Veil Ops:
Experiments in self-examination in this particular time and place
This work began as a form of worry. I worry about how capable we Americans are of seeing “the world” truthfully. In this time of overt war, of complex economic and cultural globalism, and of looming environmental crises, I worry that our vision is deeply flawed.
The goal of the Veil Ops project is to begin (with some humor and some dead-seriousness) to improve our vision of ourselves, our culture, and, to some degree, of other people and cultures with whom we must learn to form a better community than we have so far. My approach here is to brush up against actual veiling by “others” while simultaneously exploring ways that we might already be veiling ourselves or, more experimentally, that we might want to consider trying.
So I took on the veil.
Veiling is a highly charged, highly foreign-seeming practice to which it is easy to have a negative reaction. For myself, I chafe at the suggested lack of individuality and personal freedom that accompanies veiling. People wear veiling garments all over this world for many reasons, some good, some bad, and some merely habitual or traditional. And people do not veil for just as many reasons. In recent times, especially post 9/11, the news media tends to publish dramatic images of veiled Muslim women. I am not alone in questioning whether these images are presented in order to create a sense of superiority in us American consumers of world news—a sense of superiority combined with pity combined with self-righteousness combined with a heightened sense of “otherness.” My fear is that these feelings are triggered in us in order to convince us to support violence and war, in the name of establishing freedom from veiling and everything associated with it. It is always easier to identify someone as an enemy if we can rest assured that they are not one of us.
Of course, the veil in its many forms is most powerfully associated with Islam. The veil is also associated with oppression, fanaticism and terrorism. Indeed some Muslims in some places have made use of various veiling garments as rallying symbols for anti-Western and anti-American movements. Some of them are fanatics, perhaps. Of course, most people who practice veiling are not fanatics and are certainly not terrorists. Right here at home in the rural mid-south we regularly encounter very conservative veiled Anabaptist women in the Amish and Mennonite communities. But we are at war in several parts of the world against people who promote the veil, or so we’ve been told.
So I took on the veil as a prosthetic device.
I wondered whether wearing a veil (or at least entertaining the idea) might shake our vision loose enough to see ourselves and the forces that shape us in new and fruitful ways.
I discovered several interesting things, one being that we have some veils of our own. People, especially women, are expected to display themselves in specific, socially acceptable ways. Cosmetics are mild means of conforming to standards of femininity; plastic surgery is more radical conformity. We all know that these standards are largely unrealistic and unhealthy. Yet we suffer under their influence. I also wonder (and worry, of course) about how our status in the rest of the world is affected by the hyper-sexualized images our commercial culture projects. To question standards of femininity is to explore notions of body-image, sexual rules of engagement, variable standards of modesty, and the ways in which commerce and economics shape our ethics, the routines of our daily lives, and our very bodies.
Social conformity as expressed by costume is not always about gender, as in the wearing of sports logos. I suggest this in the piece called “Fan(atic) Camouflage,” the Afghan-style burqa emblazoned with the U. of K. Wildcat logo embroidery. (If I lived in Wisconsin, I would have embroidered a Green Bay Packer logo.) My hope is that a cross-over garment like this might take the shock factor out of our reactions to images of women in burqas and men in turbans.
Another discovery is that a veil might be a useful garment. (I am not being entirely facetious.) Take privacy, for example. Our right to privacy is treasured in this culture and protected explicitly by the U.S. Constitution. Video surveillance is increasingly pervasive. As an innocent pedestrian on the streets of many major U. S. cities you may find yourself under the gaze of multiple video cameras. And you must believe me when I say that you will be caught on satellite cameras on this very day. Yes, you will. In doing research for this project I actually discovered that I personally was visible in a GoogleEarth image from 2002. This was a sobering moment because although I do not tend to be paranoid, I found that I felt very disconcerted. And not only do you not own these images, you rarely even have access to them. (Well, you don’t have access to the high resolution, up-to-the-minute images, anyhow.) And your permission was certainly not asked before the images were made. A simple veiling garment may be a low-tech, highly effective tool for protecting your privacy. There are forces other than camera eyes from which we might also like to veil ourselves—unwanted sound, pollution, harassment, and profiling, among others. These are all issues I address in the garments as well as the through the spoken voice elements in the Veil Ops project.
I also recognize that it is important to begin to understand veiling from the perspective of people living in a tradition where the practice has deep roots. For this reason I have included extended theological monologues by two very different American women characters—a conservative Anabaptist (e.g. Amish or Mennonite) who does wear a veil and a liberal intellectual Muslim who rejects it.
This exhibit opens with a massive garment, worn by 10 people, five men and five women, who cannot access one another’s bodies, either visually or physically. A sense of communal purpose is created—freedom is limited but unity and mutual protection is suggested. I contrast this utopic means of maintaining modesty with another utopic practice, that of achieving mutual respect via individual responsibility for one’s own mind—what I call the “mental fig leaf.” This is the American democratic secular means. “Fig leaf” because of our cultural legacy in the Creation story from the book of Genesis and “mental” because we do not require or depend on garments to keep our minds from wandering where they should not, in theory. The mental fig leaf is not expressed via clothing in this exhibit, but is discussed by the recorded voices. One of the characters says,
“Our country offers enormous freedom, but the responsibilities are your own as an individual. You don’t want to treat someone as an object of sexual desire? Start by training yourself not to look at them in that way. Apply a mental fig leaf.”
