate why a

study of the veil is of value to International Relations
theorists.
There many examples which illustrate how images of
veiled Muslim women demonstrate a pervasiveness of shared
meanings in the West (Kahf 1994).

In England a school girl,

upset by lewd and sexually suggestive remarks directed
towards her veiled body, decides to express her piety in
other ways (Alibhai-Brown 1994).

In Australia Muslim women

are told to take off their veils before going to job
interviews.

Apparently it makes prospective employers

uncomfortable and their chances of getting jobs are
increased if they are not veiled (Pegler 1994).

In France

the citizenship claims of North African immigrants pivot on
a furious national debate over the wearing of religious
headscarves in French secular schools (Woodhull 1993;
Moruzzi 1994; Jasser 1995).

In Toronto a young girl is

called "terrorist" by her classmates when she wears her
hijab to school ("Religious scarf can set young women apart"
1994).

In Quebec during the run up to a referendum on

provincial sovereignty, the controversy over hijab-wearing
school girls sparks a debate over the religious rights of
immigrants (Block 1994; Leclerc 1994; "Veiled threats in
Quebec" 1994; Norris 1994).
The large number and diversity of examples of veiled
women represented in Western popular culture provides

10
compelling evidence that particular meanings associated with
Muslim women affect thinking, structure interactions, and
dictate responses.

The apparent Western fascination with

the veil is not merely a coincidence but stems from the
incorporation of the veil into the Western conceptual
system.

By analysing images of the veiled Muslim woman

found in Western popular culture I speculate about the
processes involved in the formation of identity and how
gendered ways of thinking impact on the concepts of Self and
Other, friend and foe, which are so critical to
International Relations theory (Blaney and Inayatullah
1994).

The Primacv of the State

According to a number of theorists, the legacy of the
Enlightenment underpins realist assumptions about the
primacy of the state.

The state is at the heart of

classical International Relations theory where its primacy
is rarely queried and theorizing about the international
political system starts from this point (Couloumbis and
Wolfe 1990; Pettman 1996; Inayatullah and Blaney 1996).
As Tickner understands it, the centrality of the state
is based on assumptions about human nature that "are partial
and that privilege masculinity" (1988:431).

This view of

the state is further institutionalized by theory's failure

11
to recognize that gender relations do not exist apart from
other power relations.

As Enloe states, this concept

reinforces the presumption that the centre is indisputably
at the hub of political activity and that margins occur
naturally and further that they are naturally silent
(1996:188).
States define themselves by designating, regulating,
and administering boundaries.

They actively engage in

constructing the public versus private divide, in order to
maintain control over who benefits from belonging, and under
what conditions belonging occurs.

However, the image of the

rational logical decision-making entity collapses when we
consider that the existence of states is conditional on the
selection of a course of action which ensures its continued
power.

If we accept Pettman's hypothesis that states are

"historical and contingent" (1996:7) we can subvert the
theoretical underpinnings which guide traditional
International Relations scholarship.

Further, in

recognizing the contingency of states we highlight the
exaggerated simplicity of realist theory where peripheries
are unacknowledged.
Realist theory is a mechanism of explanation,
understanding and prediction which includes, as part of its
framework, the ethical and functional scope under which
scholarship is assumed.

Smith points out that while

positivist epistemology is now largely rejected as a

12
methodological approach, it nevertheless continues to play a
significant role in International Relations where science is
regarded as "the only true form of knowledge" (1996:14).
Positivist ideology establishes a specific vision of
relationships between man and the natural environment.

The

character izat ion of the state of nature as chaotic and the
positioning of the sovereign state as imposer of order is an
example of this.

As nature came to be identified as a site

of disorder, the sovereign state gained authority because
its role as orderer reimposed "the balance that nature was
once seen to provide" (Runyan 1992:123).

Women and people

of colour, like nature, provide the symbolic justification
for the political authority of the state.

In this way they

become examples of the imposition of order onto chaos as
exemplified by the state's civilizing function.
Western political thought thus, is a parable
constructed around the body of the Other where difference,
defined as natural and symbolized as female, is the object
of fear which must be suppressed (Haraway 1989).

Further,

the state represents and mediates the production of white.
Western, patriarchal culture where androcentric metaphors of
Other are integral to its identity (Runyan 1992).
The idea that the truth is 'out there' for us to
discover determines how research is formulated and
conducted.

The assumption that social behaviour exhibits

regular and observable patterns has positioned empirical

13
validation as the hallmark of enquiry where assertions are
deemed credible only if based on directly observed and
corroborated experience.

Observed facts are valued as true

knowledge while unmeasurable intangibles like emotions are
dismissed from the construction of truth.
However, if we position the concept of the state within
a historical and contextual framework we can challenge
assumptions about the universality of the state and the
inevitability of a state-centric international system.

As

number of feminists have shown, assessment of the gendered
assumptions underlying the concept of the state reveals the
presence of value-laden presumptions about Otherness which
privilege a partial, masculine and Western model of
international political theory (Tickner 1988, 1992; Peterson
1993; Sylvester 1996; Pettman 1996).
What this thesis proposes is a reformulation of what
constitutes relevant knowledge.

I suggest that

international politics should be studied from a
multidisciplinary perspective.

In this thesis I apply

postcolonialism' to my critique of traditional international
political theory since interaction between East and West,
North and South, and have and have not nations, is now a
pronounced feature of international affairs.

However,

formulating new ways of knowing are impossible unless we
also embrace new sources of evidence and different methods
of data-gathering found outside the discipline.

Darby

14
(1997a) points out that traditional International Relations'
distaste of non-conventional sources reflects and reinforces
an academic tradition which ignores issues of social
transformation (Darby 1997a).

This hierarchical valuing of

public versus private, which results in the relegation of
the private sphere to the domestic arena, is frustrating
since my goal is the problematization of the social in
realist theory.

My use of other theoretical approaches and

methods of data gathering in this thesis stems from my
concern about traditional International Relations'
understandings about gender and culture and the way these
are positioned outside the scope of the international (Enloe
1993, 1996; Pettman 1996; Inayatullah and Blaney 1996).
However, it is not simply a matter of adding gender and
culture to traditional International Relations theory as if
these are merely contingent influences on the leadership of
sovereign states.

As Lapid notes, there are great risks

involved in incorporating culture and gender into
International Relations "... without a corresponding move
away from categorical, essentialist, and unitary
understandings of these concepts" (1996a:8).

Indeed, the

projection of masculine characteristics onto the behaviour
of states is what allows realists to assert that women
subjected to the same circumstances as men, would ultimately
make the same decisions as male leaders (Beckman 1994).
Similarly, Samuel Huntington's (1993) state-centric

15
framework for investigating the role of culture in the
international sphere yields no new insights into the social
world which states inhabit.

Huntington maintains that the

world population can be broken down into a number of
specific cultural groups and that these will replace state
as the proponents in world conflict.

He suggests that the

traditional rivalries presently found between states,
identified mainly by economic or ideological factors, will
be replaced by conflict between cultural groups.

Although

he endows civilizations with many of the same
characteristics as states, he does not address how or why
civilizations will avoid conflict over these issues.

Also,

in building his analysis Huntington essentializes the
dynamics of the social world into a generalized definition
of culture.

In doing this he fails to account for the

reality of multicultural populations found within state
borders and the globalized nature of contemporary economic
relations.

I am not alone in my opinion.

Lapid (1996a),

for example views Huntington's thesis on the clash of
civilizations as a mere rehash of power politics under
different labels.
The milieu in which International Relations developed
as a separate academic discipline originated in the
tumultuous years after the European wars\

Traditional

modes of diplomatic savoir-faire, having brought the world
to the brink of disaster, were seen by realists as

16
inadequate to the task of manoeuvring within the realities
of a new international order.

Characterized by a liberal

and optimistic political leadership, which focused on the
ideal of world peace through co-opetation, the political
strategies of the inter-war era were seen as a failure by
realist theorists.

After the devastation of the second

European war, conciliatory and optimistic political
philosophies were judged contrary to the laws of nature and
provided evidence of vulnerability and weakness.

Since

then, a military strategic definition of power and a male
gendered drive to acquire it have become dominant themes in
traditional International Relations theory.
Conflict and tension define an international system
where a state's ability to maintain and use power
successfully determines its position in relation to other
states.

Within this framework, appropriate state behaviour

maintains a state's position in the system;

inappropriate

behaviour results in a loss of sovereignty.

Beckman (1994)

stresses that from this perspective cooperation is
characterized as a tool of conciliation and an abdication of
authority which interferes with the logical and rational
decision-making apparatus of the state.
In the realist's view the international sphere is an
arena where states do not enjoy the security of fixed
positions or alliances but compete and jockey for positions
of advantage and even survival in a hostile anarchic global

17
system.

The state is the entity which acts in the

international sphere and individuals and groups are
relegated to the private sphere of domestic and household
politics.
Realist explanations accounting for the distribution of
power at the international level are plausible, especially
when the system is severely constrained as was the case
after the second European war (Krasner 1992).

However,

theory is not merely a tool for modelling behaviour that
occurs under specific conditions.

As Smith (1996) affirms,

it is also an instrument for understanding that addresses
and investigates sources of injustice and inequality between
states.
Rousseau's stag hunt is a narrative typically used by
realist theorists to portray the act of seeking others
within a framework of self-interest serving the desire for
power (Waltz 1959).

To them it illustrates how self-

interest overrides cooperation in the chaotic state of
nature.

In this fable five men with sufficient basic

communications skills to understand each other come together
at a time of great hunger.

Since the hunger of any one of

them will be alleviated by one fifth of a stag, they agree
to cooperate and hunt together.

However the hunger of one

would also be satisfied by a hare.

During the hunt one

hunter spots a hare and in going after it allows the stag to

18
escape.

This hunter's immediate interest overshadowed his

consideration of his fellow hunters.
The satisfaction of self-interest is a relevant moral
drawn from this fable.

However, a reconsideration of the

basis for these assumptions leaves me with some niggling
questions. Although hunger is the general assumption, no
satisfactory answer is given as to why strangers would come
together in a state of nature in the first place.

If hunger

is indeed the answer, then why assume that the state of
nature is characterized by a scarcity of resources?
all the hunters in the fable male?

The nature of the

hunters' relationship can also be questioned.
hunters communicate?

Why are

How do these

Is the assumption that they all speak

the same language and have the same eating habits and
customs?

If the hunters do not speak the same language one

wonders why, after putting in the effort to learn about each
other, these hunters would find the abandonment of
cooperation advantageous.
again tomorrow.

After all they will all be hungry

Viewed from another perspective, is it not

self-interest than competition?
The state of nature allegory acknowledges the existence
of the social context by recognizing that hunters manoeuvre
for position through contact and interaction.

However, the

dynamic relationships which structure the nature of anarchy
are not located within a historical or cultural context.
Could we not assume that the shared meanings constructed

19
through contact would result in something other than
competition?

The presumption that the hunters cannot learn

over time or that they can not adapt their tactics to
account for new or changing circumstances, assumes that
competition is the inevitable outcome of contact.
The circumstances which occasion human interaction may
not be as simple as they first appear and other fables may
be required to explain the motivation for human contact. I
submit that the construction of the Self and Other requires
the recognition that contact occurs within a socially
dynamic milieu of shared histories and cultural experiences.
As Inayatullah and Blaney (1996) suggest, people come
together for self-knowledge rather than self-interest.
Further, I concur when they posit the need for International
Relations theory to reflect a "cultural understanding of
international society"

(1996:82).

I suggest that giving voice to issues and perspectives
previously marginalized from the dominant discourse compels
a réévaluation of International Relations disciplinary
exclusivity.

In this way we expand our partial

understanding of what constitutes the international realm.
Theory then becomes a tool for recognizing and assessing the
unequal and hierarchical power relationships both within, as
well as between, states (Zalewski 1996).

20
The Construction of Nation

Beckman characterizes traditional International
Relations' premise as the study of the state's urge to power
(1994:21).

Thus, unless I demonstrate individual agency at

the international level or challenge accepted definitions of
power, I reinforce rather than reveal the marginalization of
the individual from the rational actor state.

I attempt the

first, the demonstration of individual agency, in this
thesis.

The second project, that of redefining power is

largely outside the scope of this study, however, I offer
some insights in chapter five.
International Relations scholars traditionally define
nationalism as the identification of individuals with the
"territorially organized collectivity" of the state
(Couloumbis and Wolfe 1990:60)*.

