19
location of inhibitions. Censor the body and you censor breath and speech
at the same time. (my emphasis; Cixous 338)
‘The uncanny stranger on display’ that Cixous individuates in the female body as
a symbol of alterity in a phallogocentric society assumes more complex nuances when
applied to the young Muslim women living (and born) in France. In their case, a history
of colonization and immigration complicates the readability of their bodies and subjects
them to different (mis)understandings and (mis)interpretations. As discussed earlier,
during the colonial era, the colonized body of North-African women constituted a site of
extreme mystery and danger, an impenetrable barrier that resisted the ubiquitous power
of the male colonizer. As such, the female (Muslim) body was either eroticized and, thus,
transformed into the object of a voyeuristic gaze; or, it was ignored altogether by the
phallic discourse of the colonizer. Clearly, the kind of censorship of the body mentioned
by Cixous becomes very palpable both in the relationships between French ex-colonizers
and Muslim ex-colonized women and, decades later, in the ‘headscarf affair’. Here, the
young women’s impossibility to present and use their bodies in a certain way is evidently
reminiscent of a similar effort during the colonizing period.
5
Yet, in 1989 the adolescents
in Creil seemed to adopt a new way of writing their hybrid identity by refusing to remove
their veils at school. The public dismay in the face of such decision is witness to ever-
present anxiety towards the (partially) covered female body and women’s attempts to
“write themselves” through their body.
The question of (un)covering of the female body becomes controversial when it is
situated in a strict relation to the gaze of the (mostly male) beholder. As argued by
Convention