I think that in both France and Germany, for different reasons, the burka has come to signify not only the threat of islam but a certain threat to secularism itself. I am not sure that the burka states identity any more definitively than an excellent dress by Christian Dior. Both are clearly means through which cultural belonging are signified or, rather, means through which that signification is attempted. I have heard debates in France, for instance, in which public intellectuals who support the ban on the veil (le foulard) argue that the veil has only one meaning. Then they (Elisabeth Roundinesco, most prominently), proceed to argue that it is (a) an assertion of female subordination within Islam (and so contrary to principles of equality that ostensibly characterize western systems of justice, (b) an affiliation with Islamic fundamentalism (which is a joke, considering, for instance, the fashion in scarves that prevails in cosmopolitan areas such as Cairo), (c) an assault on secularism. Of course, if religious garb is the issue, then it would seem that Jewish men who wear the kepah (yarmulkah) would be also suspect.
But in actuality, the burka as well as the yarmulke have different meanings. It can be a sign of private faith; it can be a way of signifying a certain belonging to community; the burka can be a way of negotiating shame and sexuality in a public sphere, or preserving a woman’s honor, and even a way of resisting certain western modes of dress that signify a full encroachment of fashion and commodity dress that signifies the cultural efforts to efface Islamic practice. I cannot imagine that it only signifies one thing, and whatever it does signify cannot have any bearing on whether these individuals should be admitted into school. Even those who are in favor of integration and assimilation of Islamic communities into Europe – that is, those who do not recognize that Europe is already constituted by numerous Islamic communities – should be in favor of opening the public schools to those who wear the burka, since it will be in those schools that cultural encounters will take place that allows both Islamic and non-islamic students the chance to learn something about how various people actually live, what form their beliefs take, and what politics do or do not follow from those beliefs. In the place of a phobic and reductive projection of Islam, we might then have a more knowledgeable approach to these matters, one that affirms the diversity of islams, the complexity of women’s place and agency within Islamic practice, and the particular cultural negotiations that an Islamic woman makes in the context of rural and urban Germany in these times.
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In a way, we are confronted with the problem that Susan Sontag identified some years ago when she argued that war photography has the power to shock, but not to instruct. I wonder to what extent some of the photos you mention are part of a culture industry that keeps us in a state of shock and fear, and which compels us to give up any effort at understanding global events. It is as if we, those of us in Europe and the US, predominantly white and secular, are asked to give up the practice of thinking and, indeed, the practice of critique itself, in the face of this fearful, new reality against which we can only hope for security. We are rendered docile in this regard, and in the US, at least until recently, it has led to a willingness to give up constitutional liberties for ourselves and those we imprison, to subject ourselves to illegal surveillance, and to live in an ethos of xenophobia. I do not think we can appeal to some non-violent disposition of women in order to oppose the latest version of the war industry. It is important to remember that Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meir, and Condoleezza Rice both have perpetrated wars, and there is nothing internal to women as such that keep them from embracing destruction as a political policy. On the other hand, there are important movements, such as Women in Black, that suggest that the social labor of mourning falls upon women differentially, and those groups work to derive a politics of non-violence from the cultural experience of mourning. But this kind of movement result from the social division of emotional labor, the traditional place of women as the ones who mourn their fathers and brothers. But if we think about one such mourner, Antigone, we find that her sorrow is mixed with rage, and that it leads her to break the law, assume a certain criminality in relation to an unjust law. It is not too difficult, then, to understand how sorrow and rage might work together to dispose a woman to become a suicide bomber, if she understands that the life she leads, and the life that her people are leading, is already a non-life, a life that is as good as dead. I think that suicide bombing is a social commentary on a social death that has already taken place. This does not justify it. I hope for other kinds of political interventions, and my own dispositions are non-violent, even sometimes unrealistically so. But I think we should not be surprised to find women, educated women, who make that choice.
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I am quite sure that feminism should not resign in the face of such instrumentalization. You are right to describe it as such, but there are many ways to take issue with this situation. I think the first point would be to ally with women’s movements in Afghanistan itself, and to see through what terms they are articulating that struggle. The opposition to torture and rape seems crucial in this regard, but here we have to consider the vulnerability of newly liberated Afghan women to US violence as well. The sudden unveiling of Afghani women on the pages of The New York Times when the US moved into that country was juxtaposed with an image of men suddenly released into a pile of pornographic images. It raised the question of whether the Times was itself performing or lauding pornography. I do not want to get in a debate about pornography here, but would only suggest that we have to wonder whether the ›freedom‹ that the US defends in its military ventures is not one that involves making women more available to sexual appropriation rather than less. In this sense, it is not about women’s sexual freedom, but about men’s, and about a certain masculine notion of appropriation that is very much linked to military conquer and the assertion of nationalism.
I think that when the media focuses on the subordination of women within Turkish immigrant communities, it very often is trying to announce the superiority and more enlightened status of German culture. But it also authorizes its own paternalistic policies, including means of forcible integration. I think that ›integration‹ as a model has to be opposed. It belongs to a framework in which there is either separatism or integration. And both of those options miss the possibility of cultural difference, of cultural heterogeneity, as being precisely what is German now, and certainly what is European now. It sets up both the German and the European as nostalgic and racialist ideals to which new immigrants are compelled to conform. So feminism, once again, needs to care not simply about the status of women, but about opposing forms of national and racial purity and superiority. There can be no feminism within the contemporary global situation that does not actively contest the kind of nationalist violence that pervades immigration policy in Europe right now.
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I think that we have not to play the game of the charismatic leader, since if it is a man who leads with his charisma, he does not lead because people have weighed his views or the reasons for what he believes. I think we have to move away from charismatic power, and remember its deep links with fascism. For this reason, I would not be happy to find a charismatic woman with the power to counter the charisma of Bin Laden or, indeed, Bush/Blair. I think that women’s political power is in organizations, collectives, and that the more thoroughly we can link feminism with anti-racist politics and politics that seeks to enfranchise new immigrant communities, the better off we will be. There also have to be women’s groups that object to rape and violence, but they must formulate their views within the parameters of contemporary bio-power. This is why feminism has to be involved in anti-war mobilizations, in the politics of demographics as well as the politics of reproduction. This will be a matter of overcoming parochial networks to reach global ones, and of recasting our analyses transnationally, to bring in strong numbers and cast our positions broadly in light of the contemporary organization of power and violence. We cannot afford to be narrow, identitarian, or culturalist at such a juncture.
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I think we need to think more carefully about the sexual division of labor, but not assume that we know, sociologically, who women are, and who men are. After all, the categories, and the subjects whom they structure, are being made as a consequence of this sexual division of labor. We need to think again about the sexual division of war: who supplies, who fights, who mourns, who decides? My sense is that feminism does not belong to women, but to anyone who believes that equality and justice should prevail, regardless of gender. And if these means that men, women, trans people, the genderqueer are feminists, then so be it. Most important is that we see that gender politics are working in the middle of the politics of war, of new nationalisms, of racism, and of new immigration politics, and the problematics of displaced peoples. So such a broad-based movement would involve men and women and others of every gender because what would be most important would not be ›our identities‹ but the world we are trying to make, unmake, and remake together.
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Full interview here.