The Autumn Issue

I LOVE PARIS IN THE SPRINGTIME, I love Paris in the fall… I love Paris when art explodes onto the street and politics spills over into matters of daily life, throwing into turmoil the otherwise carefully compartmentalised areas of state, religion and everyday existence. It was a pleasantly warm October this year in Paris, which was just as well since two young women decided to employ a powerful juxtaposition to protest the nationwide burqa ban that will come into force next year. Draped in burqas from head to waist, leaving exposed hot pants and bare legs, they strutted the busy streets of Paris in strappy heels. The filmed clip, brimming with observers’ looks that range from curious to stunned—including a policewoman who asked to take a picture of them—became an instant viral hit. The women, who call themselves NiqaBitch, explain their protest as a necessary commentary on the French state’s diktat vis-à-vis female apparel.

Through the same glorious autumn, a street artist was changing the face of advertising in Paris’ metro. Often referred to as a French Banksy, Princess Hijab paints veils over the female faces in lavishly designed ads throughout the underground network. Princess Hijab—who may or not be Muslim or, indeed, a woman—deliberately scars the visual landscape, a ‘hijabisation’ that can, as with NiqaBitch, be taken as a political statement. The graffiti veil is at once an explicit questioning of the notion that the state has the right to determine how a woman should dress, as well as a subversive critique of the female form’s exploitation in a hyper-consumerist advertising culture. On both levels, it is a powerful reminder that a woman’s body is a hotly contested battleground.

What is particularly striking about these artistic responses to France’s upcoming burqa ban is the return to the first principle, as it were, of the debate: women themselves. The current discussion rarely engages with the more ponderous aspects of the issue—say the nature of laïcité (the 1905 law separating Church and State that the French government has used in its defence) or a so-called multicultural approach (what the British media famously imagined was their more inclusive manner of functioning with minorities). Instead, these artists are (as I agree) taking the matter back to the female body and are creatively challenging viewers about its very nature and the meanings ascribed to it. Fashioning an artistic discourse that would make the most fervent post-modernist proud, they position the female body as a floating signifier: a form to which meaning is being arbitrarily attached by various stakeholders, a form to which meaning—such as it exists—no longer resides in the form but in its interpretation. Women become a receptacle of expectation: either the burqa-clad top half with all the attendant prejudice that a veiled woman inevitably faces (and here it is worth quoting Obama’s Cairo speech which makes the following succinct distinction: ‘I reject the view of some in the West that a woman who chooses to cover her hair is somehow less equal. But I do believe that a woman who is denied an education is denied equality’) or the lower half, in hot pants, who fits into a separate and also problematic category of her own.

Similarly, the hijabisation of the luxe department store ads—that are themselves landmarks in the daily Parisian visual landscape—neatly position the female form at the crossroads where state, religion and capitalism meet; and suggest, therefore, that the burqa ban is indicative of a larger power nexus. These ads provocatively reduce the female form to a pawn position in the larger game by destabilising the meaning of visual female representation. Princess Hijab intriguingly takes the subversion of fixed meaning one step further by problematising that of the veil as well, calling it as “profane as it is sacred, consumerist and sanctimonious.”

The anticipated reaction to the burqa-clad top half and the bare legs of NiqaBitch or the luxe advertisement figure with a black veil is one of disconnection: between a facile singularity of what one expects of a woman and the multiplicity of roles she can inhabit far beyond simplistic definitions; between the notion of a fixed meaning and the nature of transgressively alternate realities. In case one needs a more explicit sense of the disconnection embodied by this debate, note that nowhere in the burqa ban is the word ‘woman’ or ‘Muslim’ or ‘veil’ even mentioned—a rather neat trick of legalese.

In all this slipperiness of meaning, then, what is the end game? Does all the sound and fury end in a debate about whether art can change the world in the classical French tradition à la Victor Hugo (with no small measure of irony): that an invasion of armies can be resisted but not an idea whose time has come? Or, and this is quite exciting for the viral generation, has the burqa become a Che Guevara-like symbol, separated from its religious meaning and co-opted into a popular cultural narrative? What does this latter shift mean for the female form and the future of feminist dialogue in art? What next for these artists? If the answers to these questions are still tricky to formulate, the first response should be, quite simply: watch this space for when the ban actually does come into play. And in the meantime, let’s hope winter is a little warmer than usual.