Veiled Constellations

Abstract

The “Veiled Constellations: The Veil, Critical Theory, Politics, and Contemporary Society” conference took place at York University’s Keele Campus and at the University of Toronto on 3-5 June 2010. Sponsors included the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Toronto Initiative for Iranian Studies, the Noor Cultural Centre, the Canadian Council of Muslim Women, the Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations, and multiple departments and associations at both universities. The two graduate students who co-organized the conference, Melissa Finn and Arshavez Mozafari, did an excellent job in choosing papers that highlighted the veil’s multi-faceted appearances both in contemporary society and academic discourses as something that is under-theorized and overlooked at the same time. The event’s advertising and signage played with the tropes of overwritten and overlooked, suggesting that veiled women can be both silenced and subjected to “therapeutic, punitive attention” (Edward Said, Covering Islam, xxxv-vi). For example, www.veiledconstellations.com shows two faceless women veiled in black, a torrent of water flooding the scene and pouring over them and through the ovals where their faces should be. This serves as a kind of natural disaster or Armageddon trope on the body of Muslim women. A prominent poster pictured a profiled woman wearing hijab, her face overwritten with overlapping Arabic words, while alternating pink lines radiate from behind her face, as if it were giving off light. A third poster offers the common image of the exotic woman behind-the-veil, a partial photo of a woman wearing niqab, her perfectly arched eyebrows perhaps challenging the viewer to respond with the intrigued gaze, the desire to unveil her. While these posters meant to undo tired images of Muslim women, their ambiguous nature sometimes reinforced those very stereotypes ...