Forcibly unveiling Muslim women mirrors the territorial seizure of imperialism.

Evidence

Second, Balibar argues that such practices are inspired by and produce a focus on migrant families (their composition and way of life) that works to sustain the idea that the nation is a racial kin group constituted against aliens. As I have argued in previous chapters, in the fantasy of Orientalism so brilliantly explored by Meyda Yegenoglu, the Western subject becomes a subject only through signifying the Other as different. The body of the Oriental woman, a body that must be consistently unveiled and modernized, confirms the Western subject as a person of knowledge and reason. To unveil, to bring Muslim women into modernity through force, is to ‘territorialize’ her body, Yegenoglu argues, a process matched by the wider process of territorialization we call imperialism. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 254

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Spivak’s ‘white men saving brown women from brown men’ and to Lila Abu-Lughod’s ‘do Muslim women need saving?’ — the same unveiling/imperialism parallel.
• SEED: Angle: the forced-unveiling-as-imperial-territorialization metaphor could anchor an essay on how benevolent feminist interventions on Muslim women’s dress repeat colonial land-grab logic.