Author: Ophelia Benson

The issue of the possible French ban on the hijab or headscarf in public schools raises a lot of interesting questions – also a lot of strong emotions, not to say plain rudeness. There was a discussion of the subject at Crooked Timber a few days ago that was quite interesting at the beginning, but I abandoned it in disgust after being accused of patronizing ‘subdued and voiceless brown women’ one too many times.

But it’s not that simple, obviously – well it’s obvious to me, but clearly not to everyone. That is to say, whatever one thinks about the proposed ban, it’s too simple to say that the ban is exclusively about seeing Muslim women as subdued, voiceless and brown. (The brown bit, of course, is pure rhetoric, pure attempted intimidation, pure browbeating and guilt-mongering. Just for one thing, not all Muslims are ‘brown.’ For another thing, even if they were, would that mean that no ‘Muslim’ custom or law could ever be disagreed with? There might be some dangers in an idea like that, I would think.) It’s not exclusively about that for the compelling reason that a good many Muslim women (and women of Muslim background as opposed to religion) are strongly opposed to the hijab and in favour of the ban. So why are ‘white’ non-Muslims forbidden to agree with them, one wonders.

The BBC has a good article on the subject.

Samira Bellil, a 30-year-old Algerian-born Frenchwoman is just as passionate as Antoine in her rejection of the hijab. She has become involved in a Muslim women’s campaign against the headscarf in schools. She says girls are being pressurised to wear it, as much to protect themselves from the casual violence of the ghetto, as by their families or religious leaders. Samira herself was raped not once but twice as a teenager in the Paris suburbs. Her attackers were also Muslim. Later, she was told by one classmate that she wouldn’t have been attacked if she had been wearing the hijab instead of flaunting herself bare-headed. It was that sort of attitude, Samira told me, that she was campaigning against. It was the idea of women as objects, told what to do and how to dress by men. That, for her, is what the hijab symbolises.

Interesting, isn’t it. One wonders to what extent rape is used as an enforcement tool in those Paris suburbs. ‘Either stop flaunting your wicked seductive self, put on this bag that covers your wicked seductive hair and neck and ears and in fact looks like a nun’s headgear – or else I’ll rape you.’

Yet people opposed to the ban insist with great indignation that wearing the veil is a free choice and that it’s thought-crime to wonder if that’s always true. Well – but is it always true? That quotation above would certainly seem to hint that it might not be.

People think of the state as highly coercive – and of course it is. It has an army, and a judicial system, and prisons, and access to the media, and control of funding for a lot of necessary institutions. But the fact remains that the state is not the only source of coercion in the world, and that it can sometimes (indeed often) use its coercive power to protect some people from the coercion of some other people. Peer pressure is coercive, the family can be coercive, as can men, fathers and brothers, religion, Islam. Yes, girls can still make a free choice (at least in theory) to wear the hijab. But how free are the girls who don’t want to, to refuse to wear it? If their fathers and brothers order them to, and their classmates tell them they’re inviting rape if they don’t, and neighbours rape them if they don’t…is their choice really as completely free and uncoerced as it might be? One has to wonder, it seems to me. What if it’s not a simple choice between coercion and freedom, but rather a choice of who gets coerced? In that case, why should it be the girls who don’t want to bag themselves who are coerced, and the ones who do want to (or have been coerced to) who are ‘free’?

One advantage of state coercion, it seems to me, is that it’s obvious. We know it’s coercion. Things like peer pressure and threats of rape and what happens behind closed doors in the family, are less obvious, so more difficult to resist, also more difficult to point out and quantify. But that does not necessarily make them less coercive. On the contrary, surely.

Some writers of letters to the Guardian make similar points.

Secular states, not religious ones, most effectively protect the rights of minorities. Where would Madeleine Bunting prefer to live if she were a Muslim woman: France or one of numerous Islamic states where her freedoms would be at best challenged, at worst removed? If she were a Jew, a Sikh, or a Baha’i, which state might she expect to protect her beliefs: France or a Muslim country? The headscarf move is a sensible school uniform measure designed to stop the French school system from becoming the Northern Irish nightmare I was taught in. Multiculturalism gets you Northern Ireland: integration gives you tolerance and the rule of law for everyone.

