Global hair project: March 2014

A few years ago the French government, to keep true to their admirable secularity, banned “ostensible” religious dress in schools, effecting above all the headscarf. Sarkozy recently said that burqas (full body coverings) were “not welcome” in France, depriving women of an identity. The mood of the nation, as measured by my own anecdotal evidence and limited knowledge of the intellectual debate, is that headscarves are un-French, un-developed, un-Western. In hair, in women’s hair, femininity is located, say many French women and some French intellectuals. So to cover her hair is for a woman to negate her femininity. In denying her identity, her identity as an elegant Gaul, in some sense she is challenging the national gender stereotype and so threatening the alleged homogeneity of French women and the first woman, Liberté herself. The concealment of hair is implicitly compared to treason. To cover the hair in France is as taboo as to uncover the hair is in Islam.

Hair is a taboo because like all things that are taboo, it is desirable. The existence of a taboo is only required when there exists a desire that needs to be suppressed. Freud wrote on this topic with unapproachable insight in the essay Totem and Taboo, to which I direct the reader rather than attempt to paraphrase.

Hair is a locus of sexuality, which like all taboos is both sacred and forbidden. It is the taboo of women’s hair in Islamic society which reveals hair’s sexual potency. One doesn’t need to read Freud (so integrated into our worldview are his discoveries) to recognise that modesty must be enforced, in many cultures through hair-concealment, to ward off sexual desires, promiscuity, and the threat to family and the social status quo. While in Islamic countries hair, as the locus of sexual potency, is concealed to subjugate promiscuity, in France a different quality is located in the hair, and its concealment enacts a different taboo – the taboo of unfemininity.

The desire suppressed by one taboo in one culture may not be the same desire the same taboo suppresses in another culture. The two desires being tabooed by covering the hair: that of sexual promiscuity in Islam, and the need for femininity in France, show that the femininity of French women is then placed, through this taboo, alongside sexual promiscuity, as both must be located in the same place. This result would not have pleased the generations of feminists who fought to unshackle the second sex, and is perhaps a sign which reveals the continued chauvinism of the French intellectual aristocracy.

Now we come full circle. Sexuality and/or femininity are being ‘protected’ by making the wearing of a headscarf into an anti-French taboo. A taboo exists because what it taboos is in fact deeply desired – if it wasn’t desired, a taboo would not be required. So the taboo of hair coverage in France reveals a desire to have femininity denied. Does this desire just come from the oppressive husbands of Muslim women, or from the barbaric Koran? No, it comes from the top, from Liberté herself. Why? Precisely because this femininity has been aligned with sexual promiscuity. And what is “femininity” if it is not a convenient label for men’s desires: the sexuality with which men burden women. Finally Liberté wants, deep down, to burn her bra, to neglect her hair, as she once did, to break the tradition of female objectification, to unclasp the link from hair to sex, and in so doing crack open the synecdoche of hair as a physical locus of the notions of femininity.

And it is her terrified husbands and fathers - Sarkozy, the left bank intellectuals, the Law – looking on aghast, who are tabooing this break up, who are ostracising those who coincidentally manifest their fears. The Islamic woman does not aspire to emasculate La France, but she represents this potential defrocking. And why the Muslims? No-one seems to bother the tonsured Orthodox Jewish women, Buddhists, Krishnas, and the various other religious sects who shave their heads, qua being un-feminine, being un-French. Man fires taboos from the watchtowers at those who seek to escape the enforced prison of the manufactured woman, the manufactured France, and leave behind her “femininity”: sexuality, vanity, and judgementalism.

15 september 2009