Thus, I investigate

nationalism and the question of national identity versus
personal identity as a mechanism for assessing the impact of
the individual on international political affairs.
Lapid (1996b) in his critique of realism states that
nationalism is perceived as an emotional reaction
instinctively directed against enemies of the state.
Further, he states that in realism, national feeling
incorporates the potential of irrational chaos which
ultimately threatens state security (Lapid 1996b).
view, realists' acceptance of an enhanced scientific

In his

21
framework for the conceptualization of International
Relations encourages their belief that nationalism is a
precept of disintegration which is held in check only when
it is ordered within a rational state apparatus.

Thus, he

posits that traditional International Relations theory
reduces individual identity to an automatically aggressive
emotional group response to the identification of a stateidentified common enemy (Lapid 1996b).

Pettman (1996:48)

suggests that traditional theory naturalizes nationalism as
the emotional attachment of citizens to their homeland in
order to relegate emotion to the domestic sphere.

In

addition to revealing traditional theory's hierarchical
positioning of the international over the domestic, Pettman
(1996:48) suggests that this sanctions the mapping of
unequal relationships of power and constructions of
difference by the state onto constructions of national
identity.

In this way, the state establishes and verifies

the nation so that racialized and sexualized constructions
of Otherness become markers of boundary, foreignness and
fear.
Traditional International Relations isolation of what
constitutes national identity to the domestic sphere shifts
gender, culture as well as race, ethnicity, and language to
the private arena.

This effectively dismisses nationalism

to a silent discursive space within the discipline where its
theoretical significance is erased (Lapid 1996b).

Further,

22
Pettman (1998:48) maintains that by authorizing the
construction of national identity based on exclusivity and
difference, traditional theory disguises the state's stake
in the political value of unequal power relationships.
The personal identity of citizens, homogenized by
linking state identity to physical territory, creates the
expectation that people living within specific territorial
boundaries will consign their loyalty to the state (Foster
1995).

While acknowledging that the boundaries of states

and nations do not always coincide, realists such as Gellner
(1983) and Morgenthau (1967) direct our attention to the
fusion of political and cultural boundaries because of the
centralized political control of territory by the state'.
International Relations in general and realism in
particular are discourses about war and survival, where
sovereignty, the supreme and final authority over a
particular territory, is conferred only on states (Viotti
and Kauppi 1993).

However, history provides examples where

loose associations of stateless people have demanded
sovereignty.

One such example is the Balkan crisis which

precipitated the European War of 1914.
of this phenomenon also exist.

Modern-day examples

The startling break-up of

the Soviet Union and the disintegration of the former
Yugoslavia signals an on-going urgency to understand the
complex relationship between state and nation.

Traditional

International Relations discourse has focused almost

23
exclusively on the consolidation of economic and military
power as key to the maintenance of a state's position in the
international sphere.

However, recent events remind us that

we need to recognize what structures relationships which
link people, territory and identity.

Viewed from this

perspective the importance of the state as a centralizing
ideological authority has been overlooked (Falk 1990).

As

Pettman reminds us, culture and ideology are "key to
ensuring the "success" of states ...as states manipulate
symbols, discursive practices, and ideological productions
to mask their coercive power and effectuate indirect rule"
(1996:260).

The Construction of Nation As Female

The authorization of masculinized ideologies in the
construction of nationalism justifies the privileging of men
and legitimates hierarchy.

In addition, the state's

relegation of women to the private sphere ensures its
monopoly on political authority and guarantees control over
the sexual condition of women.

In this way state control of

ideology production ensures that the creation and
manipulation of symbols and discursive practices mediates
"the discursive, semiotic, and spatial terms of women's
political practice" (Brown 1992:30).

The apparent

simplicity of this traditional construct of the state is

24
grounded within narratives of essentialized behaviour that
do not address women's gendered identity (Enloe 1996).

In

the masculine construct of the state, women are left to
"tend the mundane and the necessary while men and the state
pursue larger-than-life concerns ... men discount or with
their activities threaten the realm of the everyday life
while women nurture and protect it" (Brown 1992:25).
In attempting to reconcile the position of women in
traditional International Relations theory, I propose that
we reconsider difference and its effect in the construction
of state power and authority.

Since race is a marker of

power and nationhood is embedded in gendered identity
((Pettman 1996:43; Fiske 1996:73), I suggest that race,
gender and culture are aspects of difference controlled by
the state as it consolidates power against those outside
territorial boundaries.
In order to integrate new ways of thinking into
International Relations theory Pettman focuses on how
"nation is constructed on and through gender" (1996:45).
Nation, symbolized as a loved woman's body is placed into a
binary relationship with the state, which is endowed with
male characteristics.

Although Tickner points out a

significant exception to this hypothesis, specifically the
construction of the German nation into the Fatherland by
Hitler and the Nazi Party, she concedes that the imagery of
the feminized nation as opposed to the masculinized state is

25
prevalent (1994:32).

By assuming control over women's

biological identity as reproducer, the state creates women
into the raw material out of which states are consolidated
and reproduced.

Thus while men fight, women as the heart of

the nation reproduce, nurture, and grieve.

Women's

behaviour is constrained within the state so that it
reflects the roles women are forced to play, that of mother
and obedient wife.

This social control of women is then

naturally displaced onto the control and policing of women's
bodies.

Identifying women with nature and focusing

attention on their biological roles as mother, wife and
sister, allows traditional theory to distance women from the
cultural or decision-making sphere which is identified with
men.
In deciding to challenge these constructs I question
traditional International Relations theory's male-centric
understanding of ideology construction.

I also contest the

naturalized processes which supposedly explain women's
subordination and exclusion from the international political
sphere.

My efforts to reevaluate the construct of woman

which underwrites traditional theory incorporates
postcolonial thought into International Relations.

Thus, my

analysis of the symbolic discourse of the veil, is aided
substantially by Partha Chatterjee's analysis which I
discuss in chapter three.

There I discuss his insights into

26
gender and culture within the context of the dynamic
relationship between imperialism and nationalism.
Implicit in my approach is the acknowledgement that
international politics is part of the everyday where all of
us negotiate culture, gender and identity.

It is this

recognition which gives the individual agency in a way that
is not possible within the confines of traditional
International Relations theory.

Citizenship

In International Relations theory, the link between the
state and the nation is the citizen (Pettman 1996:15).

In

traditional theory the state makes decisions in the national
interest of the security of its citizens, with security
defined in military strategic terms.

The authority of the

state over its citizens derives from its sovereignty over a
physical space which compels citizen loyalty (Foster 1995).
Within this model, state decision-makers assure the
integrity of territorial borders and the protection of
individuals in exchange for citizen allegiance.

Citizen

devotion to the state is formed through the construction of
communal memories of emotional attachment to physical
terrain, a common language, and a shared history.

An

embrace of belonging surrounds citizens dwelling within
state boundaries where differences are masked and

27
unacknowledged.

The construction of a national memory by

the state through orchestrated images of sameness classifies
those outside state boundaries as different where difference
is equated with threat, competition, and fear (Foster 1995).
State manipulation of emotion into expressions of
nationalistic fervour serves to exaggerate and emphasize the
constructed differences between states.

In this way states

construct their sovereign, rational and unitary identities
within which they proceed to make decisions in the best
interests of a culturally homogenized citizenry (Foster
1995).

Implicit in this perception is the assumption that

all citizens benefit equally from decisions made by the
state (Pettman 1996; Peterson 1996b).

However, as Gaidzanwa

(1993) points out, the inequality of rights and benefits
afforded to women and the marginalized provides compelling
empirical evidence that this is not the case.
The narrative that citizens participate in the state on
the basis of their belonging to the "nation" is structured
through state agencies that mediate the formation of
collective and individual identities (Foster 1995).

If we

explore the gendered nature of power relationships we
unearth evidence of the political value of the unitary
identity of the state.
In proposing the acceptance of the gendered dimensions
of political discourse I recommend an investigation into the
creation, manipulation and articulation of personal cultural

28
identity.

By investigating the intersection of the

public/private, state/nation dichotomies we expose how the
construction of the Self "only makes sense through the
presence of the Other" (Jourdan 1998:129).

It is with this

as background that I suggest that the creation of the Other
permeates consciousness and structures individual reality.
Our acknowledging that the individual is engaged in the
international sphere is key to understanding why the veil is
symbolic of a feminized, racialized, and devalued Other.
Further, it propels my investigation of why political
theorists position this Other in opposition to the modernist
masculinized Western Self.

29
CHAPTER THREE

The Construction of Difference

An obstacle I faced in writing about gender across
cultures is the narrative of distortion within which Western
scholarship about the Eastern Other has flourished (Lazreg
1994).

Orientalism will be discussed in detail in chapter

three.

However, at this point it is important to consider

the legacy of this particular mode of thinking.

How we

conceptualize the Oriental Other results from a complex
fusing of ideas about race, culture, and gender created
under a particular historical, political and military
structure.
Orientalism mixes fact with fiction to invent a
perception of vast difference between East and West, a
perception that exists to this day (Said 1979).

In her work

Mutman (1993) discusses how imperialist discourse
authorized, justified and vindicated sexualized racial
difference as the basis for interaction between the Orient
and the West.

The continuing Western fascination with the

veil encourages my opinion that a study of the veil as a
marker of sexualized difference is important to
international political theory.
Difference in itself is not the issue in this paper.
What I wish to highlight is how difference is created and

30
manipulated, and the political implications of these
processes on the individual.

As a Westerner writing about

difference I employ ways of thinking of which I am not, and
perhaps can never be, completely conscious.

I acknowledge

that the confluence of race and gender is interwoven in my
intellectual heritage to the point where the identification
of difference becomes an obstacle to understanding rather
than a point of clarification.

Lazreg (1994) maintains that

the aim of Western social scientists in studying other
cultures is the desire to understand their own conventions
better.

In effect we use the Other to expand our knowledge,

and confirm the superiority, of our own institutions and
systems of thought.

Further, Lazreg (1994) asserts that

seeking truth while providing explanations for difference
has only served to reinforce social science's Western
modernist bias.

Thus, ironically, while the veil has played

a large role in the representations of the Islamic Other, it
has "...seldom [been] studied in terms of the reality that
lies behind it" (Lazreg 1994:14).

I am moved by texts which

comment on the way veiled women are represented in the West.
Both Hoodfar (1993) and Lazreg (1994) comment that veiled
Muslim women are most often portrayed as intellectually
inferior, less academically mature and more traditional in
outlook.

Thus a fatuous study of the veil might give veiled

Muslim women an identity they would not claim for
themselves.

In addition, the West's fixation with the veil

31
as a symbol of oppression sets intellectual limits on our
understanding of the role it plays in women's lives (MacLeod
1992; Block 1994).

I share Lazreg's (1990) impatience with

the simplistic view that attributes gender differences in
Islamic cultures exclusively to religion even though this
perception remains unsubstantiated.

The prevalence of these

understandings, however, continues to assert that devout
women who wear the veil are ignorant and that they actively
support a tyrannical patriarchal system.
I am drawn back to my own reactions in Vancouver.

The

construction of the sexualized racialized Islamic Other
affects us all as we live and work in a multicultural world
community.

Individuals acting politically manipulate, and

are manipulated by, constructions of difference within
cultural and historical contexts.

These constructions

affect our actions and have an impact on political decision­
making.

In essence I endeavour to get at the root of the

creation of the Islamic Other in a contemporary context.
History lays a foundation for the continuing process of
Orientalism which strain the fabric of understanding and
compassion which is critical to our ability to explain the
processes at work in international political relations.
Postcolonialism includes a revised reading of history
and political theory.

Thus, I use it as a tool in my

analysis of the impact of Orientalist discourse on political
discourse.

Further, postcolonialism provides a framework

32
for evaluating the construction of the veil's meanings in
the West.

Using these traditions I highlight and

acknowledge the critical role difference continues to play
in traditional theoretical models of the international
political system.
In Orientalist discourse academic knowledge authorized
military and political conditions of unequal power which
were transfused through pictorial and literary
representations.

In turn, this created an image of the

Other that imperialist discourse authenticated as reality.
Mutman's (1993) sexualized reading of Orientalism reveals
that Western representations of Otherness occur
synchronously via sexual and cultural modes of
representation.

Thus my approach to difference is not

restricted to either gender or culture.

Rather they

intertwine in a sexualized understanding of Otherness that
can be symbolized by the veiled woman.

The Veiled Woman as Svmbol

The veiled woman has been absorbed into the Western
conceptual framework, where it has become a symbol of all
that is Islam in the West (Moghadam 1994a).

