1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910369912803321

Autore

Ghumkhor Sahar

Titolo

The Political Psychology of the Veil : The Impossible Body / / by Sahar Ghumkhor

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Cham : , : Springer International Publishing : , : Imprint : Palgrave Macmillan, , 2020

ISBN

9783030320614

3030320618

Edizione

[1st ed. 2020.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (285 pages)

Collana

Palgrave Studies in Political Psychology, , 2946-2606

Disciplina

391.430944

297.576

Soggetti

Identity politics

Psychoanalysis

Political science - Philosophy

Religion and politics

Linguistics - Methodology

Political sociology

Politics and Gender

Political Philosophy

Politics and Religion

Research Methods in Language and Linguistics

Political Sociology

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Includes index.

Nota di contenuto

1. Introduction: Bodies without Shadows -- 2 The Unveiling Body -- 3. The 'Pure Defense of the Innocent' and Innocence Lost: Imagining the Veiled Woman in Human Rights -- 4. The Woman Question -- 5. The Postcolonial Veil: Bodies in Contact -- 6. The Confessional Body -- 7. Conclusion.

Sommario/riassunto

Veiled women in the West appear menacing. Their visible invisibility is a cause of obsession. What is beneath the veil more than a woman? This book investigates the preoccupation with the veiled body through the imaging and imagining of Muslim women. It examines the relationship



between the body and knowledge through the politics of freedom as grounded in a ‘natural’ body, in the index of flesh. The impulse to unveil is more than a desire to free the Muslim woman. What lies at the heart of the fantasy of saving the Muslim woman is the West’s desire to save itself. The preoccupation with the veiled woman is a defense that preserves neither the object of orientalism nor the difference embodied in women’s bodies, but inversely, insists on the corporeal boundaries of the West’s mode of knowing and truth-making. The book contends that the imagination of unveiling restores the West’s sense of its own power and enables it to intrude where it is ‘other’ – thus making it the centre and the agent by promising universal freedom, all the while stifling the question of what freedom is. Sahar Ghumkhor teaches and researches in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne, Australia.