I live in France and one of the main cultural barriers is my Australian sense of dress — slobby and untamed. I often catch glimpses of sympathy from villagers as I lob up the street in 'male' clothes, i.e. Blundstones and jeans.
Admittedly, I find French fashion oppressive. The Sunday markets in the posh village near us are riddled with women in tight white pant suits, fake tan, gold bling and violently spiked heels. The uniform is completed by a ciggie hanging off one hand and a small dog tucked under the other. Plastic surgery is rife — faces like melted masks, with no laugh or grief lines and lips bursting out like helium balloons.
The predatory 'beauty' market is a challenge to feminism, and I resent the capitalist industry that drains money and energy from women by promising to transform them into mannequins.
In summer two extremes of fashion ideology — burqas and mannequins — line up at the market to buy bread. Many Saudi Arabian families come to this region for holidays. burqas, some diamond encrusted with Chanel markings, can be seen flying around as women pick out peaches from the stalls. The fabric drapes over the cobblestones as if claiming possession, and wings of fabric are nothing but graceful.
Burqas can be confronting as images of the Taliban come to mind, but I am distrustful of my own fear. These links, made in the subconscious and fed by the media, demand rigorous interrogation.
As my daggy clothes brush against burqas while we wander through the markets together, I'm well aware that my refusal to partake in French fashion doesn't affect me much. In the middle of 2008 France denied citizenship to a woman because her values were incompatible with laïcité, the principle of the secular State.
The Conseil d'Etat rejected Silmi Faiza's application because of her presumed subservience to her husband and her reclusive lifestyle. The evidence to illustrate her inability to assimilate French values, particularly equality of the sexes, was her refusal to give up wearing the burqa. As her husband and three children were already French, Faiza is the only member of her family denied citizenship. Equality of the sexes?
When the decision to reject Faiza's application for citizenship hit the media, strict Islamic dress codes were equated with radical Islamic values. One blogger claimed the burqa was a contemporary swastika. The case raised a plethora of issues: the compatibility of the secular state with religious practise, the use of the law to impose civic values and how equality of the sexes is defined.
If you took a substantive rather than formal view of equality of the sexes, it would be easy to equate plastic surgery consumers as proponents of commodifying capitalism. You could construct an argument that these 'mannequins' are incapable of assimilating in a state that upholds real equality of the sexes.
This argument would be howled down but is it all that far fetched? Faiza consented to the burqa, claiming no one forced it on her. Many consumers of plastic surgery decry the claim that they do it for the male gaze. 'It's for me,' is the common call.
Where plastic surgery consumers brandish their choice to be objectified, the burqa can be used to hide from it. Both are possible reactions to the male gaze, and they equally stir the disquiet of many feminists.
Whether or not the burqa is oppressive is contestable. But that aside, the State is opening a Pandora's Box if it presumes it can get under the fabric/skin of those it believes have consented to their own oppression.
Anyone who has worked with victims of domestic violence knows that it's problematic to question an adult's capacity to determine their own life. Free choice, a cornerstone of liberty, can be an insurmountable barrier when you're desperate to save a woman's life by convincing her to flee a lethal relationship, but she refuses to budge.
The State doesn't force women living with domestic violence to leave home, because its ingrained respect for individual consent is paramount in civil law and is embedded into Western cultural norms.
Issues of consensual oppression are difficult to adjudicate. Any democratic State that assumes a capacity to see though layers of culture, social conditioning and freedom of choice faces contradictions and accusations of totalitarian tendencies. Is a reclusive life inherently oppressive? How does one measure subservience? By your clothes?
Following the logic of the Conseil d'Etat inane analogies are all too easy. I wonder how a fully garbed nun, living a reclusive life of prayer and consenting to the authority of a male Pope/Bishop, would fare. I doubt the nun would be refused citizenship.
So I wonder if this decision epitomises French fear of Islamic religious practises, rather than an issue of equality of the sexes. As with the nun's garb, beneath the burqa, plastic surgery and my own 'men's clothes' are flesh and blood women who, regardless of their feminist position, religious practises and cultural choices, are entitled to equal access to the law and its resultant protection.
It's all too easy to create a victim and then pick on her clothes. And Germaine, leave Michelle alone.
Bronwyn Lay lives with her family in rural France. She is enrolled in a Masters of English Literature at the University of Geneva and is working on her first novel. Previously she worked as a legal aid lawyer in Australia with post-graduate qualifications in political theory.
http://www.eurekastreet.com.au/article.aspx?aeid=10396
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