Page 132 - Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere

of dress, and the nature of the language used rather than only its substance. In
other words, a “politics of presence,” as a broadened notion of engagement in
the public sphere, allows for the inclusion of a greater variety of ways in which
people “make a statement,” as it were. Whereas this gains particular saliency
when discussing contributions of subaltern groups that may be less well versed
in effectively presenting their points of view in normalized and hence accept-
able formats of “rational argumentation,” such forms of “body politics” may
also be state-driven.
In Turkey and Iran a cultural politics that encouraged or even obliged women
to unveil became a central element of state policy from the 1920s on. Here the
modern public sphere did not stand in opposition to, or even at a distance from,
the state; on the contrary, issues of dress were part and parcel of of¤cial reform
programs of modernization. In Turkey, where the Kemalist state attempted to
make Islam subservient to the state, state institutions were heavily involved in
removing all markers of Islam from the public sphere. This included policies
and regulations that were instrumental in discouraging women from wear-
ing Islamic dress; in particular settings, such as state schools, women were, in
fact, forbidden to cover their heads (Göle 1996). In Iran, where Reza Shah also
strongly advocated cultural modernization through dress codes, the regulations
concerning women’s dress culminated in a general ban for women to wear the
chador that lasted from 1936 till 1941 (Baker 1997). As a result, whereas some
would avoid engaging in a hetero-social public sphere altogether, others started
to take part in the developing secularist culture where refraining from wear-
ing hijab was not only rapidly becoming acceptable but, as the crucial marker
of modernity, also turned into a hegemonic practice (see Navaro-Yashin 2002).
Yet, also for the latter, this did not simply mean a widening of the ¤eld of pos-
sibilities, an entry into the world of freedom and emancipation. As Najmabadi
(1993) points out, the physical movement of uncovered women into the public
sphere was conditioned upon women developing a particular form of desexual-
ized body language, that required new forms of self-discipline. 11
The cultural politics of particular state institutions that have strongly propa-
gated (if not obliged) women to unveil and to participate in a hetero-social pub-
lic sphere raises not only the question regarding the conditions in which women
were deemed suitable to participate. Also inherent in such a modern public
sphere may be the exclusion of those whose normative notions are different,
often women from the rural areas and the poorer sections of urban society.
Whereas a modern public sphere may indeed include new participants, women’s
moves into the modern-secular public sphere not only brought about the sani-
tization of women’s language and the disciplining of women’s bodies but also
the concomitant demise of a homo-social women’s world (Najmabadi 1993;
see also Abu-Lughod 1998). The point here is not to naively idealize systems
of gender segregation but, ¤rst, to acknowledge the existence of such semi-
autonomous female public spheres and, more speci¤cally, to investigate these in
12
relation to the development of a modern public sphere. For forms of female

Representing Family Law Debates in Palestine 121