Committing Suicide for a Headscarf: Agency and the Feminist Subject in Orhan Pamuk’s Snow

Abstract

In her book, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (2005), Saba Mahmood points out that the identification of Islam as a patriarchal, conservative religion gives rise to the contention that the Islamic woman is a victim of the constrictive patriarchy of her religion, denied access to emancipatory modes of Western feminism. Mahmood argues that while this attitude of the West engages in a process of cultural hegemonisation by dangerously downplaying the uniqueness of the spatiocultural differences between the West and the Middle-East, it also ignores the exercising of individual will by the Islamic women. In my paper I will draw upon Mahmood’s argument that the veil is not merely a symbol for faith, but an instrument in the construction of self-identity to interpret the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk’s engagement with the idea of women’s suicides in a remote Turkish town in his novel Snow as an expression of oppression and thwarted autonomy resulting from the failure of a modernist state to accommodate non-liberal modes of agency and thought as embodied in the sartorial choice of a woman rejecting the emancipatory Western styles of dressing in favour of a traditional Muslim attire of a headscarf.

Keywords

• Islamic feminism
• female agency
• politics of the dress