Women of Cover in Contemporary Transnational Literature

Abstract

Muslim women’s veils are a global obsession. From the compulsory hijab laws in Iran to police stripping women of their burkinis on French beaches, the sight of the veil provokes visceral reactions. International public discourse on veiling tends to devolve into binary and prescriptive terms, often eclipsing Muslim women’s views on their own practices. In the rhetoric of saving “oppressed” women, the fear of difference emerges as the controversy’s crux in literary artifacts. What do Muslim women say about their own covering practices? Muslim women authors featured in this dissertation—Mariam Khan’s It’s Not About the Burqa: Muslim Women on Faith, Feminism, Sexuality and Race, Sabrina Mahfouz’s The Things I Would Tell You: British Muslim Women Write, and Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf—represent covering practices as performative of identity, refuting the binary assumptions of uncritical religious observance or coerced covering. And how does global solidarity with women of cover enter public discourse? I demonstrate through readings of Deborah Ellis’s The Breadwinner and Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children that fictional narratives can perform solidarity with women of cover. The Muslim veil in fiction serves the function of marking collective spaces for dissent, demonstrating the potential for feminism-in-action by investigating the mechanisms of solidarity. Further, the religious subject is often excluded from feminist thought, a gap this dissertation addresses. Finally, the veil might be understood not as a mechanism for masking or unmasking but rather for framing women’s solidarity in the context of dissensus. Women of Cover demonstrates that the Muslim veil, as a marker of difference, provides a useful paradigm for reimagining feminist solidarity, a counter to the assimilationist assumptions that are projected onto feminism. Ultimately, I argue that feminist solidarity requires dissensus.