And

Madeleine Bunting’s article on French moves to ban headscarves (Secularism gone mad, December 18) made no reference to what is happening in the quartiers sensibles in urban France, where many Muslim girls are pressured into wearing Islamic headdress by their young brothers. Showing their hair or even wearing jeans are seen as signs of western depravity by their menfolk, who abuse and threaten them. Ms Bunting should be aware of the Ni Putes, Ni Soumises movement organised by Samira Bellil and her book about gang rapes of young female Muslims who dare to rebel.

And

As an Iranian who experienced the Islamic revolution, I applaud a ban on headscarves especially in educational institutions. Which seven-year-old, without family pressure, would opt to wear a headscarf? The codes of “modesty” for women in Islam can be interpreted in many ways. The raw facts are that subjective and arbitrary interpretations in Islam have become the norm and women coerced into behaving according to them. Women are being used as tools, this time in a political movement which is making the question of Islamic headscarf a political issue.

Anti-banners also like to point out that the French xenophobic right wing is also in favour of the ban. Fair point. But by the same token, the kind of people who like to beat up women who refuse to wear it are opposed to the ban, so again, it’s a matter of choosing one’s undesirable allies, rather than a matter of one side’s having loathsome supporters and the other side’s being free of such entities.

Here, on the other hand, is a comment on the MLA and hipness [in the comments on the post] that is quite another matter – and says (from inside the academy as opposed to outside it) what I’ve been thinking for a couple of days, as well as for many years:

At the moment (ask me again on Dec. 30 how I feel), the bottom line seems to me that many serious scholars of literature and culture, who would very much like to engage in a serious, generous, forthright way with the world-at-large, often find themselves prevented from doing so by both the internal demands of the scholarly universe (publishing in the “right places” demanding certain kinds of technical language and attention to trends) and by the jeers of that world-at-large (the technical language and trendiness taken as evidence of our irrelevance).

There. This is what I’m saying. Academics of all stripes, and especially, for heaven’s sake, literary academics, serious scholars of literature and culture, ought to want to engage with the world at large. Not necessarily every single one of them, I don’t mean that; some people would rather just concentrate on research, and are better at it; but some of them. It ought to be within the possible realm of thought for the discipline. That’s why I take exception to that ‘We’re professionals and this is our turf and it’s nothing to do with you so shut up and go away’ line. The quotation above is exactly the kind of answer I was hoping to see.

It’s common knowledge that engagement with the world at large, that popularization and public education are not the way to get ahead in universities. To put it mildly – they are in fact a ticket to oblivion. I’ve heard this from many relatives, friends and acquaintances. It’s only established stars who can afford to popularize or engage with the world at large. Carl Sagan was kept out of the National Academy of Sciences because he was a popularizer – because he did such a damn good job of turning people on to science. Well, brilliant – that’s a good way to run things. Wouldn’t it be nice if that system could begin to change. (People have been saying that for as long as I can remember, which is awhile. But one might as well go on saying it.)

Chapter 3. (And I still had some items I wanted to examine from the fuss over ‘Hear the Silence’ – some of the odd assumptions behind the rhetoric – but that’s such a long time ago now. I’m just not speedy enough, clearly.) Because there is still a little more. And it really is quite interesting, how very defensive and righteously indignant the defenders of the ‘professional discourse of the humanities’ get. As if people who tease them were committing lèse-majesté, invading the Temple, polluting the inner sanctum. Why? Why do they take themselves so very seriously? Why is a joke (and a damn funny one at that) seen as an outrage? Why are professional discoursers so deaf to humour on this subject? Is that an occupational hazard? If so, it would be an interesting research topic to discover why. Something for a social psychologist, perhaps, or a sociologist of work.