A brief

consideration of the relationship between Orientalist art
and 19th century European imperialism helps to uncover the
continuing connection between representations of Oriental

33
women and the ascription of meanings about the Islamic
Other.

Orientalist discourse feminized a racial

construction of Islamic culture and instituted a way of
thinking which continues to exploit veiled women as the
embodiment of Otherness (Mutman 1993:2).
The Orientalist school of art spanned the years from
1798 until 1914, covering the height of French and British
political domination of the Orient.

Paintings from this era

focus on the female who, stripped of her veil, waits to
satisfy the decadent sexual needs of the absent and Muslim
male (Fig.6-7).

The apparently accurate narrative of the

Orient as captured by French and English Orientalist
painters characterized the East as mysterious, ancient,
powerless, and exotic (Nochlin 1983).

The

segregation/seclusion of Islamic women, the existence of the
harem, and the wearing of the veil were all interpreted to
render the Oriental backward, primitive, and degenerate
(Brown 1987; Mutman 1993; Khan 1995b; Lewis 1996).

Working

within this frame Nochlin (1993) and Lewis (1996) advance
that British and French imperialists' patriarchal notions
about women and race were used to construct meanings about
the veiled bodies of Othered women.

They conclude that

these meanings were translated onto the canvas where the
violation of the eroticized veiled woman became a metaphor
for boundary transgressions.
detail in chapter four.

This will be discussed in more

34
This eroticization of the subjugated woman rationalized
colonial behaviour towards Oriental women who "...'needed'
male european 'protection'" (Enloe 1989:86).

Picturing

colonizing men as liberators is as important to imperialist
discourse as is the view of helpless Islamic women.

The

fantasy of the West as protector releasing the vulnerable
and defenceless has become part of the West's image of
itself.
National discourses structured through religion,
culture, and race have used the veil to symbolize the
resurgence of religious and cultural purity and the
rejection of Western style modernity.

While the processes

involved in nationalist movements are many and vary from
country to country, Ahmed (1992) discusses how the symbolic
signifier of the veil is acknowledged as a significant
component in all anti-imperialist discourses.

Of particular

interest to this paper is the creation of Islam into the new
'evil empire' in the West (Hoodfar 1993), which has
rejuvenated the veil as a metaphor for backwardness and
fear, as effective now as in the days of the crusades.
The essentializing of the West and the homogenizing of
the discourses of the veil reflected in these comments are
not challenged in this thesis.

I recognize that the

discourse of the veil serves the needs of those who use it.
I do not assume that it is static and unchanging, nor that
it reflects unvarying historical, cultural and political

35
contexts.

The same can be said of imperialist discourses.

However, the limited scope of this project dictated that I
make a number of choices about how to structure my study of
the veil.

I wanted to yield insight into the impact of

gender and culture in international political theory.

I

also wanted to introduce contextual metaphor as a
theoretical tool for International Relations.

Thus, while I

acknowledge that there are disparate imperialist discourses
and that perspectives in the West are varied and diverse, I
restricted my study of the veil to that which is framed
within a homogenized imperialist discourse of a deliberately
essentialized West.

I did this in order to highlight the

role of political discourse on the construction of
difference and the importance of this to international
political theory.

Although this approach is incomplete, it

substantiates the need for further research into the
inclusion of gender and culture into theory.

It also serves

to focus attention on the contribution conceptual metaphor
can make to International Relations theory.

Conceptual Metaphor

Conceptual metaphor is a mechanism for understanding
and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another.
(Lakoff & Johnson 1980; Lakoff 1987; McGlone 1996).

It

structures our conceptual systems and organizes how we think

36
about things.

Metaphor links everyday experience or what is

perceived to be everyday experience with cultural concepts.
Once these links are absorbed into collective conscious, the
metaphor is understood as characterizing details that are
inherent to the item itself.

In this way, by masking the

face, the veil becomes a metaphor for the mystery, both
positive and negative, of the unknown.
Metaphor is most routinely viewed as a feature of
language rather than a quality of thought or deed.

However,

a more comprehensive view places metaphor within a context
that extends beyond the printed page so that symbolic
meanings pervade not just language but how we think and what
we do (Lakoff and Johnson 1980).

Metaphor is a mechanism

for ordering our universe and provides a frame of reference
for making sense of the world around us and what we
experience within it.

Thus, metaphors are not simply ways

of describing things in terms of something else but involve
the conceptual process of conceiving of something in terms
of something else (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Haste 1994).
Unfortunately, as Pettman (1996:51) and Sylvester (1994:128)
point out, not withstanding the interest in metaphorical
constructions of women's bodies as sites of political
struggle, there is a lack of analysis on the implications of
these meanings to International Relations theory.
The implications of my study of the veil as a gendered
metaphor for the Islamic Other revolves around the

37
privileging of the state in traditional International
Relations.

Realism acknowledges only state leaders or

prominent officials as individual political actors.

Within

traditional International Relations theory, ordinary
individuals are insignificant to decision-making at the
state level.

Even within the domestic sphere, individuals

do not figure as salient political factors.

Notwithstanding

debate about the nature and degree of interaction between
the international and the domestic realms, traditional
International Relations theory sustains the detachment
between high and low politics and the even lower politics of
the family and household unit.

This reflects realism's

persistent privileging of the state.
This study of the veiled woman as metaphor for the
Other challenges this paradigm by positioning the gendered
individual in their places of action.

In this way I seek to

expose the undertheorization^" of gender and culture in
traditional International Relations.

In contextualizing the

political agency of veiled women through an examination of
the discourse of Orientalism I contest the positivist
heritage of a state-centric theory.

Further, I challenge

how realists construct and validate relevant knowledge about
our world.
According to realist theory, nation is the single
ethnic and cultural identity of a state's population.
Nation, thus conceived as a singular concept, is a construct

38
of gendered difference where women's beloved bodies
represent boundary transgressions and the violation of
borders.

Thus, as Tickner maintains, "as sovereign man

depended on the female Other for his identity, so the state
secures its identity through its relationship to identities
of devalued and dangerous Others, both inside and outside
its boundaries" (1996:151).
The Iranian clergy's challenge to American might in the
1970's has become a political trend in the 1990's
(Juergensmeyer 1993).

The perceived growing threat to world

order from fundamentalist Islamic regimes, as viewed from
the West, especially the United States, is being played out
through the discourse of the veil.

In the East, wearing the

veil is symbolic of the rejection of the corruption of the
West.

In the West, this is created into proof of the

inequality and backwardness of the Orient.

The joint

project of symbolic discourse forged through Orientalism
enables the construction and manipulation of the veil as a
symbol emblematic of both sides.

The rejection of modernism

coupled with the re-emergence of the traditionalist
perspective in fundamentalist Islamic movements in Iran,
Afghanistan, Algeria, Israel, Egypt and Turkey (Brown 1994)
has pushed the religious and cultural personality of states
to the forefront of international political discourse.
Because of this, the veil has become an effective political

39
symbol, manipulated by all participants, in what might
become a new cold war (Juergensmeyer 1993).
The meanings of the veil in the West are created
within Western social, historical and cultural contexts and
have little or nothing to do with the complex religious
meanings Muslim women attach to wearing it (MacLeod 1992).
However these meanings do reveal how Westerners may
manipulate the veil as a symbol of difference to suit
specific political goals.

Orientalism

Orientalism, as a discursive field, is pivotal to
appreciating the gendered and cultural dimensions of power
relationships.

The rise of fundamentalism in Islamic states

and the supposed threat it poses to Western secular
nationalism encourages a re-evaluation of how sexualized
representations of difference "regulate the West's every
relation with its Other" (Mutman 1993:2).

Western portraits

of the Oriental Other are interwoven with gendered imagery.
As Lewis states, the sexually charged lifting of the veil is
represented in art as a metaphor for political domination
and military conquest (1996:113).

In Orientalism Edward

Said (1979) investigates Western political institutions and
illustrates how imperialism validated difference as the
basis of the West's relationship with the East.

Situating

40
Orientalism within the peak period of European colonialism,
Said (1979) argues that the creation of knowledge is
inextricably bound up with relations of power which
naturalize the institutionalization of unequal
relationships.

In Orientalist discourse, theory and

practice moulded into a system of knowledge where the East
was positioned as "Other" to the West, where "Other" was
constructed as everything the West was not.

The

establishment of the Western Self constituted in opposition
to the Oriental Other justified and validated political
domination, and granted moral authority to an imposed social
structure (Said 1979).
Because Said (1979) historicized and contextualized the
interconnections between academia and popular literature, he
uncovered how the construction of knowledge about the East
had more to do with how the West imagined the East than it
did with reality.

British and French novels written

contemporaneously with imperialism reflect an Orient where
the "interchange between the academic and the ...
imaginative meanings of Orientalism" was constant (Said
1979:3).
Said (1979) traces the production of knowledge and
demonstrates how the Orient was created as a racial,
geographic, political, religious, and cultural entity.
discourse of Orientalism flowed from 19th century
Orientalists' interpretation of Eastern strangeness into

The

41
something Europeans could understand.

In essence the Orient

became real to the West because of the knowledge produced in
and by Western academic texts.

Maintaining ownership over

what constituted the Orient imbued the academy with the
authority to define the Orient and made Western scholars the
experts on what constituted difference (Said 1979).
Orientalism structures the desire to acquire knowledge
within the power structure of imperialism (Said 1979).

This

automatically gives the West a position of superiority and
dominance.

The coincidental development of modern Western

science reinforced the legitimacy of the Western
construction of the Orient.

The pursuit of truth through

the theoretically neutral, objective and impartial use of
the scientific method codified the East and through
objective empirical confirmation placed it into memory as
everything the West was not (Said 1979).

The West was

familiar, the East exotic, the West was Self, the East was
Other.
Orientalism designated the West as the centre and
created the East into the boundary lands.

The nature of

Orientalist thought was such that as European imperial
powers moved outwards from the centre their perception of
Western cultural vitality was strengthened.

Orientalism

confirmed that the Orient was naturally subordinate to
Europe and that the Orient's natural role was "as an
appendage to Europe" (Said 1979:66).

Thus, the West's

42
imperial presence was the bulwark of empire, the gate behind
which the 'heathen' massed.

In effect what a study of

Orientalism highlights in a discussion of political theory
is the constant sense of confrontation felt by Westerners
dealing with the East.

I maintain that it is this sense of

confrontation that enunciates and reinforces the constructed
chasm of difference.
According to Said (1979), Orientalist discourse
emphasized race as the basis of difference so that any
instance of native behaviour was archetypal of the primitive
origins of the Other where the present is irrevocably
chained to truths conceived about prototypical forbearers.
To go to the Orient was to witness the exotic, interact with
the uncivilized, to take a step backward in time.
Orientalism constructed the East into a mythical place where
idioms barren of historical grounding asserted the Orient's
"place in memory "(Said 1979:86), thus reinforcing the
modernity of the powerful West.

A Feminist Reading of Orientalism

Said's (1979) analysis of Orientalist discourse focuses
attention on culture and race as the basis of difference.
He did not consider the significance of gender in his
analysis of culture.

However, Mutman in her sexualized

reading of Orientalism confirms that "representation of

43
Otherness is achieved simultaneously through sexual as well
as cultural modes of differentiation" (1993:2).

Thus,

"[t]he western acts of understanding the Orient and its
women are not two distinct enterprises, but rather
interwoven aspects of the same gesture" (Mutman 1993:26).
According to Mutman (1993) Orientalism constructs the
Orient into a place of sensuality.

Orientalist discourse

produces knowledge about the East creating it into a "site
of the unconscious -

desire and fantasy" (1993:20).

Further, Orientalism manifests the Orient both as knowledge
and as the object of desire.
women are described.

The Orient is described as its

The language of difference within the

colonial apparatus of power is sexualized (Bhabha 1983) and
establishes a chain of equivalence where women are Orient,
and Orient is woman (de Groot 1996).

By consolidating the

metaphoric figure of the veiled woman, the East "constitutes
an overdetermined totality whose residue persists in the
unconsciousness of the Subject" (Mutman 1993:49).

All that

is Oriental is incorporated into meanings of the veil.
Because the women are veiled, the Orient is deceptive and
false.
Mutman suggests that thwarted by the veil's
impenetrability and the inaccessibility of the object behind
it. Western desire is spurred to ruthless inquiry (1993:47).
We in the West then presume that the veil is a guise and its
association with unknowability stimulates the desire to know

44
the Other.

