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“You can’t know how they are inside”: The Ambivalence of Veiling and Discourses of the Other in Turkey

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Religion and Place

Abstract

The question of the veil and what it conceals has long been a trope within orientalist discourses. In our research with veiled women in Turkey, we find that the veil continues to work as an ambivalent signifier through which women position themselves within both Islamic and secular modernity in Turkey. We find that women who cover in a controversial style that has become popular in Turkey since the 1980s (what we are calling veiling fashion, or tesettür fashion) deploy the figure of the more completely veiled woman (those who wear the enveloping outer garment called the çarşaf) in order to stabilize their own positions, both discursively and socially. In their discussions, our participants emphasize the ambiguity of the çarşaf, opening up a discursive gap between outward appearance and inner piety. By destabilizing the religious signification of the çarşaf and by scripting its wearers as “other” – foreign, strange, threatening, and erotic – our research participants produce a discourse in which they themselves can become the pious but modern, socially integrated, authentically Turkish citizens of the republic.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Tesettür comes from an Arabic root and simply means “covering.” It is an umbrella term that is deployed in different ways. Many of our interviewees use tesettür to refer to religiously appropriate modest dress. We are using this term to refer specifically to a certain style of covering in Turkey, one that became popular in the 1980s and has since evolved into a fashion industry (see Gökarıksel and Secor 2009, 2010a, b).

  2. 2.

    Çarşaflı is used to refer to the wearers of this garment in Turkey.

  3. 3.

    According to a national survey conducted by Ali Çarkoğlu and Binnaz Toprak in 2006, only 1.1% of women wore çarşaf and 11.4% wore tesettür (Çarkoğlu and Toprak 2006). They found that 48.8% of women wore some kind of veiling.

  4. 4.

    We use the English word “veiling” to refer to a wide range of covering which includes headscarves, tesettür, and çarşaf.

  5. 5.

    This research was supported by the National Science Foundation (BCS-0723986 and BCS-0722825), with the project title: “Collaborative Research: The veiling-fashion industry: transnational geographies of Islamism, capitalism, and identity.” In 2009, we conducted six focus groups with the consumers of tesettür fashion in Istanbul and Konya. Organized along the lines of age and socioeconomic status, the groups were each comprised of eight women who did not previously know one another. Fieldwork was conducted with the assistance of the Istanbul-based social research firm, Sosyal Araştırmalar Merkezi, who recruited participants from their databases. The authors are solely responsible for the content of this chapter.

  6. 6.

    Scholars have also been interested in the inner space created by the çarşaf and other similar garments. For example, Papanek (1982) argues that the purdah in Pakistan provides “portable seclusion” to women, while Abu-Lughod (2002) likens the Afghan burqa to a “mobile home.” Both emphasize that the veil carves out sanctified or protected space for women in public spaces, thus enabling women’s mobility. In our focus groups, tesettürlü women did not view the çarşaf as enabling or increasing women’s mobility in the context of Turkey. Their inquiries and criticisms about the çarşaf were driven more by suspicion and skepticism about the inner space the çarşaf created.

  7. 7.

    This line of thinking follows a strategy employed by some “Islamic feminists” who argue for the need to understand the underlying principles of Islamic prescriptions and to apply them to the present context (Mernissi 1987; Wadud 1999).

  8. 8.

    Ironically, perhaps, the popularity of both modes of covering, the çarşaf and tesettür fashion, is a recent phenomenon in Turkey. Perhaps the most “Turkish” mode of covering is what our participants refer to as “grandma” style: a simple, patterned scarf tied under the chin (Gökarıksel and Secor 2010b).

  9. 9.

    See Robert Olson (2000) for a discussion of how the attempt of a parliamentarian, Merve Kavakçı, to take her oath of office wearing a headscarf in April 1999 caused an uproar that brought to the fore Iranian support for the Turkish pro-veiling movement. Recent books such as Bulut (2008) and Koloğlu (2008) discuss tesettür in Turkey as a phenomenon with strong links to the Arab Middle East and Iran.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Geography, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

    Banu Gökarıksel

  2. Department of Geography, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY, USA

    Anna Secor

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  1. Banu Gökarıksel
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  2. Anna Secor
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Correspondence to Banu Gökarıksel .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. , School of Geography, Politics and Sociol, Newcastle University, Newcastle Upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, United Kingdom

    Peter Hopkins

  2. , Department of Geography, National University of Singapore, Arts Link 1, Singapore, 117570, Singapore

    Lily Kong

  3. , School of Geosciences, The University of Edinburgh, Geography Building, Drummond Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9XP, United Kingdom

    Elizabeth Olson

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Gökarıksel, B., Secor, A. (2013). “You can’t know how they are inside”: The Ambivalence of Veiling and Discourses of the Other in Turkey. In: Hopkins, P., Kong, L., Olson, E. (eds) Religion and Place. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-4685-5_6

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