Along with the humour-deficit there is an odd sort of professional gigantism – an unwarranted assumption (as I mentioned yesterday) that all intellectuals are academics, that only academics are intellectuals, and that to tease ‘the professional discourse of the humanities’ is to attack intellectuals. There is something very sinister and unpleasant in these two ideas: one, that academics have a monopoly on intellectualism, and two, that non-academics are forbidden to criticise ‘the professional discourse of the humanities.’ So they have a double monopoly, and the rest of us are doubly excluded. We’re not intellectuals ourselves, and we’re not allowed to tease the people who are. It really does sound very like the medieval priesthood, that used Latin as a fence to keep the people out.

Now, of course, the people who complained that the Chronicle article was a jihad against intellectuals may well not have meant such an implication – but in that case, their clumsiness with language doesn’t give us non-intellectuals out here in the cold much confidence in their highly-trained ability to be aware of their own discourse, does it.

One more thing. Among the several excellent things McLemee said was this –

by all means say hello at MLA. Just do me a favor. If I ask you what papers you have heard that are interesting, please don’t translate my question. What happens every year is that people respond by saying: “Hmmm, what’s ‘hot’ this year?” And then they proceed to tell me what is “hot.” They dilate upon what is “trendy.” I do not care at all what is hot and trendy, and would never use such terms in my writing without displaying conspicious levels of sarcasm. Talk about what you found interesting, important, an addition to the conversation. I’m as concerned with the actually developing substance of scholarship as any of you are. After all, I spend at least as much time as you do reading it. But if you do insist on talking about what’s hip, hot, and happening, I will regard you as part of the nominating committee for next year’s Provokies.

Regular readers may remember that I’ve talked about that very maneuver of translating, many times. I’m interested to see that I’m not the only one who’s noticed. No indeed, interesting is not the same thing as hot or hip. I wonder if there’s some connection between excessive defensiveness and pomposity and humour-deficit, and ambitions to be hip and hot and happening and edgy. That would be ‘ironic,’ wouldn’t it?

I have some more comments I want to make and others I want to quote. Comment boards on blogs are not always the best place to do research on attitudes, naturally, because the people commenting can be anybody and everybody – people who’ve misplaced their meds, people who haven’t been prescribed any meds yet, people who are just that little bit too interested in aluminum foil. So keep that in mind. But the comments at Invisible Adjunct do seem to represent some real attitudes in that sector of the academy that’s under discussion. So let’s dissect one or two of them on that assumption – the attitudes are worth a look even if these particular exponents of them are bogus.

For instance this from comment 25:

I repeat: the MLA is a professional convention. Its audience is _not_ the general public. We don’t ask particle physicists to defend big words and opaque paper titles. Why literary and language scholars? Because while we recognize the expertise inherent in a field like particle physics we _all_ feel we have some intuitive claim on language and literature? Because language and literature are about our opinions and emotions? Not. Get thee to Literary Research Methods 101.

Particle physicists – there it is. I love it when literary theorists compare themselves to physicists, particle or otherwise. It’s so funny, for one thing, and such a giveaway, for another. One feels an overwhelming urge to start exclaiming like a Valley girl, ‘You wish! In your dreams; as if; yeah, right; etc.’ Apparently the assumption is that if a discipline is to be found at universities, it therefore follows that they are all of exactly comparable difficulty and rigor. But it doesn’t follow, does it. No.

And then – and here we move from funny and pathetic to rather disgusting – there is the business about ‘professional’ and the repudiation of the general public, and then the brisk removal of literature from the public domain. And yet literary theory on the whole considers itself a left-wing, liberatory, progressive enterprise – doesn’t it? Am I wrong about that? I don’t think so. But one of the first defensive moves in the face of criticism is to proclaim how professional and expert the whole subject is, and none of the public’s damn business. But that’s nonsense. Certainly there is much to learn about theory and criticism, but that does not alter the fact that literature in fact is a public subject in a way that physics (obviously) is not. People don’t generally do amateur physics for fun and pleasure, but people do read novels and poetry and essays and plays for those reasons. All the time! This is a common practice! Why, non-experts are even permitted to read Shakespeare and Wordsworth if they feel like it – and they get a lot out of it, too, without ever asking permission of literary theorists. That’s simply a fact. So, yes, that is one reason the MLA gets more attention than other conventions do – and a good thing too. Universities aren’t some sort of sacred mystery, after all. Academics are not medieval priests, their subject matter is not the Ark of the Covenant. So this indignant relish for the professionalization of the academic study of literature is deeply repellent.

