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Burqa: Garment As Signifier 2 Burqa: Garment as Signifier The significance of the signifier does not reside in the object beheld, but in the beholder. Copyright © 2012 Catherine Cartwright-Jones Cover Graphic by Alex Morgan Published by Henna Page Publications, a division of TapDancing Lizard LLC Stow, Ohio, 44224 USA All rights Reserved. Catherine Cartwright-Jones Burqa: Garment as Signifier Cultural Geography, Political Science, Sociology, Anthropology Burqa: Garment as Signifier Copyright © 2012 Catherine Cartwright-Jones TapDancing Lizard LLC This book is provided free by hennapage.com and mehandi.com Please purchase henna and body art supplies from http://www.mehandi.com 3 Burqa: Garment as Signifier 7 yards of polyester as Honor, Protection, Purity, Prestige, Oppression, Resistance, Violence, Poverty, and a Justification for Military invasion The significance of the signifier does not reside in the object beheld, but in the beholder. “Burqa: Garment as Signifier” was a research paper originally written as part of completion of the Masters of Liberal Studies degree at Kent State University, in Kent, Ohio, USA, by Catherine Cartwright-Jones in 2004. The paper was edited, and a foreword added in 2012. In 2012, Catherine made a good faith effort to reconnect with the original websites and contact image owners cited in the paper. Most of the original websites no longer are online, and the contact emails were returned “Mail delivery failed: returning message to sender.” In lieu of explicit permission, TapDancing Lizard LLC claims fair use of material quoted for academic research and educational material, with full citations. This paper was originally written in partial fulfillment for PhD, 2004, with notes and introduction added 2012 The significance of the signifier does not reside in the object beheld, but in the beholder. Burqa: Garment as Signifier Copyright © 2012 Catherine Cartwright-Jones TapDancing Lizard LLC This book is provided free by hennapage.com and mehandi.com Please purchase henna and body art supplies from http://www.mehandi.com 4 Contents: Foreword …………………………………………………………………………………7 Part I: Burqa: Garment as Signifier …………………………………………………….17 Veiling within Islamic Geographies: Signifier and Discipline in Space ………………..21 The Burqa and Veils within Islamic Geographies: Law and Resistance ….….…………25 The Burqa as Signifier in Context: Islamic Pashtun Afghanistan ………………………27 The Burqa in the Shop …………………………………………………………………..28 The Burqa within Afghani Geographies: Ethnic Signifier ………………………...……31 The Burqa within Afghani Geographies: Signifier in Personal Expression …………….32 The Burqa within Afghani Geographies: Physical Environment of the Steppe ……...…34 The Burqa within Afghani Geographies: Physical Environment of the Marketplace …..35 The Burqa within Afghani Geographies: Public Spaces and Men’s Places……………..40 The Burqa in Afghani Geographies: Private Spaces ………………………….…………45 Part II: The Burqa and the Taliban: The Burqa and the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan: Boundaries Disrupted….…………………………………………….…….…………….48 The Burqa and the Taliban: Boundaries Re-Established…………………………….…..49 The Burqa and the Taliban: Boundaries Enforced ………………………………………52 Part III: The Politicization of the Burqa in the West: Images of the Burqa and Afghani Women in West prior to 2001, and Sharbat Gula ….……...…………………………….57 The Burqa and RAWA………………………………………………….……………….61 Burqa: Garment as Signifier Copyright © 2012 Catherine Cartwright-Jones TapDancing Lizard LLC This book is provided free by hennapage.com and mehandi.com Please purchase henna and body art supplies from http://www.mehandi.com 5 RAWA uses the Burqa as a Signifier to the West …………………...………………….62 RAWA creates the discourse of “Fundamentalism-Blighted” Afghanistan ……...……..63 The Burqa as Signifier Extracted from Indigenous Geography and offered to US News Media Following 9/11……………………………………………………………………68 The Western Gaze and the Burqa ……………………………………………………….72 Burqa as Signifier used by Rand, AP, Reuters and the US Government ……….………80 Lifting the Burqa becomes a Signifier of Support for the West …………………...……84 Conclusion ………………………………………………………………………………97 References ……………………………………………………………………………….98 Burqa: Garment as Signifier Copyright © 2012 Catherine Cartwright-Jones TapDancing Lizard LLC This book is provided free by hennapage.com and mehandi.com Please purchase henna and body art supplies from http://www.mehandi.com 6 Figure 1: Cover image: Engraving of Persian woman in a Burqa. 