TPCS 30: How to ‘how to’? The prescriptive micropolitics of Hijabista

By Jan Blommaert and Piia Varis

Introduction

Identities have always been subject to prescriptive ‘how to’ discourses; there is or has been no lack of guides and instructors for identities. The expansion of identity repertoires that we currently witness in the context of superdiversity naturally comes with an expansion of ‘how to’ literature, and the Internet is a prime vehicle for this. We see a mushrooming of self-help and ‘how to’ websites, videos and social media groups, all targeting specific modes of behavior and thus aimed at producing people recognizable as X or Y. From ‘how to be a Goth’ to ‘how to become a Facebook star’, over ‘how to trick people into thinking you’re good-looking’ and ‘how to be a metrosexual’: the list of potential targets for prescriptive discourse and illustration is endless and appears to respond to an increasing demand. YouTube, for instance, abounds with such material – how to dress like a skateboarder; how to be a good husband; how to be more feminine, etc.; ‘How to and Style’ is also, together with for instance ‘Music’, ‘Education’, ‘Sports’ and ‘Pets and animals’, one on the list of 17 main categories for browsing videos on Youtube.

These prescriptive ‘how to’ discourses have a clear scope and they operate on a series of assumptions that, recapitulating arguments developed elsewhere, we can sketch as follows. Acquiring and assembling identities are matters of perfection and exact precision; when appropriately practiced, they achieve recognizability for you as someone or a certain kind of person. In fact, identity work boils down to collecting and arranging a bundle of small details measured as to their appropriateness and ‘enoughness’, the ordered display of which generates recognizability as X or Y. Hence, say, dressing almost like a skateboarder is not quite good enough, as combining skater wear with, for instance, cowboy boots (at first sight a harmless detail) will ultimately lead to a failed projection of ‘skateboarder’ identity. One is ‘not enough’ of a skater and ‘too much’ of something else. Perfection and precision, thus, require sustained and disciplined focus on the detailed micro-practices of ‘getting it right’. These micro-practices, we argued earlier, are governed by ‘micro-hegemonies’: specific sets of norms that dictate the place of certain details in the ordered bundles that produce identities. Consequently, small changes in style – changing one detail sometimes – provoke big changes in identities, because such small changes rearrange and reorder the whole bundle. Every detail, thus, can be seen as in need of organization and ordering, and can so become an object of ‘how to’ discourse (Blommaert & Varis 2011, 2012).

In this paper, we focus on a phenomenon called the Hijabistas, and the online ‘how to’ discourse regulating this phenomenon. Hijab refers to the head cover worn by Muslim women, and to the ‘modest’ style of Muslim women in general. Hijabistas, then, are Muslim women who dress ‘fashionably’ and/or design fashionable clothes, while orienting towards what is being prescribed by their religion in terms of dress2. Being a hijabista can be seen as a sartorial technology of the self (Foucault 1988; see also Fadil 2011 for a discussion on not-veiling as an aesthetic of the self) that finds its expression in a complex of micro-practices revolving around recognizable emblematic values of fabrics, cuts, accessories and styles. This phenomenon is not exclusively visible on the internet, but still very prominent in different online environments: one can find blogs (e.g. http://www.hijabstyle.co.uk/), shop in online stores (e.g. http://www.hijabista.com/), watch YouTube videos (more on this below), ‘like’ Facebook pages (e.g. http://www.facebook.com/Hijabista), and engage in discussion with others on these and other sites.

'Hijabista’ as a word has its roots in the older ‘fashionista’, which refers to a keen follower of fashion and/or someone who dresses up fashionably. ‘Hijab’ is not the only word that has been used to form such a ‘fashion portmanteau’ word – another example of this would be ‘fatshionista’ (see e.g. Diary of a Fatshionista3). As the name suggests, fatshionistas are people who go against the received idea that fashion is only for the ‘skinny’, and both hijabistas and fatshionistas can in fact be seen as transgressive modes of fashionista, as neither Muslim nor overweight women are seen as the ideal targets of the prescriptive discourse on acceptable Western female bodies regulating their desired shape and the ways in which they should be (un)covered.

