“Free Hair”: Narratives of Unveiling and the Reconstruction of Self
Voluntary unveiling by Muslim women has largely been overlooked within the context of Islamization. In Muslim-majority societies where the hijab is not legally imposed on women, Muslim women who do not veil or are “free hair” face significant pressure as they embody, in very visible terms, deviance...
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University of Chicago Press
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| Summary: | Voluntary unveiling by Muslim women has largely been overlooked within the context of Islamization. In Muslim-majority societies where the hijab is not legally imposed on women, Muslim women who do not veil or are “free hair” face significant pressure as they embody, in very visible terms, deviance from normative Islamic practice. This article seeks to decenter the symbol of the hijab as the defining factor of these women’s lives by examining why Malay Muslim women remove the hijab and by reanimating a discussion on agency, failure, and reconstruction of self enacted through the practice of nonveiling. It examines the practices of the self that depart from local iterations of normative femininity and the processes of Islamization in Malaysia and how such processes inadvertently produce critical subjectivities and resistant bodies. |
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