The garments and the accompanying montage of voices explore a range of concepts including democracy, consumer choice (and its related burdens), international humanitarian standards, surveillance, religious freedom, corporate global branding, clothing as camouflage, fluid concepts of decency / modesty, demarcation between public and private space, clothing as a form of protection, pharmaceuticals as used to create a sense of self, costume as public signifier of belief, and so forth.
The Veil Ops project will continue beyond this event and take other forms at other sites. My hope is that the project itself functions as a prosthetic device for all who engage with it.
Enjoy.
Zoé Strecker
January, 2007
Notes on Voices
(Notes on each of the garments are posted with the images.)
The Voices
The voices that come from the speakers along the gallery walls function like theatre, but without any linear narrative structure. They are characters that do not interact with one another but instead speak about veiling from a wide, but interrelated range of perspectives. The parts I have written for these voices are not linked directly with individual garments in the exhibit but rather form a web of thoughts and opinions about the issues explored in this project.
Visitors to the gallery are, in effect, audience to each character’s personal thoughts and opinions. Some voices are “insiders,” people who actually veil or come from a veiling culture and speak about what that means for them. Voice number 1, for example, is that of a very conservative Anabaptist (like Amish or Mennonite) woman who explains why she wears the traditional “headship veiling” and “Plain clothes” in general, while voice number 2 is a progressive, intellectual Muslim woman who does not wear a veil and makes a case for Islam as a profoundly egalitarian and pragmatic religious practice that works under the assumption that cultural change happens gradually. That both characters are North American is important because it places the issues firmly within our own culture.
Other voices represent characters who are “outsiders,” people who experiment with the idea of veiling but in a radically modified application. One pregnant character, for example, chooses to wear a veil that shields her and her unborn child from exposure to unwanted sounds, while another yearns for a hood that might camouflage him from satellite cameras.
Voice 1 “Anabaptist Theology”
An Anabaptist (e.g. Amish or Mennonite) woman explains why women in her religious practice wear the traditional “headship veiling.” In the process of doing so she explains how all of the garments in the “Plain Christian” denominations express their particular Christian theology.
Actress: Jane Dewey
Source Materials: Anabaptist sewing workbooks for school girls and various published interviews with Amish and Mennonite women
Voice 2 “Progressive Islam”
A progressive, intellectual Muslim woman who does not wear a veil and makes a case for Islam as a profoundly egalitarian and ethical religious practice. Her concern is to look as the Quran directly, in order not to base notions of Islam on the wide range of cultural practices with which it is associated. She argues that misogyny and injustice of any kind is not inherent to Islam.
Actress: Jane Dewey
Source Materials: Essays, interviews, and other texts by Muslim women, artists, scholars, and various cultural writers, with the greatest debts owed to the writings of Azizah Al-Hibri, and Riffat Hassan.
Voice 3 ”Global branding” and “Corporate Fashion”
An African American woman who questions the power that global corporations have over our lives. She connects market forces directly with our individual bodies when she discusses branding. She also explores the wastefulness of consumer culture and worries about her own culpability in the situation.
Actress: Yolantha Pace
Source Materials: Various.
Voice 4 “Lofty Ideals”
An authoritative legal voice reads excerpts from texts that are at the heart of our democracy and of international humanitarian standards: The Declaration of Independence, The U. S. Constitution, The Geneva Conventions, and the Golden Rule. Text selections were made based on relevance to current public debates as well as to issues addressed in the Veil Ops project.
Actor: Raymond Debolt
Source Materials: Actual excerpts.
Voice 5 “Surveillance”
A male voice that worries about the psychological effects of exposure to unmonitored surveillance—closed-circuit television, satellite imaging, spy-cameras, and so forth. He questions whether we are actually getting security in exchange for our loss of privacy. He also questions the Constitutionality of the surveillance of innocent people.
Actor: Patrick Kagan-Moore
Source Materials: Various, with special thanks to the Institute for Applied Autonomy and their ingenious iSee project.
Voice 6 “Veil of Pharmaceuticals”
A middle-class woman casually reviews the vast quantities of pharmaceuticals she takes. She denies being “a drug person” and claims only to take everyday drugs. She reveals that she depends on drugs to maintain (or possibly create) her sense of her “true” self.
Actress: Heather Henson
Source Materials: Personal everyday life.
Voice 7 “Silencer”
A pregnant woman sensitive to sounds who chooses to wear a garment that shields or veils her and her unborn child from exposure to unwanted sounds. She suggests that permanent physical damage may be done prenatally by industrial noise pollution.
Actress: Zoé Strecker
Source Materials: Personal life.
Voice 8 “On Display”
A professional woman complains about the burden of constantly being on display. She entertains the notion of wearing a burqa as a way of simplifying her life and of allowing her voice and intellect to take precedence over her appearance. She imagines a utopic experiment in which a whole city joins her in wearing some kind of uniform.
Actress: Ania Byrzski
Source Materials: Everyday life for Ania and many women.
Voice 9 “The Red Cape”
A southern small-town resident talks bout what happen when she takes the Veil Ops challenge literally and wears a non-religious veil that conceals her identity out and about in her daily life. For her, the veil she wears is a prosthetic device that functions to open her mind to, among other things, the potential of reversing the power of the gaze.
Actress: Yolantha Pace
Source Materials: Personal everyday life.
Voice 10 “Fig Leaf” and “Western Veils”
A woman wonders about the usefulness of actual physical veiling between the sexes in our culture here in the United States. She places responsibility for ethical, humane interactions between the sexes on women as well as on men, although she also angrily reviews how corporations make this difficult by hyper-sexualizing our bodies through advertising.
Actress: Yolantha Pace
Source Materials: Various.