The relationship between Islam, female fashion and individuality has in fact been fraught with conflicts. In 1994 an international row broke out when Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld showed a dress on which verses from the Qur’an were printed. Globalized fashion, so it seemed, should not in any way be confused with the Muslim faith. Conversely, wearing the hijab has in Western societies quite consistently been branded as a kind of uniformization of female Muslims, and so associated to the denial of individual liberties, the absence of freedom to articulate female identities, and the oppression of Muslim women in general. It is seen as a remnant of pre-Modernity and pre-Enlightenment, which is why Atatürk banned the hijab from his modernized Turkish state and Shah Reza Pahlavi banned it from his equally modernized Iran. The same arguments motivated a hotly contested debate in France in the 1990s and in several other European countries since then, leading to the call by Geert Wilders in The Netherlands to introduce a special tax for women who insist on wearing the hijab. A large and growing popular and media literature documents such conflicting interpretations. Hijabistas, thus, assume a place in an area of controversy and conflict. Their sartorial practices need to balance between different worlds of interpretation, none of them socioculturally and politically innocent (see also Sweeney 2011).

Western’ fashion is designed to cover specific kinds of bodies, and to a large extent cover them only minimally – hence the exclusion of bodies that are seen as non-fitting due to their ‘wrong’ shape, as well as the ‘awkward’ mix with bodies that are not available for the generous display of bare skin or are not by default aiming at attracting (often erotically interpreted) attention to themselves. Thus the emergence of niche fashionistas such as fatshionistas and hijabistas, with specific micro-hegemonies entailing specific micro-practices of self-fashioning and self-consciousness.

These specific micro-practices play into the creation of what we have elsewhere (Blommaert & Varis 2012) called ‘culture as accent’ – a space for uniqueness and individuality within overwhelming pressures towards conformity. One’s accent – the details that contribute to the making of one’s unique identity – are often the result of very complex articulations where even seemingly contradictory identity discourses are brought together for the production of the totality that is ‘my (unique) accent’. Articulation, in the words of Stuart Hall (1986: 53, emphasis original), is

(…) the form of the connection that can make a unity of two different elements, under certain conditions. It is a linkage which is not necessary, determined, absolute and essential for all time. You have to ask, under what circumstances can a connection be forged or made? The so-called ‘unity’ of a discourse is really the articulation of different, distinct elements which can be rearticulated in different ways because they have no necessary ‘belongingness’. The ‘unity’ which matters is a linkage between the articulated discourse and the social forces with which it can, under certain historical conditions, but need not necessarily, be connected.

Our accents are the result of specific articulations, and all of this is tied into consumer culture and the consumption and display of certain consumer commodities. As Entwistle (2000: 124) puts it, in the “production of the ‘body beautiful’”, “the modern ‘care of the self’ has become one of the defining features of consumer culture. Rather than imposed on us, these practices call us to be self-conscious and self-disciplining.” The preoccupation with the micro-practices of self-in-consumerism is very prominently manifest in e.g. the change of style according to occasion, year and season (hence, for instance, the fear of being a target of the damning ‘that is so last season’ remark for anyone who wishes to be stylish). As for the case of hijabistas, Jones (2007: 211) in her discussion on Islamic fashion in Indonesia points to these consumerist articulations as “an index of two apparently contradictory or mutually exclusive phenomena, a rise in Islamic piety and a rise in consumerism.” However, here we should be wary of constructing any essentialist fundamental break between ‘Western’ fashion and ‘Muslim’ clothing and of implying the impossibility of combining these two. Just because the mix is not necessary does not mean that it is impossible, and, as we shall see below in more detail, our late modern consumer culture indeed enables and encourages the articulation of a whole range of identities, each with their own defining accent.

The product of engaging in specific practices of articulation is a tailored self – in the case of different fashionistas very literally so. This means striking a balance between ‘standing out’ and ‘fitting in’: “We can use dress to articulate our sense of ‘uniqueness’ to express our difference from others, although as members of particular classes and cultures, we are equally likely to find styles of dress that connect us to others as well” (Entwistle 2000: 138, 139). It is, as said above, a trade-off between conformity and uniqueness. Striking this balance is not always easy, for one may – either accidentally or on purpose – produce too strong an accent that will be the target of criticism, ridicule etc. We will start by looking at corrective ‘how to’ discourses on unacceptable accents.

How to quote: J. Blommaert & P. Varis. (2012). How to 'how to'? The prescriptive micropolitics of Hijabista. Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies nr. 30. 

Read the full working paper here: How to ‘how to’? The prescriptive micropolitics of Hijabista.