1843. Librarie Historique-Artisique. Author’s collection Burqa: Garment as Signifier Copyright © 2012 Catherine Cartwright-Jones TapDancing Lizard LLC This book is provided free by hennapage.com and mehandi.com Please purchase henna and body art supplies from http://www.mehandi.com 7 Foreword: Figure 2: A chador, a form of burqa, worn by a Muslim woman in India, 1922. Author’s collection. I wrote “Burqa: Garment as Signifier” in 2004 as part of the preparatory work for my PhD dissertation in cultural geography. I was focused on the geographies of henna, and part of that focus included studying women’s body scripts in the cultures where henna is an indigenous tradition. I searched and saved every news article from every media I could access that had any mention of henna, as part of being a diligent researcher. After 2001, I found increasingly frequent mentions of henna in Afghanistan, if for no other reason than henna is worn by Afghani women, and the USA was involved in military action in Afghanistan. Burqa: Garment as Signifier Copyright © 2012 Catherine Cartwright-Jones TapDancing Lizard LLC This book is provided free by hennapage.com and mehandi.com Please purchase henna and body art supplies from http://www.mehandi.com 8 Figure 3: “Jewish Women” L.C Page and Company, 1900 The media, viral emails, newsgroups, and news reports on television increasingly used images of women in blue burqas as a signifier of oppression, and as a justification for western allies to send military forces into Afghanistan. I had file cabinets and shelves lined with books of the history and practice of women covering and secluding. As a Burqa: Garment as Signifier Copyright © 2012 Catherine Cartwright-Jones TapDancing Lizard LLC This book is provided free by hennapage.com and mehandi.com Please purchase henna and body art supplies from http://www.mehandi.com 9 henna artist, I had clients who covered and secluded. The news cycle implication that ‘the burqa equals oppression’ was simplistic and ill informed. The ubiquitous blue burqa seemed to me to be a red herring for escalating western military presence in Afghanistan, while the actual strategic objectives, political, economic, military, while a masked vendetta following 9/11 was obscured. Though it is always tempting to simply yell at the 6 o’clock news, social media, and online news groups for purveying misinformation, such expressions are usually fairly futile. I had an assignment in Geographic Thought to produce a research paper through post-structural approaches to conflicts in cultural geographies, significance and signifiers, the beholder and the beheld. I thought that the western perception of the burqa as instrument of oppression, conflated with fears of conservative and vocal Islamists, had interesting potential for analysis. I settled into researching and writing,” Burqa; Garment as Signifier from the Umma to the USA: 7 yards of polyester as Honor, Protection, Purity, Prestige, Oppression, Resistance, Violence, Poverty, and a Justification for Military invasion.” There are some points implicit in western misunderstanding of women’s covering that I would like to review in this introduction. Covering has been a fashion for women in semi-arid regions of this planet for thousands of years. Women in these regions all cover to a greater or lesser extent, because a fine fabric, drawn over the face and shoulders provides some shelter from the ever-present Burqa: Garment as Signifier Copyright © 2012 Catherine Cartwright-Jones TapDancing Lizard LLC This book is provided free by hennapage.com and mehandi.com Please purchase henna and body art supplies from http://www.mehandi.com 10 dust, bursts of wind carrying dust, and occasional simooms (dust storms). Dust is irritating to the eyes and nose, and long exposure to dust can cause respiratory damage. These regions also have high albedo (reflected sunlight) and exposure to sun weathers skin and causes skin cancer. Where there are shopping areas with butcheries, vegetable sellers, and restaurants without western-style plastic hygienic packaging, refrigeration, antiseptics, and waste disposal systems, flies find attractive accommodations. Flies are a nuisance and disease vector to any person who has the slightly damp and fly-attractive spots of eyes, nose and ears. Covering the face with a fine gauze cloth is a simple, sensible way for a woman to mitigate environmental hazards to her health in this environment. The effects of sun, wind, and pestilence, among many other things, were once culturally framed as ‘The Evil Eye.’ Women avoided the Evil Eye by covering themselves, wearing amulets, and other behaviors which often coincidentally were beneficial habits. Much of the semi-arid zone happens to currently coincide with demographic prevalence of the Muslim faith and culture, but covering is not limited to Muslim women. As you can see from the images in this introduction, Coptic Christian, Jewish, and Muslim women in this region all have worn variations of the burqa. Covering and secluding the female body is not an exclusively Muslim concept,
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