In this way the veil becomes a duplicitous mask

which turns woman into enigma.

This is important to

international political theory because it turns the veil
into a tool of advantage and power.

The gazer cannot see

whether threat or promise is concealed behind the mask.

The

gazer is left feeling exposed and fearing harm from what
cannot be seen.

As Nochlin (1983) and Lewis (1996)

discovered in their study of Orientalist art. Orientalism
structures the military objective of invasion, the revealing
of the concealed, through sexual fantasy.

Thus military

opposition is formulated through images of rending the veil,
of raping and defiling the 'heathen' who hides herself from
the Western male viewer.

The veiled woman is thus created

into the exotic who engenders fear and whose sexual power
must be conquered (Mutman 1993; Lewis 1996).
In the 19th century, structures and relations of power
acquired a gendered racialized dimension in which Westerners
shaped constructions of themselves by reference to the
exotic, alien, feminized Other.

In this sense the origins

of metaphor of the veil reveal information about the
specificity of the culture in which they developed.

The

conceptual inheritance of the 19th century resonates to this
day.

The construction of the Other continues to be critical

to the identity of the European self where the veil endures
as a barrier between civilization and the primitive (Kahf
1994).

45
Imperial discourse legitimized Western colonialism and
placed the Oriental Other into a different chronological
sequence of history.

Where the West is progressive, the

Orient occupies the past.

This allows the West to

constitute and affirm difference through temporal means,
normalizing the West's imperial violence by portraying it as
part of the West's "civilizing mission" (Mutman 1993:148).
De-veiling then becomes an emancipatory act, associated with
progress, modernity and emancipation.
Mutman's assertion that the most basic aspects of the
Orient are inscribed onto the veiled figure, is very
powerful (1993:152).

This premise positions women as the

site of a discursive battle where regulation of gender is
central to the articulation of national identity and
cultural difference (Kandiyoti 1991).
Chatterjee recognizes this and contributes to the
discussion by positing that the identification of social
roles by gender, maps the figure of woman onto nationalist
discourse (1993:120).

Further, he speculates that

understanding how this mapping occurs illuminates how the
figure of woman reinforces and justifies a masculinized
vision of national identity (Chatterjee 1986).

I explore

these insights because they reveal valuable insights into
the processes whereby gender and culture have an impact on
the international political system.

46
However, even as nationalists reject the truth claims
of imperialism, they are captive to categories of Western
knowledge (Foster 1995).

This is because they aspire to

modernization and economic progress.

In order to affirm the

sovereignty of their postcolonial nation-states,
nationalists must position themselves within the power
structure of an international system which is dominated by
the capitalist West.

LiPuma (1995) points out that,

regardless of nationalist discourse, the dominance of
Western capitalist economic practices in the international
sphere compels nationalist states to employ economic
practices which embody Western epistemology.

As a result

colonial discourse underlies nationalist interaction with
other nation-states in the international system.

Chatterjee

(1986) explores how this commits nationalists to occupying
contradictory discursive spaces at the same time.

Further,

he traces how the building of nationalist thought on the
foundations of colonial discourse results in a discursive
battle between imperialism and nationalism with the figure
of woman at its centre (Chatterjee 1986).

The importance of

this discursive battle to international events becomes
obvious when we consider how gendered images of nation are
used to avenge perceived imperialist indignities.
Chatterjee submits that nationalist paradigms map a
material/spiritual discourse onto the foreign/domestic or
outside/inside dichotomies which characterize the

47
intersection of nationalist and colonialist discourses
(1993:120-121).

The outside or material/foreign sphere is

where contact with alien influences occurs.

The spiritual

or inside/domestic sphere symbolized by woman is the core of
reclaimed nationhood.

The outside realm of international

politics becomes the site of contestation, the arena within
which ideological battles are played out through political,
economic and symbolic discourses.

Underlying this

ideological foundation of the outside is the inside sphere
which must protected at all costs from the invasive and
insidious corruption of imperial modernity.
The mapping of the spiritual onto the inside/domestic
creates women's bodies into vehicles upon which nationalists
build the discourse of material versus spiritual identities
(Chatterjee 1993:116-135).

Thus gender, as a primary

category of difference serves as a focal point in the
encounter between colonial and nationalist discourses.

The

discursive contradiction is therefore resolved through a re­
positioning of the veiled woman within the discourse of
nationalism.

Because women signify the differences between

inside and outside, they embody the identity of nation.
Women then share in the nation building project by being
constructed into "symbolic bearers of the nation" (Tickner
1996:153) where their personification of a purified ethnic
and cultural identity across boundaries is authorized by the
male state which creates them into markers of difference.

48
Thus, veiled women are created into evidence of the male
sanctioned authentic culture (Haddad 1985; Moghadam 1992;
Chatterjee 1993; Pettman 1996).

Particularly relevant to my

study is Chatterjee's contention that once women are
identified as a medium for the assertion of national
identity, controversy over their dress, manners, what they
say and their role in the outside world become intensified
(1993:130).

Accordingly, the veil ensures the continued

purity of the spiritual world by allowing women to go
'outside' in a manner which does not threaten their
essential 'inside' feminine role as the conduit of cultural
purity.
Nationalists, by advocating veiling, continue to use
the discourse of gender promulgated by imperialist discourse
(Chatterjee 1986, 1993; Ahmed 1992; Moghadam 1992, 1994a;
Lazreg 1994; Gole, 1996).

In this way the male Self

appropriates the veiled woman, yet again, to assert his
identity in the outside world.

Under imperial rule women

were silent pawns used to maintain unequal power
relationships.

In movements of national liberation women

are once again silenced and their bodies sacrificed to the
pursuit of political power. Thus, in trying to distance
nationalist thought from the native patriarchal tradition
identified with imperialism, women become the site where
nationalism is reformed to defeat imperialism.

Just as

imperial patriarchy removed the veil to affirm European

49
superiority so do nationalist movements use veiling to
confirm the purity of their revitalized culture.
Orientalist discourse created the Orient and thereby
helped define the West in the joint venture of imperialism
(Said 1979).

The Western Self and the Oriental Other

participating in Orientalist and imperialist discourse,
albeit unequally, played a vital role in the construction of
the each other's respective identities.

The contemporary

international arena allows us to reflect on the complicity
of nationalist thought as it struggles with the legacy of
the imperial project.

This provides insight into the

continuing legacy of Orientalism.
The on-going discursive battle between imperialism and
nationalist thought encourages my belief that the
metaphorical meanings attached to the veil construct it into
an essentialized instrument of difference between the
modernist masculine Subject and the primitive feminized
Other.

Westerners placed women at the centre of imperial

discourse and used them as a barometer of colonial success
(Ahmed 1992; Mutman 1993; Lewis 1996).

The veil as a symbol

of the subjugation of Muslim women provided tangible
evidence of the superiority of the colonial elite (Walther
1993).

In imperial discourse shedding the veil was

synonymous with the casting aside of traditional and
oppressive forms of thinking.

When women re-veil during

50
movements of national liberation, the veil is re-inscribed
as symbolic of the backwardness of Islam in the West
(Moghadam 1994a).

Constructing the Metaphor

As I proceeded in this study I realized that the
connection between the construction of the feminized Other
and a critique of realism might not be immediately obvious.
However, since traditional International Relations theory,
like imperialism is based on hierarchy (Prestney 1997)",
the search for how hierarchy structures traditional
International Relations theory requires that we evaluate how
relevant knowledge is constructed.

Further, this search

challenges theory's apparently uncritical acceptance of
historically authorized knowledge where one interpretation
of reality is validated over others (Wilmer 1996).

By

investigating the veiled woman as metaphor for the Other, I
seek to expose how the historical construction of the Self
occurs through the appropriation of all facets of
difference: cultural, racial, and sexual.

Because I argue

that the relations of dominance and power central to
traditional theory are symbolized by and executed through
woman's body, I seek an understanding for how European
definitions of masculine and feminine are supplanted onto
issues of the West's power over the East.

My study of the

51
symbolism of the veiled woman locates sexism and racism
within Western political discourse and allows me to
demonstrate how identities created for the Other continue to
position the Orient outside a eurocentric conception of
society (Ang-Lygate 1996).
The construction of Self and Other requires that we
address more than how veiled women are represented, however.
I discerned that where the image of the veiled woman occurs,
how it is packaged and the timing of its presentation
highlight how the public sphere exploits the private sphere
to achieve public sphere goals.

The construction of the

gendered Other as represented in literature and art is an
important component of Orientalist discourse.

In order to

understand the contemporary context of illustrations of
veiled women, we need to appreciate the origins of Western
metaphors of the veil.

In chapter four I contextualize how

writers, artists and political theorists absorbed these
metaphors into their conceptual frameworks and patterns of
thought.

52
CHAPTER FOUR

Meanings of the Veil - Historical Context

At the end of the Napoleonic wars the East symbolized
easy riches, untrammelled freedom, passion and excitement
(Jullian 1977:33).

The French and British, having absorbed

the moral legacy of the Crusaders, based their right to rule
the holy land on their belief in the moral superiority of
the West (Fernea and Bezirgan 1977; Haddad and Findley
1985).
With the emergence of the industrial revolution in
Europe, the nature of imperialism changed.

Government

officials' and traders' social interaction with native
populations, previously seen as a good thing, was now
discouraged (Lewis 1996:13).

The new structure of

imperialism prescribed increased social and political
intervention where the ordering of power relationships was
based on the superiority of the British and French (Haddad
and Findley 1985).
The newly emerging sciences recorded the East as
hierarchically different from the West.

This apparently

objective observation of empirical phenomena authorized the
unequal power relationships found in imperialism (Said
1979).

The West, functioning within imperialist discourse,

found proof of the intellectual inferiority and baseness of

53
Muslim men in the cultural practices of veiling, seclusion
and polygamy.

These justified the Other's political and

military subjugation (Walther 1993).
Central to the structure of Orientalist discourses was
the cult of the harem (Lewis 1996:111).

Orientalist

painting organized the needs of the absent but controlling
Western male observer by picturing the odalisque" (Fig.6-7)
preparing herself for the Sultan, "and by proxy the artist
and viewer" (Lewis 1996:112).

This form of painting

illustrates the imperialists sexual fantasy of one man's
ownership of many women and links it to the dream of seeing
that which was forbidden and hidden behind the veil.

In

addition, the creation of the white sex slave set in
opposition to the black harem servants demonstrates the
imperialist's belief in the superiority of the white race.
It also illustrates the European's fears that the ostensibly
voracious sexual appetite of the primitive Eastern male
would be directed against the white. Western mother,
daughter and wife.
Typically many of the artists working in the
Orientalist tradition never went to the Orient (Stevens
1984) but chronicled what went on there by referring to
novels, diaries, and their own imaginings of the picturesque
(Jullian 1977; Brown 1987; Mabro 1996).

Newly translated

versions of the Arabian nights and volumes of Persian poetry
as interpreted through Orientalist and Imperial discourse

54
formed the core on which artists based their representations
of Cairo and Constantinople, which by mid 1860's presented
the Orient as a reality "informed by the vision of the
Orient as different, exotic and archaic" (Lewis 1996:111).
Orientalist painting, functioning as part of the
academic tradition, stamped its impression of the Orient as
authentic, so that the European establishment "confused the
canvas with history" (Jullian 1977:47).

The veil and the

harem marked the Islamic male as oppressor of women in
private places.

European artists used these devices to

manifest the backwardness of the Other in direct opposition
to the civilizing liberating role of the colonizers.

Thus,

as Nochlin (1983) suggests. Orientalist paintings of the
private sphere were used to demonstrate the complete control
of the British and French over the public sphere.

Orientalism in the Contemporarv Context

Economic, political and symbolic discourses continue to
structure the on-going dialogue and negotiation between the
Orient and the West, where the veiled female body persists
as symbolic of a mythologized past.

The importance of this

symbolism to International Relations theory is manifest
through the appropriation of the veiled woman by the
masculine Self as he articulates his national difference
from the imperial Western Other.

This provides a focal

55
point for the perception that Islam is a threat to the West
(Esposito 1992; Juergensmeyer 1993; Halliday 1995; Fuller
and Lesser 1995; Husain 1995).

Thus, as discussed, the

symbolism of veiling (or unveiling) women has political
implications beyond national borders.

What results from the

battle of imperialist and nationalist discourses over the
identity of the nation is that difference, mediated through
women's bodies, is re-inscribed onto the veil where it
validates the persistence of Oriehtalist discourse.
Although Orientalist discourse continues to mediate
constructed identities of Self and Other, I do not suggest
that evidence of on-going Orientalism in itself erodes the
centrality of the state.

Nor do I suggest that it

completely illuminates the concept of nationalism and the
processes through which citizens negotiate identities for
themselves within the state.

However, I do propose that if

we are aware of how the gendered Other is constructed, used
and manipulated for political purposes, we have the
potential to shatter simplistic models of state-centric
behaviour.

By paying attention to these processes, I

postulate that theorists can also demonstrate how the
ideology of nation building and the discourse of power
interact.

56
Meaning of the Veil - Contemporary Context

In order to explore the on-going role of Orientalist
discourse in contemporary conceptualizations of difference,
1 document circumstances where the veil is constructed to
represent the East in the West.

This allows us to reflect

on the interaction between the domestic and international
realms.

Further, it stimulates discussion about the

implications of this interaction on international political
theory.
The visual image of the veiled woman has an inherent
authority and familiarity to viewers.

It is the pervasive

and persuasive nature of the visual in popular culture that
makes the veil into a powerful and provocative image.
Therefore, 1 concentrate primarily on visual images in this
paper.

1 intend to show how images of veiled women provide

clues about the dynamic role of unequal power relationships
in the creation of the exotic Other.

In order to

substantiate that metaphor is a viable tool for assessing
the effect of gender and culture on political decision­
making and behaviour, images of veiled women should be
widespread, numerous, and consistent in their message.
Also, if symbols are constructed to invoke a range of
associations, there should be indications that images of the
veil are intended to manipulate the thoughts of those who
observe them.

If indeed as Kertzner states, "Men possess

57
thought, but symbols possess men" (1988:5), then the veil
and the gendered cultural idiom it has been constructed to
represent should be evident.
In order to gain insight into the subtleties of how the
metaphor of the Other is constructed and presented in the
West I consider images of veiled women as I encountered them
in examples from popular culture and the media.

The

interpretation of meanings offered are largely expressions
of my own reactions framed within the theoretical literature
I have explored in the preceding chapters".

My voice is

guided by my analysis of Orientalism and is structured to
provide clues about the layers of meanings imparted by the
items' content.

I am guided in this project by Said who re­

evaluated novels framed within Orientalist discourse.

He

maintains that knowledge reflects the imperialist and
Orientalist discourses within which it is created (Said
1979:13-18).

The random, everyday circumstances in which I

heard about or saw the veil, allows me to reflect on the
naturalized processes whereby meanings attributed to the
veil are absorbed into patterns of thinking.
Orientalist discourse invents the East as a subjective
experience which is "disgorged ... as a prefabricated
construct" (Said 1979 cited in Mackenzie 1995:8).

In this

way Orientalism forms a backdrop for the marketing of
fantasy which organizes consumer experience around an Orient
personified as a mysterious, exotic, and timeless veiled

58
woman (Studlar 1989).

The timeless romance of the Orient

affirmed by the British and French travellers, whose
journals record their travels in the mysterious East, is
evoked by contemporary travel brochures featuring pictures
of veiled women in settings emblematic of the unchanging
East (Fig.8).

Similarly Orientalist discourse sanctions the

West's appropriation of the East by associating the veil
with artifacts of the ancient world, thereby marking the
East as worthy of Western interest.

The majestic male

Pharaonic god-head opposite the picturesque veiled woman
emphasizes the power and dominance of men over women (Fig.
9).

In addition, the juxtaposition of splendour versus the

quaint, of stateliness versus commonplace, reduces the
female image to the quaintly picturesque, confirming
patriarchy's perceptions of the hidden female.
A quick trip to the grocery store exposes the subtlety
with which Orientalist discourse orchestrates everyday
occurrences in ways which may not be immediately evident.
Foods bearing figures and emblems of the East are
interesting in their number and variety.

Products display

images of camels, desert, sand dunes, and exotic
architecture^*.

However the marketing of the East as a

consumable item is especially striking in the President's
Choice "Memories of" product line.
The use of a veiled woman's image as the trademark for
these products relies on Orientalism's positioning of the

59
veiled woman as a signifier of the East in the West.
President's Choice plays on perceptions some Western
consumers may have about the East by incorporating the
symbolism of the veil as a metaphor for the feminized Other.
The President's choice logo depends on our recognition of
the veiled woman as the epitome of the exotic.

She signals

that consumers will experience the romance of the mysterious
East by consuming its foods.

The duplicity of the veil is

linked to sensuousness and sexual desirability.

By cooking

this food Western women are invited to become as desirable
as the mysterious Eastern Other.

By consuming this food

Western consumers are enticed by the promise of satisfaction
of sexual desire.

In effect by eating the food so do we

'eat' and sexually dominate the veiled image and the
subservient East she epitomizes.
Orientalism frames the veiled woman as existing in an
ahistorical atemporal space.

The implicit assumption is

that time has stood still in the Orient even though we have
progressed in the West.

Thus it does not matter if the

image appears under the name "Memories of ancient Damascus"
(Fig.4) or "Memories of Marrakech" (Fig.10) because all are
part of a mythologized, uniform, timeless and homogenized
Orient.

60
Hollywood and the Veil

I focus on the Hollywood movie genre because the
discourse of Orientalism links the exotic to the erotic by
forging a spectacle of female ethnic Otherness acceptable
within North American popular culture (Studlar 1989).

The

vogue of the late 1940's and 1950's desert romance movie
presents the caucasien male romantic champion as an ethnic
object playing opposite an unconventional feisty heroine.
The heroine's ethnicity is ambiguous both because she is
played by an actress with white skin and because she
typically has spent many years in the West.

In that unseen

interval she has changed into a woman who exhibits
outspoken, combative, behaviour.

Her headstrong impetuous

'female' behaviour gets her into trouble, however, and
undermines her role as the masculinized Western Self who
only dons the veil as a mask to foil her ridiculous Othered
enemies.
These films contain all the elements of the
standard romance novel (Radway 1984).

I am particularly

interested in the dynamics occasioned by the added bonus of
a mysterious exotic setting where normal rules of behaviour
would not be expected to apply.

On returning to her native

homeland, the heroine confronts the strong silent hero who
behaves enigmatically towards her.

She responds to him with

coldness and continues to pursue her goals of justice and

61
revenge in such a way as to endanger herself.

The hero

apparently ignores her and her plight until his sense of
responsibility towards her and her righteous cause forces
him to respond to her with tenderness.

At this point the

heroine matures and begins to understand that the hero's
earlier reticence is the result of a previous hurt committed
against him and those for whom he is responsible.

Once this

is clarified the two are united in a commitment of love and
together they triumph over the evil that threatened their
happiness.
In these films, the female lead is the epitome of the
politically emancipated modern woman who, nevertheless,
remains chaste and virginal (Studlar 1989).

Flame of Arabv.

1951 and Baghdad. 1949 are typical of this type of film.
Their star Maureen O'Hara was known for her spirited
portrayal of strong heroines.
is largely the same.

The storyline of both films

In these films O'Hara is introduced as

a native Princess returning to the desert after a long time
abroad.

She has just learned that her father has been

killed by his enemies.

This places her in the position of

single-handedly keeping her desert kingdom out of the hands
of the corrupt villain responsible for the murder.

Her

ability to succeed in this mission is due to her headstrong
nature.

She is constantly under sexual threat from the evil

lascivious villain who seeks to control her, and through
her, her kingdom.

She keeps him at bay by using her sexual

62
wiles and we cheer when she succeeds in outwitting him.

She

is ultimately threatened only when she falls in love with
the handsome hero.

By doing this she places her own

survival and that of her people in his hands.

Her love for

the hero causes her to submit her will to him and at this
point in the movie, it is his love which tames her,
transforming the hero into saviour and protector.
The kidnapped white-skinned sex slave found in
Orientalist art (Fig.6-7) still languishes in wait of the
Sultan's call while being attended to by dark skinned
servants in the 1942 epic Arabian Niohts.

Here, the slave

is transferred to the silver screen where her calls for
justice, freedom and sexual choice are given voice.

Held

against her will, the object of Western sexual erotic
fantasy fights the evil Sultan until the Western viewer in
the form of the familiar Hollywood hero can rescue her and
claim her as his own on the vast and timeless desert sands.
The iconography of Orientalist discourse forms a
backdrop to these films with their flowing costumes, rich
colours, exotic sights, and foreign music.

As Lewis points

out these elements allow the viewer to feast on the East as
a complete whole (1996:113).

The moral decadence of the

East symbolized by the luscious fabrics and colours is
integral to the discursive construction of the East as
morally inferior to the West (Lewis 1996:113).

While on the

one hand destabilizing accepted standards of male sexuality

63
by wearing flowing robes and ornate headgear. Orientalist
discourse mediates the sexualized ethnic male through his
typically Western male "hero" behaviour (Studlar 1989).

He

is the hero because he does not threaten the heroine with
sexual violence.

Her active shedding of the veil in front

of him marks him as different from the decadent Eastern
Other who threatens her.

The heroine willingly submits to

the hero because of her love for him while the hero, even
though demanding her submission, couples this with the
promise of emotional tenderness, transforming his
masculinity into Western woman's desire (Studlar 1989).
As Studlar (1989) discusses. Orientalist discourse
reconciles the Western spectator's participation in
patriarchy by facilitating the satisfaction of erotic
fantasy while preserving North American ethnic purity and
social values.

At the end of the film the heroine accepts

the limitations on her behaviour that love requires.

The

movie ends with the heroine safely in the arms of the hero
identified as Western.
Consistent with Orientalism, in some films of this
genre, the veiled women does not even appear.

However, her

absence is used to further distance the veiled secluded
woman from the typically Western heroine.

In Kina Richard

and the Crusaders. 1954, the Saracen Saladin infiltrates
King Richard's camp in the guise of a doctor who can cure a
wound Richard receives at the hand of a treacherous knight.

64
The King's sister, played by blonde, blue-eyed Virginia
Mayo, is curious about the mysterious Arab who initially is
impudent and presumptuous.

As he gets to know her, he

contrasts her strength and force of character with that of
his women who, because of veiling and seclusion, are doubly
absent and silenced.

Saladin, played in elaborate make-up

and costume by Rex Harrison, openly admires Mayo's
character, and she in turn, is unnerved by her attraction to
the strange exotic.

She teeters on the edge of an emotional

precipice until Saladin shows the true nefarious nature of
the Other and she realizes that her life belongs to the
Scottish hero who entreats her to marry him and make his
porridge.
The erotic fantasy of the exotic East surfaces again in
the 1960's with the television show I Dream of Jeannie.

In

this program an American astronaut crash lands on a deserted
island and opens a bottle releasing a genie who has been
trapped for 2000 years.

The ahistorical eternal East is

given voice through this beautiful ageless genie who wears
exotic filmy clothing and who speaks in an archaic manner
significant of the timeless past.

The exquisite genie seeks

to serve her handsome master in any and all ways possible.
She is delightfully charming, mischievous and turns his life
upside down.

While expressing annoyance the astronaut is

attracted to this enchanting fantasy and it is clear that he
will not be able to live without her.

65
Barbara Eden plays the genie and her blue-eyed blonde
good looks are the foundation of the all-American dream girl
sexual fantasy.

Captain Tony Nelson, played by Larry Hagman

is the clean cut all-American boy who wins the heart of the
beautiful girl.

Orientalist discourse mandates the

patriarchy of the master even as it eroticizes the girl in
the flowing veils.

Her sexual overtures are located within

Orientalist discourse just as his rejection of them is
located in imperialist discourse. ' In situation after
situation Jeannie, even though often undermining his efforts
to control her, defers to her astronaut master because of
her role as sex slave.

Conversely, Captain Nelson's actions

mandates that he act as defender of her virtue.

He will not

take advantage of his position as "Master" even though the
Other entices him by her dress, words, and glances.

He is

incorruptible and true-hearted, eventually succumbing to her
sexual charms only within marriage and after the exotic
Other agrees to shed her veils and give up her magic powers
to become what every woman apparently wants to be —

an

American housewife.
The 1990's saw a rising tide of emotion against Islam
in the West and with it a corresponding change in the facets
of Orientalist discourse highlighted in the construction of
the Other.

The fear of the veiled alien is accented in

media coverage and in a made for television movie Not
without mv daughter to be discussed later.