Well, this is a rich resource at Invisible Adjunct. Sort of a treasure-chest of lame alibis, bogus analogies, whining, flag-self-wrapping-in, efforts to seem important via association, verbiage, accusation, attempted guilt-mongering, accidental self-revelations, messenger-blaming, conceit, and much much more. It’s funny but it’s also rather depressing. However, it’s not exactly a news flash that people in the literary theory game have gone a little odd lately, is it.

The fuss is about a hilarious brief piece Scott McLemee wrote for the CHE about ‘The Chronicle’s First Annual Awards for Self-Consciously Provocative MLA Paper Titles (also known as the Provokies).’ There’s an Award for Transgressive Punctuation, the Andrew Ross Award for Dangerous Hipness (if you’ve read Strange Weather you know how funny that is), the Award for Best Slavoj Zizek Knockoff, and more.

Criteria for the Andrew Ross Award for Dangerous Hipness incited heated debate among the judges. Some held that the award should go to a title reflecting scholarship that keeps up with recent cable-television listings. They nominated the paper “Taking Away the Threat: Cribs and The Osbournes as Narratives of Domestication,” by David S. Escoffery and Michelle Sullivan, of Southwest Missouri State University and the University of Pittsburgh’s main campus, respectively. Others contended that the winner should be “très 1990s,” just like Mr. Ross’s own bad self. They argued strenuously for “Judith Butler Got Me Tenure (but I Owe My Job to k.d. lang): High Theory, Pop Culture, and Some Thoughts About the Role of Literature in Contemporary Queer Studies,” by Kim L. Emery of the University of Florida.

Don’t you just want to stampede off to the bookstore or library and snap those titles up so you can start not reading them? I know I do. But alas, some people were not amused. (Others decidedly were, which is a relief. I mean, if you’re going to be all playful and ironic and dangerously hip for the MLA but then go rigid and purple with deadly-earnest rage when other people are playful and ironic – why, people might start to think you’re not really all that playful and amusing after all, mightn’t they.) Comment 15, for example:

The point, as far as I’m concerned, is that these articles are nothing more than a recycled, sneering, hipster version of the same old intellectual-bashing exercises that mainstream US culture is perennially embarked upon. Is it too much to ask that the freaking Chronicle — our own paper-of-record, one would have thought — resist getting in on the action? Yes, ridiculous, yes, sexless, yes, dorky. But who isn’t?

Well, frankly, lots of people are not as ridiculous as the titles of those articles are. Let’s see – historians, sociologists, astronomers, mathematicians, biologists – I can think of lots and lots of disciplines that don’t attract the kind of derision the MLA does (remember the article last year? ‘Theorists make the snappiest dressers?’). So teasing the MLA is not equivalent to teasing (or bashing) all intellectuals. It’s just teasing the people at the MLA. Do they take themselves to coincide exactly with the set ‘intellectuals’? Do they think there are no intellectuals outside the MLA? Do they think literary theorists exhaust the definition of ‘intellectual’?

And then there’s an old acquaintance of ours, talking with his usual politeness and depth of learning to the author of the article:

The fact that these few paper titles out of hundreds offend your parochial sense of what literature professors should do is not particularly surprising; but the Chronicle hasn’t gone broke by perpetuating ignorant stereotypes…I guess they don’t give you the Microsoft-style brainteasers at the Chronicle job interview. But do you know what I bet is a de facto prereq? Unsuccessful attempt at being an academic. You see you’d be delivering papers at the MLA if it weren’t for all the “queer theorists” and “blaxploiticians,” right? It’d make me bitter too.

Amazing, isn’t it? He thinks delivering papers at the MLA is a desirable fate. He thinks people want to be like him! That may be the funniest thing on the whole page.