The French, The Veil and The Look

The NY Times just ran this interesting piece on France's recent ban on the veil in public places. Some of the essays we have read this semester serve as great tools for understanding the potential for symbolic intervention that the veil may pose. And, perhaps, how feminists may appropriate it in a way that divorces it from its religious attachments. As the article notes, the veil "interrupts the circulation of coquetry" and reminds French people daily that the "civilizing mission" of its colonies has failed. Mostly, it allows women to "see out," without allowing anyone (men) to "see in." When Interior Minister Claude Guéant defends the principles behind the ban as "secularism" and "equality between man and woman," it's easy to see how threatening to the economy of the patriarchal look the veil is. We know that this claimed "equality" is actually one in which women are looked-at and man look at her (despite possible fissures). If the veil blocks the always already male-to-female look, then the very circulatory system of patriarchy, which guarantees its functioning, gets jammed. The veil announces a withdrawal from an economy that basically founds human subjectivity as we know it,and experience it, rendering the effects of the mirror into impenetrable opaqueness. It disables recognition and, therefore, mis-recognition. It, at the same time, and ironically, invites another kind of look that bounces back to the Western looker (in disapproval, or even horror), perhaps calling attention to the naturalization of an economy that should be "absurd" (similar to the possible effects of camp vis-a-vis the feminine masquerade). Of course the niqab usually means more than just this perhaps ancillary, perhaps accidental, symbolic intervention. If we think of the veil as a feminist refusal, accidental or not, we may be able to see through the self-righteous rhetoric of "equality" and join Luce Irigaray in asking: "Equal to whom?"

Verlan: Beyond Tactical Inversions

Kobena Mercer's discussion of oppositional strategies by the subaltern and the hegemonic (via inter-culturation) through style (the zoot suit, the Afro, the Dreadlock) in "Black Hair/Style Politics" reminds me of the linguistic inversion intervention by North Africans (at least originally) in France. One could make the crude equivalence that "verlan" is the "ebonics" of France's oppressed. It basically consists of literally inverting the sound of syllables in a creative way. "Femme" (woman) becomes "moef", "flic" (cop) becomes "keuf", "fou" (mad) becomes "ouf" and "beur" (already a slang for "Arab") becomes "rebeu." This kind of street talk signifies hyper-masculinity, ghetto-ness, street-smartness and an appropriation of oppression into a willingness to talk back. In a culture that prides itself in being classy and proper, verlan can mean major ruptures, even as it is assimilated by the general "youth culture." It is also very commonly used in French hip-hop and other music genres. The name of Belgian-Rwandan singer Stromae (pictured above) is itself a product of verlan from the original word "maestro." Here is one of his really amazing tracks, "Alors on Danse" (the screen itself is chopped in half in this instance):



For Mercer, I suppose, this kind of literal inversion alone wouldn't accomplish much besides reiterating the language of the oppressed as the simple opposite of the master('s) language. Except that it probably achieves much more than a mere syntactic inversion, as verlan chops words in half, re-arranges them skillfully, re-shuffles them, re-slang-fies them in a mis-en-abime-esque manner. This symbolic intervention in language itself should also be read not just as a source for transgression but also as a symptom of other transgressions already at work that find in language itself some kind of utter-able form.