Unveiling the Veil: Headscarf and Identity Crises in Orhan Pamuk ’ s Snow

1. Unveiling the Veil: Headscarf and Identity Crises in Orhan Pamuk’s Snow Clara Shu-chun Chang 張淑君 Colloquium on Diaspora and Asian Fiction Jan. 14, 2008

2. Historical background of headscarf: • In 1980 “covered” women students are banned from entry to universities • Turban Movement: a protest against the legal prohibition of the Islamic headscarf for women students; gradually it became a political issue in Turkish society(Moghadam 161) • Role conflict: suffer from problems of identity definition • “Girls who commit suicide are not even Muslims…These girls who for the love of God find themselves caught between their schools and their families are so miserable and so alone that they see no course but to imitate the suicidal martyr” (81).

3. Thesis Statement • the double motif to reflect the crises of identity • body politics based on Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Sandra Lee Bartky, • the body (headscarf) as a referent point in Islamic social context • headscarf as a cultural symbol • political, religious, and masculine/feminine identity crises

4. Identity Crisis: A Division into Double • Identity: performative & constructive • Double motif: (doppelganger) • A divided and discontinuous self • Multi-dimensional unity of the character • Contextualized double: • the double & cultural transgression

5. Self vs. ideological contestation • Dialectic between pride and Shame • “Wherever there is someone who feel deeply humiliated, we can expect ot see a proud nationalism rising to the surface” (Pamuk) • A history comprising of a dichotomy between the Muslim and the West • Ka: “two-faced” • Fazil: “two souls inside my body”

6. A dialectic between modernity and tradition • 1920s: symbols of Westernization for reformers • 1960s: military coups • 1980s and 1990: the rise of Islamist groups as political entities • Dichotomy: government ban headscarf wearing in universities (1980s)

7. Women’s Bodies • Female body represents a Islamic political identity • Michel Foucault: “docile bodies” • A “mechanics of power”“defined how one may have a hold over others’ bodies, not only so that they may do what one wishes [. . .]. Thus, discipline produces subjected and practiced bodies, ‘docile’ bodies” (Discipline 138).

8. Judith Butler & Sandra Lee Bartky • Butler: • Gender is performative & culturally constructed • Loss of gender : disruption of identity • Bartky: • Femininity under the gaze of an invisible Other • Process of feminization constitutes power structure that internalizes women’s bodies into Foucult’s docile bodies

9. Women’s role in Islamic Turkey • Family honor: women’s chastity • Guardian of tradition • “the tribal or familial structural basis of these [Muslim] societies imposes upon women a role and a position such that any modification of their status threatens to bring down the patriarchal, familial or tribal pillars on which those societies rest” (Minces 23).

10. Cultural implication of headscarf: • Headscarf serves as a symbol of irreconcilable struggles between the secularists and the Islamists: “a symbol of political Islam” • Today, veil suggests women’s position in Muslim world: “respectability” and “untouchability.” • A trend of Muslim women’s return to the veil is seen for political reasons • “its absence is as worthy of interpretation in the same manner as its appearance as a necessary or unnecessary part of religious life” (Breu and Marchese 26)

11. Headscarf vs. Identity crises • Headscarf girls • Unveil: de-femininity cause a disruption of identity • Man’s identity: • the deprivation of femininity: a threat to Islamic society • Turkish lose the women as the Other, their ‘identity-support”

12. The End Thank you for listening.