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Veiled Transgressions: Afterlives of the Hijab Ban and the Paradoxes of State Feminism in Tunisia
Abstract
This article analyzes the efforts of ordinary women to frame the Hijab (Veil) ban under the former autocratic regime of Ben Ali, also known as Circular 108, as a women's rights violation through mobilizing Tunisia's process of transitional justice. Women's headscarves –known as hijabs– were not only portrayed as traditional and sectarian symbols by secular state elites throughout Tunisia’s postcolonial history, but they were also outright banned in all state institutions, including schools and universities. The first restrictions on the veil were introduced in 1981 under Tunisia’s first president Bourguiba, but Ben Ali extended this policy under other circulars in 1991-1992, introducing a complete national ban on wearing the veil in all state-run educational institutions. The government further widened the official state ban on the veil in 2003, forbidding female civil servants working in the public health sector from wearing any form of the Hijab. Circular 108, and its various applications, adversely affected the lives of thousands of ordinary Tunisian women in critical ways. Women who wore the Hijab were expelled in their thousands from government universities and schools, harassed by the police on the streets, frequently summoned to the police stations, and excluded from many areas of the labor market, as mentioned above. The topic of the Hijab ban remained virtually off the limits of public discussion until the 2011 Jasmine revolution. Based on qualitative fieldwork including forty in-depth interviews with ordinary women, ethnographic observation of the work of the Truth and Dignity Commission (TDC), and content analysis of the Tunisian media, this article contributes to scholarship on feminist politics in post-revolutionary Tunisia in three ways. First, it documents the complex terrain of women's repertoires of resistance against Circular 108, demonstrating how their lived experiences trouble the official narrative of Tunisia's edifice of state-sponsored feminism by highlighting how it oppressed thousands of Tunisian women. Second, it reveals how the Hijab ban, and its contemporary afterlives constituted a dynamic field of feminist contention that shifted over time and in response to changes in women's web of social relations and networks of support. Finally, the findings directly challenge the religious versus secular conceptual binary that dominated earlier scholarship on women's rights in post-revolutionary Tunisia, confirming the urgent need for more nuanced, intersectional analyses of the field of contemporary feminist politics, as emphasized by recent scholarship.
Discipline
Political Science
Geographic Area
Tunisia
Sub Area
None