Morality, Politics and Coiffeur
The BBC reports this week that Indonesian Clerics are calling for a ban on morally perilous hairdos.
This story seems to be a continuation of the rather strange debate around the morality and politics of the uses of fashion which had as one of its most visible stages the French state, which promoted a debate on French Identity in the aftermath of the ban on headscarfs–among other expressions of religious identity–and their respective political implications.
The indonesian case, offers a way to gauge the scope and reach of the French decision, which had been often ridiculed by both the left and the right on this side of the Atlantic. A substantive difference becomes apparent in looking at the two attempts to proscribe these two different forms of presenting the female body–the female head to be precise. At first blush, both of these demands seem to be of the very same type but, in fact there is an important difference which seems to come down to this: the Indonesian clerical demand is to thwart expression of sexual identity–as they see it–whereas the French legislation attempts to preempt the suppression or rather repression of expressions of sexual identity. So the French are precisely trying to foreclose the political force of clerical orders and demands, which though–as in the Indonesian case–are not legally binding, are, nonetheless, politically forceful. That is to say, by the mere force of the moral authority of the cleric–defined by his religious standing–these fatwas are politically binding. This kind of de facto power, forces one to wonder if a woman who covers herself or changes her hairdo for religious reasons could be said to be taking the cover freely. Unless one thinks that acting under threat of eternal damnation, communal shunning or public stoning is acting freely one would have to say that in fact, it is not.
Now, arguably any one individual woman could choose to cover her face and this one act may be understood in several different registers of identity. One of them, certainly being the assertion of her religious identity. However, the problem is that the headscarf still belongs to a history of the determination of the status of women as objects of possession and the source of moral degeneration. This is certainly by no means a monopoly of Islam, Judaism and Christianity have partaken of this, as when Christianity demands the covering of the female body in the guise of modesty of Jewish orthodox continues to cover the head of women or endorses the shaving of their hair or segregates them in all communal space). The question then becomes if the state has the right to intervene when the de facto statement that head gear makes in public is that women are morally dangerous and that their image is the property of a man for which it is guarded under veils? The answer is: of course. As it turns out, the mere public acceptance of the veiling of the female body by some or other part of society translates into making the veiling of any female body acceptable political practice. For the state to agree to these terms is, de facto, to declare all its female population the type of subjects that can be admissibly treated as property. But much more problematically, this acceptance amounts the state’s tacit assertion of of the moral inferiority of women and of their perilous presence in society as sources of moral danger.
-MJG