Veiled and unveiled: bodies without shadows in the fantasy of unveiling freedom

Abstract

Veiled women in the West are menacing. Their visible invisibility is a cause of obsession. What is this fixation on the veil and the veiled woman? In this thesis I frame this question in another way: what is beneath the veil more than a woman? The thesis investigates the preoccupation with the veiled body through the discursive imaging and imagining of Muslim women. It examines the relationship between the body and knowledge through the politics of freedom as grounded in the body, in the index of flesh. It contends that the impulse to unveil is more than a desire to free the Muslim woman. Behind the desire to release (Muslim) women’s bodies from the veil is the intolerable possibility of lim..