Veiling, Gender and Space: On the fluidity of ‘public’ and ‘private’

Veiling has in the ‘Western’ mind been associated with the mysterious harem for centuries. Over-eroticized ideas about harems and public baths in the ‘Orient’ appear in traveller narratives, art and literature alike. For centuries, Muslim women (and Muslim men) have been created through romantic, exotic, erotic, sensual, sensational stories by Europeans. Yet it is indeed the case that veiling and harem have been intimately connected in many locations across the Middle East and North Africa. While the nature of these spaces and practices has often been misunderstood, the interconnectedness of dress, construction of space, and gender is undeniable in practices of veiling. It has been recognized that sartorial fashion and architecture in Europe have tended to follow similar aesthetic trends. Even more fundamentally, any spatial practice must be in balance with the built environment. If dress is understood as a spatial practice, it follows that dress systems must be in balance with architecture and the built environment. The interesting question, then, becomes this: what kind of adaptations are needed when a ‘foreign’ dress practice, following ‘foreign’ spatial logic, is brought into a different environment? In other words, how do veiling women manage European spaces and spatial practices? In this chapter I consider veiling as dress, and as spatially located practice. This means that I consider veiling as a phenomenon that is socially meaningful, embodied and contextual. Dress is always defined according to social situation and social environment, and according to who is present; shared socio-moral norms define the acceptability of dress in a situation and in society. One important element of such norms is sexual morality, and related norms that define the acceptability of exposure of the gendered body, for example, has argued that the French headscarf debates in the early 2000s were partly framed through French idea(l)s of sexual liberation, and through what such liberation meant to the exposure of the female body. Thus, one element of ‘foreigness’ of the hijab in Europe is the perceived difference in terms of which parts of the body are customarily covered. But beyond this element, I shall argue, there is also a deeper, spatial level of difference, which requires various adaptation strategies from veiling women in Europe.