Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in
SpringerLink
Log in

The Woman Question

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
The Political Psychology of the Veil

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

Abstract

The chapter addresses “the Woman question” as the most powerful iteration of the Muslim Question. It asks, what makes unveiling an intrinsic metaphor for women’s liberation? The chapter critically examines how a situated desire appears and is regulated in the production of gendered subjects and what political and epistemic implications it has had on the feminist imaginary—the vision for a universal Woman’s freedom and becoming. It argues the racial dynamic of the veiled and unveiled, in the fantasy of unveiling freedom, reconfigures the relationship between women by offering women in the west the possibility of escaping ontological lack by projecting it on to the woman who bear its mark.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 84.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 109.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  • Abu-Lughod, Lila. Do Muslim Women Need Saving? Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013.

    Google Scholar 

  • Abu-Lughod, Lila. “Orientalism and Middle East Feminist Studies.” Feminist Studies 27, no. 1 (2001): 101–113.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ahmed, Leila. Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ahmed, Sara. “Affective Economies.” Social Text 22, no. 2 (2004): 117–139.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003.

    Google Scholar 

  • Asad, Talal. Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech. Berkeley: Townsend Centre for the Humanities, University of California Press, 2009.

    Google Scholar 

  • Asad, Talal. “Thinking About the Secular Body, Pain and Liberal Politics.” Cultural Anthropology 26, no. 4 (2011): 657–675.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Baldwin, James. Going to Meet the Man. San Francisco, CA: Vintage Books, 1965.

    Google Scholar 

  • Barlas, Asma. “Secular and Feminist Critiques of the Qur’an: Anti-Hermeneutics as Liberation?” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 32, no. 2 (2017): 111–121.

    Google Scholar 

  • Barnard, Suzanne, and Bruce Fink. Reading Seminar XX, Lacan’s Major Work on Love, Knowledge, and Feminine Sexuality. New York: SUNY Press, 2002.

    Google Scholar 

  • Berger, Anne-Emmanuelle. “The Newly Veiled Woman: Irigaray, Specularity, and the Islamic Veil.” Diacritics 28, no. 1 (1998): 93–119.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bilge, Sirma. “Beyond Subordination vs. Resistance: An Intersectional Approach to the Agency of Veiled Muslim Women.” Journal of Intercultural Studies 31, no. 1 (2010): 9–28.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bilge, Sirma. “Intersectionality Undone: Saving intersectionality from Feminist Intersectional Studies.” Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race 10, no. 12 (2013): 405–424.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Brown, Wendy. States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.

    Google Scholar 

  • Butler, Judith. Antigone’s Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.

    Google Scholar 

  • Butler, Judith. Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. Oxon: Routledge, 2011.

    Google Scholar 

  • Butler, Judith. “Foucault and the Paradox of Bodily Inscriptions.” The Journal of Philosophy 86, no. 11 (1989): 601–607.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Butler, Judith. “Sexual Politics, Torture, and Secular Time.” The British Journal of Sociology 59, no. 1 (March 2008): 1–23.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincialising Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cheng, Anne Anlin. Second Skin: Josephine Baker and the Modern Surface. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

    Google Scholar 

  • Copjec, Joan. Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cornell, Drucilla. “Doubly-Prized World: Myth Allegory and the Feminine.” Cornell Law Review 75, no. 2 (1990): 644–699.

    Google Scholar 

  • Davis, Angela. Policing the Black Man: Arrests, Prosecution and Imprisonment. New York: Pantheon Books, 2017.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. London: Pluto Press, 1986.

    Google Scholar 

  • Farías, Florincia. “The Body of the Hysterical Woman—The Feminine Body,” April 2010. http://www.champlacanien.net/public/docu/2/rdv2010pre5.pdf.

  • Farris, Sara. In the Name of Women’s Rights: The Rise of Femonationalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fassin, Erin. “Sexual Democracy: The New Racialization of Europe.” Journal of Civil Society 8, no. 3 (2012): 285–288.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fink, Bruce. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.