Interestingly,

66
the Walt Disney Company chose this point in time to recall
the mystery of the Arabian nights in its animated epic
Aladdin. 1992.
Aladdin introduces a new generation to the sensual
delights of the Arabian nights where the poor but honest
street boy, because of his love for the virtuous Princess,
can make good against the evil and powerful wizard.
Orientalism forms a backdrop upon which this movie is
scripted and Princess Jasmine is the epitome of the Maureen
O'Hara type heroine as she strains against the strictures of
her royal state.
Jasmine does not wear a veil, even though all other
women in the film do; and where she is outspoken and
defiant, all other female characters are secondary and
silent.

Because Jasmine chafes against her life of

seclusion

in the palace she runs away to the market where

she meets

Aladdin.

She rescues him from the palace guards

after a merry chase which cements the bonds between the hero
and heroine. However, like the earlier desert princesses,
patriarchy frames her apparently independent spirit and she
defers to

her father and the laws of the kingdom in the

choice of

whom she must marry.

even questioned or discussed.

That she must marry is not
Happily this all concludes

well when the inferiorized Sultan father comes up with a
plan that satisfies all.

Aladdin positions Jasmine and

Aladdin outside the Othered culture in which Muslims are

67
constructed as stupid, sneaky, dangerous and evil.

The

coincident release of this film with the eruption of the
Gulf War was opportune for those groups who would use such a
construct of the Other to justify the righteousness of
American participation in the United Nations military action
against Iraq.
The exotic and erotic construction of the veiled woman
is a staple in Orientalist images of the female Other.
However, the diametric opposites of fear, evil, and
backwardness masked behind the veil are also integral to
Orientalist discourse.

In the desert romance genre the

brutality of the male oppressor is expressed through the
medium of the veil.

This theme recurs in the 1990

television adaptation of Betty Mahmoody's best selling book.
Not Without Mv Daughter.
Few will forget the gut-wrenching fear experienced when
watching live television coverage of the 1979 invasion and
hostage taking at the American embassy in Teheran.

The

images of veiled women eerily shouting with upraised arms,
their faces covered with the black chador filled us with
dread and trepidation.

The synchronic placing of veiled

women with fanatical armed gunman mesmerized the world and
signalled a new reality in world politics.
The aftermath of this fanaticism in the mid-eighties
is recalled in the made-for-television movie which
originally aired in the run up to the Gulf War.

In this

68
film, Betty Mahmoody, played by two-time academy award
winner Sally Field, is the wife of an Iranian born doctor
living in the United States.

Initially the husband is

portrayed as a successful long-term immigrant whose devotion
to his wife and daughter is beyond question. However, the
increasing tension in his native land coupled with the
antagonism of his colleagues over Iranian extremism cause
him to confront the fact that he is, after all, not an
American.

His longing for belonging makes him ask his wife

to accompany him on a short vacation to Iran.
been home in decades.

He has not

After much persuasion he convinces

her that it will be safe and that he will not let any harm
come to her.

She agrees to a two-week holiday to visit his

family.
Once in Iran he admits to feeling confused over all the
changes to his homeland but he also voices his sadness that
he has nothing to go back to in America.
not belong there.

He feels he does

Still believing in him and his American

identity, his wife sympathizes with his anguish and comforts
him.

However, his family and their fundamentalist Muslim

beliefs soon turn him into an Islamic zealot for whom
religion is more important than the happiness of his child.
Even his physical appearance changes.

He becomes unkempt,

his eyes develop dark circles, his nose becomes more hooked.
He becomes more Semitic in appearance.

As his brainwashing

spirals, the viewer witnesses Betty's increasing

69
victimization because she is ostensibly perceived as the
embodiment of American decadence.

After pleading to be

allowed to take the child back to America, she is beaten,
denied food and repeatedly refused access to her daughter.
Although offered her personal freedom, Betty's true heroic
nature is revealed when she asserts that she will not leave
her child behind.
Sally Field, fresh-faced and still looking like Gidget
or the Flying Nun, the personification of the all American
sweetheart, is forced to wear the veil, denied her self­
esteem and her liberty.

Eventually she meets members of the

sophisticated Iranian elite who recall the Persia of old.
Their identification with Western ideals located within
imperialist discourse places them on Betty's side.

They are

Betty's allies against her husband and his family who are
identified as dupes of the government because they are
ignorant, rural and backward.

After much terror and anxiety

she attains freedom with her daughter.
In this film Orientalist discourse structures the
modern fear of the primitive, and everything about Iran is
constructed as strange and alien.

The American heroine has

no place here and would be erased from existence behind the
veil were it not for those components of her behaviour which
characterize her Western identity.

Her courage, her

strength and her devotion to a better life for her female
child ensure her survival and ultimately her freedom.

70
This film dwells on Betty's battles against the
strictures of Islamic law and religion and presents her as
emblematic of the Western self asserting itself against the
alien Other.

Betty subverts the symbolism of the veil,

wearing the symbol of the brutality of the Other, to mask
what American audiences would reasonably interpret as her
true strong nature.
However, the Orientalist vision of the veil as the
symbol of the subjugation of women is not just a product of
Hollywood.

Indeed it forms a backdrop to all our dealings

with the Other.

The West's apparent fascination with the

veil is premised on its symbolic representation of the
oppression of women (MacLeod 1992; Block 1994).

In this way

it is constructed to delineate the dividing line between
Islamic and Western communities (Moghadam 1994a).

The Media and the Veil

As I proceeded with this project I was struck by the
essentializing tropes of gender and culture signifying the
Other found in certain examples of mainstream news media.
Unfortunately, the links between media coverage and the
economic and political advantages gained through the
manipulation of difference, is outside the scope of this
paper.

However, even though I maintain that Orientalist

discourse frames the dichotomy between "us" and "them" as

71
expressed through images of veiled women, I recognize that
other influences may be at work in the manipulation of these
images.
In the Saturday 19 April 1997 Toronto Star an article
on the Islamic fundamentalist regime in Sudan features
pictures of armed women standing at attention and shouting
"Jihad! Martyrdom! Victory!" (Fig.11).

The iconography of

the veiled women with guns turns an erotic fantasy into a
monstrous nightmare.

The viewer is encouraged to link

terror with the veil because of the depiction of veiled
women as coerced participants in tyrannical Islamic
movements.

Out of the mass of emotions we experience while

gazing at this picture, sympathy for these women as victims
of 'fanatical' extremism vies with contempt at their
apparent submissiveness to fundamentalist regimes which
ensure their continued subjugation.
Orientalist perceptions of the veil as a tool of the
sexual exploitation of women licenses the simplistic and
simplified message that Muslim women only wear the veil to
stay alive" identifying their gendered religious context as
the reason for the assault against their personal safety.
The photo of a woman grieving after the massacre of her
eight children in Benthala, Algeria (Fig.12) is symptomatic
of the scorning of the complexity of the cultural, political
and religious circumstances operating in Islamic countries.
Orientalist discourse mandates the view that the Other is

72
uncivilized and outrageous.

We feel pity for this heart­

sick mother in the face of the most grievous of
catastrophes, but we also disparage her because she supports
the political, religious, and cultural systems that allow
this sort of thing to happen.
The construction of the Other is mediated through the
body of women where photographs exploit Western conceptions
about what might constitute appropriate behaviour.

The

portrayal of gun toting veiled women (Fig.11) or of veiled
women confronting uniformed soldiers in city streets
(Fig.13) imprints the iconography of violence onto the veil.
We are moved by photographs of veiled women depicted with
armed children (Fig.14) or holding war wounded children
(Fig.15) which appear to subvert the nationalist iconography
of loving and nurturing motherhood by identifying veiled
women as the willing accomplices of religious zealots.

The

veiled woman's apparent willingness to sacrifice her
children to a radical cause solidifies the contrast between
"us" and "them" marking then as different, less civilized
and less human.
On the CBC'* Evening News on 12 March 1997, Anna Maria
Tremonti presented a story about members of the Hezbullah
Islamist group operating in Lebanon.

Prominent in her

report was the story of a veiled Muslim woman who had lost
one son to "martyrdom" and who voiced the wish that all her
sons would be sacrificed to God in a holy cause.

The

73
association of this veiled woman with terrorism was
seamlessly put together to reflect "the way life is " in
Lebanon (Tremonti 1997).

The message is clear.

Women like

her are not like us but rather are personifications of a
primitive, alien religious belief named Islam.
The relevance of a study on the gendered iconography of
nation is forcefully demonstrated by a feature survey on the
political implications of the Islamist movement in the
August 6, 1994 issue of The Economist.

The title of the

special insert, "Not again for heaven's sake", features a
cover drawing of a crusading white Christian knight fighting
a black Saracen warrior (Fig.16).

With this drawing The

Economist recalls the historical and political context of
the crusades.

During the crusades knights went to the holy

land, the Orient, to liberate Christian places of worship
from the degenerate Muslims who trampled on them.

By

recalling this imagery, the virtuous and pure white knight
is positioned above and against an unholy and corrupt black
Other whose goal, as portrayed by The Economist's editors,
is the destruction of Western institutions.

The imagery of

the crusades re-positions the ancient battle of purity and
right over corruption and decadence in contemporary
political discourse.

This image, constructed to instill

anxiety and even fear, hints at the impossibility of
vanquishing an enemy that keeps coming back in an almost
supernatural way.

In addition, the underlying racism

74
involved in the social and cultural construction of the
image of the Islamic Other is especially striking as it lays
the groundwork for the article that follows.
The story features a discussion which constructs Islam
into one of the few religious movements which ignores the
frontier between religion and politics.

Reducing all

Islamic culture and history to a religious interpretation
(Lazreg 1990), this article views Islam as the West's
ideological competitor in the 20th century.

Because

Orientalist discourse structures The Economist's arguments,
blame for the apparently inevitable military conflict
between Islamic countries and the West is easily attributed
to backward, "bloody-minded" fundamentalists ("Survey of
Islam" 1994:6).
This article is punctuated by many photographs, but
gives prominence to a picture of a blonde Western woman
standing beside a completely veiled Muslim woman (Fig.17).
In this photograph, the Western woman adorned in a child­
like hair band and pearls is juxtaposed against a completely
veiled Muslim woman.

This image sets Western openness and

innocence against its diametric opposite, the veil, symbol
of the masked corruption of the East.
reader that Islam is Other.

This reaffirms to the

This image is used to further

intensify the message of separation, alienation, rupture and
difference that this article creates between Islam and the
West.

The potent message is clear.

Veiled women are not

75
like "us" but rather are personifications of Islam.

The

gendered racialized Other is etched onto veiled women's
bodies as something to be feared and reviled.
Orientalist discourse positions the veil as symbolic of
Muslim women's oppression.

Thus, when we see pictures of

veiled women doing things understood as modern, we are
expected to subvert this understanding and interpret the
photos as evidence that women are confronting Islamic
governments, which are necessarily anti-Western and anti­
democratic.

In this way, women pictured wearing white

rather than the standard black chador in the streets of
Teheran (Fig.18) or waiting to vote in Yemen (Fig.19),
become symbols of the degeneration of the religious
dedication of fundamentalist governments.

This signals an

acceptance of modernity to some Western observers.
The use of veiled women in cartoons (Fig.20-21)
ridiculing laws enacted in Ontario allowing the baring of
female breasts in public, ironically positions the Eastern
Other as arbiter of women's appropriate behaviour in the
West.

This farcical casting of the discourse of the veil

mocks the veiled woman and reinforces Orientalist notions
about the primitiveness of Oriental practices even as it
reminds us that the veil denies the West access to the
feminized essence of Oriental cultural integrity.

The

promise of forbidden pleasures continues to form one of the
contradictory meanings ascribed to the veil in the West

76
where the eroticization of the purity of womanhood behind
the veil is a vital part of the Western cultural tradition.
In this I agree with Alibhai-Brown (1994) and others who
maintain that it is this paradox which mediates the West's
fear and fascination with the veiled figure (Brown 1987;
Mehid 1993).
The historic encounters between Europeans and peoples
in North Africa and the Middle East created situations in
which peoples were dominated materially, culturally and
politically.

Western identities are formed, at least in

part, through reference to Others defined through
imperialist discourses.

It is this awareness of the Other

that lays the foundation for the racialized political
structures and unequal relations of power which exist in
Western countries today.
The power relations of the imperial past and the
ideological frameworks denotative of European superiority
are naturalized through Orientalist discourse where the veil
marks women as authentic symbols of Islam.

However, the

implications of this on political theoretical modelling
takes on a new urgency when Muslim women, the symbolic
representation of the Other, walk "our" streets, live in
"our" neighbourhoods and go to "our" schools.

In a world

dominated by instantaneous communications, massive world­

77
wide immigration and interlocked economic systems "they" can
no longer be dehistoricized or placed in the arcane frame of
an imaginary past.

Canada and the Discourse of Difference

In Canada, difference is reconciled through the
philosophical ideal of multiculturalism".

As de Groot

(1996) notes, however, Canada's official policy excludes
white Western woman from its discourses.

This reinforces

perceptions that inequality is based exclusively on culture
and race.

In this way Canadian multicultural policy becomes

a strategy for the management of difference where difference
is restricted to inequality experienced by a cultural group,
de Groot (1996) explores the underlying presumption that
white Canadian women are equal to white Canadian men, and
the assumption that the inequalities ethnic women experience
are due to their ethnicity and not their gender.

She

suggests that this effectively denies that Canadian women,
whether white or ethnic, experience inequality (de Groot
1996).

It also suggests that women are not denied full

citizenship rights because of gender.

This position

encourages Hoodfar's (1993) exploration of the frustration
of veiled Iranian women who are fighting for sexual equality
in a mosaic that only acknowledges them as signifiers of
their cultural group.

She maintains that creating veiled

78
women into tropes of their cultural group places them in the
position where they must choose between fighting sexism or
racism in the context of their daily lives in the West
(Hoodfar 1993).

Khan (1995a) also explores how the

sacrificing of gender to culture silences the Othered woman
in Canada.

Badeaux's (1996) political cartoon (Fig.22) is

an example of how these presumptions are translated into
Canadian newspapers via the medium of the editorial cartoon.
This cartoon, though based on United Nations
information about the economic conditions of women all over
the world (Fiske, J., personal communication, July 11,
1998), masks this reality by picturing a veiled Muslim
woman.

The implication is that the economic facts contained

in the caption only apply to Muslim women, marking them as
different from women in the West.

The assumption

underpinning this drawing is that Western women suffer no
economic differences from men.

In this way the iconography

of the duplicitous veiled Muslim woman is used to mask the
reality, not just of Muslim women, but, of all women.
Through this masking, the cartoon presents essentialized
images of the feminized Other and assumes a belief in
masculinized Western superiority.

Whether Badeaux's readers

think this cartoon is funny or wry social commentary is
unknown.

What is clear however, is that this image arises

from a conception of difference that is constructed through
discourse where race is gendered and gender is racialized

79
(Lewis 1996:12).

Another example which illustrates the

acceptance of the feminized Other as hidden behind her
ethnicity is found in Robert Munsch's 1995 children's book
From far awav.
This book tells a story about a kindergarten aged girl
who has moved with her family from a war torn country 'far
away' and her experiences adjusting to life in Canada.

The

child's veiled mother is neither exotic nor frightening and
she remains in the background for most of the story.

It is

the Westernized father who encourages his daughter to
assimilate and adjust to her new home.

However, when the

daughter decides to change her name from the ethnic sounding
Saoussan to the Canadian sounding Susan, the mother
forcefully intervenes.

As guardian of the Othered culture,

the visibly ethnic mother looms literally and figuratively
over her daughter and forbids her to change her name
(Fig.23).

While this book makes a strong point about pride

in ethnic heritage, it also stamps the veiled woman as a
marker of the ethnic other.

By dressing the father in

Western apparel and the mother in ethnic costume, Munsch and
his illustrator Michael Martchenko, inscribe the bodies of
veiled women as emblematic of cultural difference for a
whole new generation of Canadian children.
Similarly Orientalist discourse frames two essays found
in Far and Wide: Essavs From Canada edited by Sean
Armstrong, a social studies text used by students in grade

80
eleven at Prince George Secondary School in Prince George,
British Columbia.

In the first article, Naheed Mustafa

tells us she wears the veil because it gives her the freedom
to reclaim her body from the unwanted gaze of men.

She says

it releases her from the shallow pursuit of superficial
beauty.

Mustafa is openly critical about the stereotypic

responses she has experienced as a result of wearing the
veil.

She wonders if people really do think of her as a

terrorist or as a "poster girl for oppressed womanhood"
(Mustafa 1995:89).

One senses her frustration over the fact

that even though she was born in Canada, people see her veil
and assume she is an illiterate immigrant.
In the essay immediately following Mustafa's, Catherine
Meek (1995) a journalist who has lived in Islamic countries
offers her views on veiling in Canada.

Interestingly Meek

is given the opportunity to comment on Mustafa's essay,
while Mustafa does not have the opportunity to challenge any
of Meek's opinions.

Meek attacks Mustafa's opinion that the

veil gives her freedom and labels it a "uniform of
oppression" (Meek 1995:91).

She states,

"Its one thing to see covered faces as the exotic and
mysterious product of another culture you can leave
behind when you return home.

But finding them on my

home turf, I have to confront my fears about what this

81
kind of dress represents for me, and for all women:
backwardness, submissiveness, degradation" (Meek
1995:93).

With this statement Meek positions veiled women outside
the discursive space of the Canadian state.

In so doing

Meek reflects the opinion of some who would deny veiled
women voice, political agency and citizenship rights.

The

Orientalist paradigm relegates veiled women to the private
sphere reinforcing Western patriarchy which proclaims that
"women's normal identities are not the nation space but the
family space" (Kaplan 1997:45).

In addition. Orientalist

discourse authorizes Meek's appropriation of the cultural
practices of the East and structures her creation of
relevant knowledge about the Oriental.

Further, Orientalism

confirms Meek's authority to speak for the inferior and
hidden Other.
Women wearing the veil in Canada are subjected to a
range of reactions.

They are yelled at insulted, reviled in

the press, and perhaps worst of all, merely tolerated (Kurd
1995; Lemon 1995).

The static colonial image which has been

absorbed into our thinking denies Muslim communities in
general and veiled Muslim women in particular any political
voice or agency. The controversy over the wearing of hijab
in the Province of Quebec during the run up to a referendum
on provincial sovereignty raises pertinent questions about

82
the political agency of the individual and the construction
of national identity.

Further, it helps us to define the

processes involved in how states react to the marginalized
Other when that Other seeks to assert citizenship rights.
In September 1994 a female student was suspended from a
Montreal French language secondary school because she was
wearing a hijab (Leclerc 1994).

The principal explained

that by wearing the hijab the student had violated the
school's dress code.

She stated, "distinctive cloths like

the hijab or neo-Nazi regalia could polarize aggression
among young people" ("Veiled Threats in Quebec" 1994).

By

identifying the Islamic veil with regimes like that of Nazi
Germany, this educator has deliberately introduced fear and
loathing into a debate.

The veil now portrayed as a symbol

of totalitarianism gives rise to the anxiety, horror and
revulsion Westerners are schooled to experience when faced
with the 'fanatical' East.
In December of the same year another student at a
different Montreal area high school was also sent home for
wearing the hijab (Block 1994).

Jean-Louis Boucher, Chair

of this school's parent advisory committee, stated that his
group was unanimous in adopting a resolution to ban the
Islamic scarf.

He stated, "Look, there are 1,200 religions

in Quebec and it has to stop somewhere" ("Veiled Threats in
Quebec" 1994).

Also in 1993, a privately funded Islamic

83
school opened in Montreal and instituted a dress code which
forced teachers to wear the hijab as a condition of
employment.
While the Quebec Human Rights Commission found that
dress codes banning the Islamic scarf in public schools were
discriminatory, they also asserted that the Islamic school's
dress code violated the Quebec Charter of Rights and
Freedoms by forcing teachers to wear the hijab ("Banning of
Hijab Called Discriminatory" 1995).

In responding to

questions about this controversial ruling, Bernard Landry,
then Deputy Premier of Quebec, said the government would not
intercede in the matter.

However, he did state: "Religious

freedom, like all others, has its limits.

Our role is not

simply to allow the exercise of these freedoms but also to
establish limits" ("Veiled Threats in Quebec" 1994).

Jean

Pare, editor of L'Actualité, endorsed this view by stating
that the hijab "is a rallying symbol for Muslims in their
struggle against the Western satan.

In accepting into our

home this symbol, we are contributing to our own destruction
and that of our values of equality and tolerance" ("Veiled
Threats in Quebec" 1994).
The message is obvious, Muslims may wear hijab in their
own private schools but not in schools funded by the
provincial government where "our" students attend.

The

Muslim community, symbolized by veiled woman, is not welcome
into the Quebec "home" unless they adopt the national

84
collective identity the Quebec government has forged for
itself as it proceeds towards its goal of sovereignty.

The

imagery of the violation of the home is a startling posture
that confirms the veiled woman as marginalized excluded
Other vis 'a vis Canadian society.

Equating the acceptance

of hijab with the destruction of societal values recalls
Orientalist discourse where the corruption and decadence of
the East must be kept at bay.
This debate shows how exposed women are when they, as
women, are perceived to be out of place.

Simply by wearing

the veil, these young women transform a private act of faith
into a public symbol of Islam.

The transgression of the

private/public boundary creates their bodies into sites of
conflict between their cultural group and the state
authority.

The Orientalist rhetoric surrounding the wearing

of hijab denies an opportunity for a debate on religious
pluralism.

Further, it enforces a discursive silence

preventing women from defining themselves within a multi­
ethnic social fabric.
In asserting their authority, states define who is a
citizen and who may benefit from citizenship rights within
its sovereign territory.

By forcing veiled women to

negotiate their place as citizens through their veiled
bodies, the Quebec government domesticates difference and

85
silences the wealth of meanings attributed to the veil and
other gendered cultural symbols which impact on everyday
political participation.

86
CHAPTER FIVE

Implications and Conclusions

By investigating the impact of culture and gender on
international political theory through the use of conceptual
metaphor, I have contemplated a range of meanings attributed
to the gendered cultural symbol of the veil.

In addition I

have speculated on the role this symbol plays in the
construction and manipulation of power relationships.
However, this thesis is but an initial step in a long
journey towards a more complete understanding of the
processes at work in the international sphere.
In considering this ambitious task I am drawn back to
my experience in the Vancouver restaurant.

The reaction

generated by those veiled women and my perception that this
was significant formed the catalyst for this study.

In

trying to make International Relations theory relevant to my
own life experience I discovered others whose stories also
have the potential to affect how international political
theory is formulated.

The student who is called a

terrorist, the young woman who is subjected to lewd comments
because of her veil, the women who cannot wear the veil if
they hope to get a job; all these women have stories which
have been marginalized from traditional International
Relations theory.

For me, the challenge was not in proving

87
that their life experiences are politically relevant,
although this forms a substantial part of the thesis.
Rather, the challenge was going beyond the disciplinary
boundaries of traditional International Relations theory to
search for intellectual tools which allow these stories to
be heard.
By considering the impact of Orientalist discourse from
a feminist perspective, I explore how encounters between
East and West have been marked, and\continue to be marked,
with the stamps of difference.

Evidence that understandings

of gender and culture continue to structure the position of
the Other in the West, encourages my belief that models of
political decision-making must include these factors within
their frameworks.

Further, Cole's (1996) work shatters the

conception that traditional culture and religion disappear
in the so-called natural progression toward modernity.

By

assuming this, traditional political theory fails to account
for the political impact of the myriad cultural and social
identities found within states.
The use of conceptual metaphor to assess the impact of
culture and gender on political events reveals much about
the cultures within which particular meanings occur.
Western conceptualizations of the veil construct the Islamic
garment into an signifier of deceit.

Even the meaning of

the word 'veil' signifies subterfuge and guile.

Orientalist

discourse bonds the veil's message of deception and

88
duplicity to a sexualized imagery, so that the feminized
Other becomes a gendered agent of manipulation and
exploitation who purposely masks intentions and obscures
motives.
This study illustrates how metaphors of the veil
distance the West from East.

This makes the veil a

particularly effective metaphor to analyze in terms of
traditional International Relations theory.

Examining the

role of the veil as a mask and the concealment it affords
reveals important characteristics about the power politics
under study in the international sphere.

The sexualized

nature of the veiled woman underscores the gendered nature
of power relationships while highlighting how power and the
construction of nation are overlaid with Western patriarchal
and androcentric assumptions about gender, religion, and
cultural practices.
A study of the metaphorical meanings of the veil also
yields insight into the position of the individual
vis 'a vis the nation and the state.

Like gender and

culture, the individual is marginalized to the private
sphere of the domestic, family and household realms.

In

addition, realist theory assumes the automatic and
unquestioned allegiance of citizens to states and ignores
the complexity of the gendered cultural identities, the
voices and the political wills of individuals.

However, my

analysis of Orientalist discourse reveals that states

89
conceal their urge to power behind the mask of national
security, even while they construct national identities
through the manipulation of memory, social conventions,
cultural meanings and historical events.

In this sense the

veil and its meanings, whether framed within imperial
discourse or within movements of national liberation, become
a signifier of power at the international level.
A number of questions remain about the construction of
gendered cultural metaphor of the veil.
images not the same?

Why are all veiled

What is the effect of the particular

historical and cultural contexts within which the veil is
found?

Why, in different political climates or even in the

same one, do different meanings of the veil occur?

These

unresolved issues notwithstanding, my study confirms the
effectiveness of conceptual metaphor as a tool of inquiry in
the international arena.

The importance of this approach to

international political theory is emphasized when we
consider how states might manipulate culture and ideology to
disguise the acquisition and exploitation of power.

The

significance of the creation of the feminized Other and the
potential of this, and similar, images as ideological tools
at the international level cannot be minimized.

Lurie's

cartoon in Time Magazine which depicts a feminized male
Other, dressed in flowing robes and surrounded by other
symbols emblematic of the timeless and dangerous East, is
evidence of this (Fig.24).

This cartoon and the fact that

90
it is found in an influential American magazine emphasizes
International Relation's need to acknowledge the importance
of symbolic discourses to international political discourse.
If we accept Morgenthau's gendered assumptions about
the nature of rational man's drive to acquire and wield
power then International Relations must be about conflict
and war.

However, if we respond to the feminist challenge,

the adversarial view of the international system is revealed
as partial and imperfect.

If we acknowledge that gender and

culture contribute to understanding, theory is opened up to
new explanations of how power relationships are structured
in the international system.
Sedghi (1994) suggests that a gendered cultural
approach allows for the elimination of hierarchy rather than
its maintenance as the goal of International Relations
theory.

Others suggest that opportunities for new

understandings of power and power relationships are created
through this (Brown 1988; Tickner 1994; Beckman 1994).
Critical to any new advances in International Relations is
the lesson Pasic (1996) imparts to us about the importance
of the social world within which politics takes place.

She

suggests that we take advantage of the opportunity to write
theory contextually, where people live.

In this way

clarification of the processes involved in the creation of
the ideological and physical boundaries between "us" and
"them" is possible.

The reality is that "we" and "they"

91
have contact and that a theory of interaction dictated only
by one philosophical point of view is not complete (Lapid
1996b).
If we broaden the scope of traditional International
Relations theory beyond that of a state-centric
international system, we gain valuable insight into the
processes involved in the gendered politics of boundary
making.

Not only does the discourse of difference add to

our knowledge of how political identities are constructed,
it enhances our understanding of the dynamics of power in
the international arena.
A realist might suggest that an analysis of the
metaphorical meanings of the veil is too esoteric and
impractical to explain the harsh dynamics of global
politics.

However, as I contemplate the potential

explanatory value of different ways of thinking and knowing
to international political theory, a study of sexualized
imagery is not an expression of "wide-eyed idealism" (Grant
1994:128).

It is a key to better theory.

92
NOTES

1.

For further discussion on the major schools of thought

in International Relations theory see, Viotti, P.R. and M.V.
Kauppi (1993) and Booth, K. and S. Smith (Eds.) (1995)
International Relations theory today. University Park, PA:
Pennsylvania State University Press.

2.

In this thesis I use the word hijab also spelled hejab,

interchangeably with the word veil to refer to traditional
Islamic head, face or body covers which are also known under
other names:
face veil.

headscarf, chador, chadir, burkah and nigab or
As defined in The Oxford encvclonedia of the

modern Islamic world 1995 v.2. New York: Oxford University
Press, there is no single word equivalent in Arabic for
"veil" which is referred to as the most commonly used term
for all forms of traditional coverings.

3.

The literature criticizing traditional International

Relations approaches is extensive.

Pertinent items include

Rosenberg, J. (1993) The international imagination: IR
theory and "Classic social analysis." Millennium: Journal of
International Studies 23(1):85-108, Culture in International
Relations special issue of Millennium 22(3) 1993, Verwiej M.
(1995) Cultural theory and the study of International
Relations Millennium 24(1):85-111 and Ruggie, J.G. (1993)

93
Territoriality and beyond: Problematizing modernity in
International Relations International Organization
47(1):139-174.

4.

A number of writers discuss the male gendered imagery

associated with the state.

Major texts in this area include

Pettman, J.J. (1996), Sylvester, C. (1994), and Tickner,
J.A. (1992).

Partha Chatterjee also discusses this concept

from the unique perspective postcolonialism affords.

I am

particularly interested in what Chatterjee terms the
"hypermasculinity of imperialist ideology" (1993:69).

In

chapter five I suggest that International Relations theory
needs to address the impact of symbolic discourses on power
relationships in the international sphere.

An example of

this type of work in the Indian context is, Sinha, M. (1995)
Colonial masculinitv: The 'manlv Englishman* and the
effeminate Bengali* in the late nineteenth century.
Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.

5.

There is a significant amount of literature on women in

Islamic countries and the significance and implications of
the veil within particular cultural and historical contexts.
I consulted a number of texts for this study.

For example,

for information on Algeria, Egypt and Turkey consult M.
Lazreg, A.E. MacLeod, and N. Gole.

Additional material on

other Middle Eastern and North African countries may be

94
found in:

Olson, E. (1985) Muslim identity and secularism

in contemporary turkey Anthropological Quarterly
58(October):161-171; Mernissi, F. (1975) Bevond the veil:
Male-female dynamics in a modern Muslim society. New York:
Schenkman.; Mernissi, F. (1987) The veil and the male elite:
A feminist interpretation of women's rights in Islam. New
York: Addison-Wesley; Yaganeh, N. (1993) Women, nationalism
and Islam in contemporary political discourse in Iran
Feminist Review No.44:3-18; Najmabadi, A. (1993) Veiled
discourse-unveiled bodies Feminist Studies No.3:487-518;
Nakanishi, H. (1994) Creating the "ideal" woman and
reconstructing "Islamic" women: Ideology, power. and women's
consciousness in post-revolutionary Iran. Ph.D. thesis
University of California, Los Angeles; Yeganeh, N. (1993)
Women, nationalism and Islam in contemporary political
discourse in Iran. Feminist Review 44:3-18; Shukrallah, H.
(1994) The impact of the Islamic movement in Egypt Feminist
Review No.47:15-32; Sallam, A.M.A. (1980) The return of the
v e il

among undergraduate females at Minva University. Egypt.

Ph.D. thesis Purdue University; MacLeod A. (1991)
Accommodating process: Working women and the new veiling and
change in Cairo. New York: Columbia University Press.

6.

There is debate over the meaning of postcolonialism.

In this thesis I use it to include works of social criticism
that are concerned with the unequal and uneven processes of

95
power relationships, whether these focus on the colonial
past or whether they deal with the social and cultural
spaces of our increasingly interconnected world.

7.

I use this term to include the European War of 1914-

1918, commonly known as World War I, and the European War of
1939-1945, commonly known as World War II.

8.

A thorough investigation of nationalism is beyond the

scope of this paper.

Works which consider nationalism

beyond the realist perspective explored here include:
Couloumbis and Wolfe (1996), Viotti and Kauppi (1993), Haas,
E. (1993) Nationalism: An instrumental social construction.
Millennium 22(3):505-545, Haas, E. (1997) Nationalism,
liberalism and progress. Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
Ignatieff, M. Blood and belonging: Journevs into the new
nationalism. Toronto: Viking, Smith, A. (1995) Nations and
nationalism in a global era. Cambridge, MA: Polity Press,
and Ward, B. (1966) Nationalism and ideology. New York:
Norton.

9.

Discursive attempts to homogenize national identities

are not always successful.

A glaring example of failure is

the Israeli state's attempt to construct a national identity
which excludes its Palestinian citizens.

96
10.

I use this term in the same sense as Inayatullah and

Blaney (1996) when they suggest that the ahistorical
acultural state of nature fable prevents International
Relations theory from providing a more meaningful analysis
of a culturally diverse international society.

11.

Prestney examines the role of culture and science in

the historical construction of the Western Self.

Through

her study of the Hottentot Venus, she illustrates how
Western thinking, and specifically International Relations
theory, is based on assumptions about the hierarchy of
difference.

12.

An odalisque is an Eastern slave or concubine found

especially in a Sultan's seraglio or harem.

13.

I am aware that discourses of the veil in the West are

not as homogeneous as they might at first seem.

As I point

out on p. 33, discourses of the veil, as well as imperialist
discourses are not uniform, nor static, but rather they
reflect their historical and cultural contexts.

14.

Products with these images include: Casbah brand

couscous pilaf and Uncle Ben's brand specialty rices pilaf.

97
15.

For examples of this see: Hepburn 1994, Fatima 1994,

and "Women have become targets in undeclared war" 1994.

16.

CBC is the common name for the Canadian Broadcasting

Corporation.

17.

The official definition of multiculturalism is, the

recognition of the diverse cultures of a plural society
based on three principles: we all have an ethnic origin
(equality); all our cultures deserve respect (dignity); and
cultural pluralism needs official support (community).
Source:

Canada. Report of the Standing Committee on

Multiculturalism. (1987) Multiculturalism: Building the
Canadian mosaic. Ottawa: Queen's Printer, p. 87.

98
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Ill

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Fig. 1

Book cover. Mvinsch, Robert (1995) From far away.
Toronto: Annick Press. Art work by Michael
Martchenko.

112

Fig. 2

"Tuareg" watercolour by Irene Klar.
Published and distributed by:
Links Fine Art Cards,
Box 33036, Glenwood Postal Outlet,
Edmonton, Alberta
T5P 4VB

113

Fig. 3

Compact disc jacket. The Toraia Orchestra of
Algiers. (1997) Ya Bav! London: Tradition.

114

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115

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Jean-Jules-Antoine LeComte de Nouy. L 'esclave
blanche. The white slave. 1868. Oil on canvas.

117
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7.1 Jean-Auguste Domonique Ingres. Odalisque.
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1883. Oil on canvas.

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Cover illustration from McLachlan, A. and K.
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Label from a bottle of President's Choice brand
Memories of Damascus glaze and sauce. The image
is identical to Fig. 4.

121

Fig. 11

These photos appear in full colour taking up 3/4
of the front page of the Insight section of the
12 April 1997 Toronto Star, p. Cl.

122

Pig. 12

In a 1997 World Press Photo of the Year, an
Algerian woman grieves after the massacre in
Benthala, Algeria. This photo appeared in the 14
February 1998 Prince Georoe Citizen, p.30.

123

Fig. 13

This picture illustrates a story in the 7 October
1996 Maclean's magazine entitled, "The tunnel that
started the battle" about Palestinian reaction to
the opening of an underground passageway in
Jerusalem.

Fig. 14

This photo illustrates Don Belt's article on conflict in Galilee in the June 1995 National
Geographic.

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125

Fig. 15

This portrait of a mother with her war-injured
child accompanies an article on the on-going
conflict in Afghanistan in the October 1993 issue
of National Geographic.

126

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Cover of a special insert entitled "Not again for
heaven's sake" in the 6 August 1994 issue of The
Economist on Islam and its impact on the West.

127

Fig. 17

This photo captioned "Islam and the West: The next
war they say" is in a special insert on
Islam in the 6 August 1994 issue of The Economist.

128

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Fig. 18

This photo is captioned "Young women in a Tehran
street stray from the colour black as the strict
I s l p i c dress code is relaxed.” It illustrates an
article entitled "Modernists take on Iran's
mullahs" in the 12 April 1998 Guardian Weekly.

129

Fig. 19

This photo appears in the 4 May 1997 Guardian
Weekly. The caption describes how these women are
lined up to vote in Yemen's parliamentary
elections where 2,306 candidates are seeking 301
seats.

130

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131

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originally published in the Ottawa Citizen in
1997. The caption reads. Summer in the city:
1998?

132

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Cartoon by Guy Badeaux (pseudonym Bado) originally
published in Le Droit, Ottawa in 1996.

133

Fig. 23

Illustration from Munsch, Robert (1995) From far
awav. Toronto: Annick Press. Art work by Michael
Martchenko.

134

Fig. 24

Lurie's World. Cartoon from Time Magazine,
July 8, 1996.