    Google Scholar 

  • Foucault, Michel. The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality I. Translated by Robert Hurley. London: Random House, 1978.

    Google Scholar 

  • Freud, Sigmund, and James Strachey. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. New York: Basic Books, 2000.

    Google Scholar 

  • Grosfugel, Ramón. Lecture on Intersectionality, University of South Africa, August 19, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FMEhyKqMWmA.

  • Grosz, Elizabeth. Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction. New York: Routledge, 1990.

    Google Scholar 

  • Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism—Theories of Representation and Difference. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.

    Google Scholar 

  • Guynn, Jessica. “BBQ Betty, Permit Patty and Why the Internet Is Shaming White People Who Police People ‘Simply for Being Black’.” USA Today, July 18 2018. https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2018/07/18/bbq-becky-permit-patty-and-why-internet-shaming-white-people-who-police-black-people/793574002/.

  • Hodgson, Barbara. Dreaming of East: Western Women and the Exotic Allure of the Orient. Vancouver: Greystone Books, 2007.

    Google Scholar 

  • Irigaray, Luce. The Sex Which Is Not One. Translated by Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke. New York: Cornell University Press, 1985.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kabir, Nahid Afrose. Young British Muslims: Identity, Culture, Politics and the Media. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010.

    Google Scholar 

  • Krips, Henry. Fetish. New York: Cornell University Press, 1999.

    Google Scholar 

  • Krips, Henry. “The Hijab, the Veil and Sexuation.” Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society 13, no. 1 (2008): 35–47.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kristeva, Julia. “Women’s Time.” [Alice Jardine and Harry Blake.] Journal of Women in Culture and Society 7, no. 1 (1981): 17.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book IV the Object Relation 1956–1957. Translated by L. V. A. Roche and Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller. New York: W. W. Norton, 1956–1957.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lacan, Jacques, Juliet Mitchell, and Jacqueline Rose. Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the école freudienne. New York: Pantheon Books, 1982.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mahmood, Saba. “Feminism, Democracy and Empire: Islam and the War on Terror.” In Women’s Studies on the Edge, edited by Joan Wallach Scott. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mahmood, Saba. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mancini, Susanna. “Patriarchy as the Exclusive Domain of the Other: The Veil Controversy, False Projection, and Cultural Racism.” International Journal of Constitutional Law 1, no. 2 (2011): 411–428.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Matviyekno, Svitlana. “The Veil and Capitalist Discourse: A Lacanian Reading of the Veil Beyond Islam.” (Re)-Turn: Journal of Lacanian Studies 6 (2011): 7.

    Google Scholar 

  • McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge, 1995.

    Google Scholar 

  • Miller, Jacques-Alain. “The Relation Between Sexes.” In Sexuation, SIC 3, edited by Renata Salecl. Durham: Duke University Press, 2000.

    Google Scholar 

  • Moors, Annelies. “The Dutch and the Face-Veil: The Politics of Discomfort.” European Association of Social Anthropologists 17, no. 4 (2009): 393–408.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Northup, Solomon. 12 Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup, a Citizen of New-York, Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853. Edited by David Wilson, Electronic ed., 1997 vols. Chapel Hill, NC: Documenting the American South, University of North Carolina, 1853.

    Google Scholar 

  • Parramore, Lynn Stuart. “White Females from Hell.” Lapham’s Quarterly, August 2, 2017. https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/white-females-hell.

  • Paur, Jasbir. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2007.

    Google Scholar 

  • Potok, Mark, and Janet Smith. “Women Against Islam.” Intelligence Report, June 10, 2015.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ragland, Ellie. “The Hysteric’s Truth.” In Reflections on Seminar XVII: Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis, edited by Justin Clemens and Russel Grigg. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ragland, Ellie. “The Masquerade, the Veil, and the Phallic Mask.” Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society 13 (2008): 8–23.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Razack, Sherene. “Imperilled Muslim Woman, Dangerous Muslim Men and Civilised Europeans: Legal and Social Responses to Forced Marriages.” Feminist Legal Studies 12 (2004): 129–174.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Razack, Sherene. Looking White People in the Eye: Gender, Race, and Culture in Courtrooms and Classrooms. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998.

    Google Scholar 

  • Riley, Denise. ‘Am I That Name?’ Feminism and the Category of ‘Women’ in History. London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 1988.

    Google Scholar 

  • Riordan, Primrose. “Hanson Wears Burqa in ‘Appalling’ Senate Stunt.” The Australian, August 17, 2017. https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/politics/pauline-hanson-wears-burka-in-senate/news-story/cd29b0ac7e07bab761004381e3a42882.

  • Rogers, Juliet. “Making the Crimes (Female Genital Mutilation) Act 1996, Making the ‘Non-mutilation Woman’.” The Australian Feminist Law Journal 18, no. 1 (2003): 93–113.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Rose, Jacqueline. Sexuality in the Field of Vision. London and New York: Verso Books, 1986.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ross, Marlon. Manning the Race: Reforming Black Men in the Jim Crow Era. New York and London: NYU Press, 2004.

    Google Scholar 

  • Salecl, Renata. “Love Anxieties.” In Reading Seminar XX: Lacan’s Major Work on Love, Knowledge, and Feminine Sexuality, edited by Suzanne Barnard and Bruce Fink. New York: State University of New York Press, 2002.

    Google Scholar 

  • Salecl, Renata. Perversions in Love and Hate. New York: Verso Books, 1998.

    Google Scholar 

  • Scott, Joan Wallach. The Fantasy of Feminist History. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.

    Google Scholar 

  • Scott, Joan Wallach. The Politics of the Veil. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007.

    Google Scholar 

  • Scott, Joan Wallach. Sex and Secularism. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2018.

    Google Scholar 

  • Soler, Colette. “Hysteria and Obsession.” In Reading Seminar I and II: Lacan’s Return to Freud, edited by Richard Feldstein, Bruce Fink, and Maire Jaanus. New York: State University New York Press 1999.

    Google Scholar 

  • Soler, Colette. What Lacan Said About Women: A Psychoanalytic Study. Michigan: Other Press, 2006.

    Google Scholar 

  • Spelman, Elizabeth V. Inessential Woman: Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought. Boston: Beacon Press, 1990.

    Google Scholar 

  • Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17, no. 1 (1987): 64–81.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999.

    Google Scholar 

  • Stoler, Anna Laura. “Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination.” Cultural Anthropology 23, no. 2 (2008): 191–219.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Thobani, Sunera. “White Wars: Western Feminisms and the ‘War on Terror’.” Feminist Theory 8, no. 2 (2007): 169–185.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Wiering, Jelle. “There Is a Sexular Body: Introducing a Material Approach to the Secular.” Secularism and Nonreligion 6, no. 8 (2011): 1–11.

    Google Scholar 

  • Yeğenoğlu, Meyda. Colonial Fantasies: Towards a Feminist Reading of Orientalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

    Google Scholar 

  • Zakaria, Rafia, Veil. New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017.

    Google Scholar 

  • Zayzafoon, Lamia Ben Youssef. The Production of the Muslim Woman: Negotiating Text, History, and Ideology. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2005.

    Google Scholar 

  • Žižek, Slavoj. “The Neighbour in Burka.” The Symptom 11 (2010).

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

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

    Sahar Ghumkhor

Authors
  1. Sahar Ghumkhor
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Sahar Ghumkhor .

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2020 The Author(s)

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Ghumkhor, S. (2020). The Woman Question. In: The Political Psychology of the Veil. Palgrave Studies in Political Psychology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32061-4_4

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation