Removing the veil disrupts the Algerian woman’s body image and spatial sense.

Evidence

The body of the young Algerian woman, in traditional society, is revealed to her by its coming to maturity and by the veil. The veil covers the body and disciplines it, tempers it, at the very time when it experiences its phase of greatest effervescence. The veil protects, reassures, isolates. One must have heard the confessions of Algerian women or have analyzed the dream content of certain recently unveiled women to appreciate the importance of the veil for the body of the woman. Without the veil she has an impression of her body being cut up into bits, put adrift; the limbs seem to lengthen indefinitely. When the Algerian woman has to cross a street, for a long time she commits errors of judgment as to the exact distance to be negotiated. The unveiled body seems to escape, to dissolve. She has an impression of being improperly dressed, even of being naked. She experiences a sense of incompleteness with great intensity. She has the anxious feeling that something is unfinished, and along with this a frightful sensation of disintegrating. The absence of the veil distorts the Algerian woman’s corporal pattern. She quickly has to invent new dimensions for her body, new means of muscular control. She has to create for herself an attitude of unveiled-woman-outside. She must overcome all timidity, all awkwardness (for she must pass for a European), and at the same time be careful not to overdo it, not to attract notice to herself. The Algerian woman who walks stark naked into the European city relearns her body, re-establishes it in a totally revolutionary fashion. This new dialectic of the body and of the world is primary in the case of one revolutionary woman. — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 204

Categorization

• DEFINE: Fanon’s concept of the ‘dialectic of the body and of the world’ in revolutionary veillessness.
• XREF: Connects to body-schema and embodied-cognition themes; directly serves the reader’s research on how coloniality permeates corporeal experience. — connects to: Algerian women’s veiling practices changed without being part of the revolution’s program; Colonial conquest history planted rape fantasies in European dreams about Algerian women; Colonial confinement degraded Algerian women’s bodily mobility and assurance (+1 more)

Related

• Colonial confinement degraded Algerian women’s bodily mobility and assurance (similarity 0.85)
• The veil shifted from passive tradition into an active revolutionary instrument (similarity 0.85)
• Algerian women’s veiling practices changed without being part of the revolution’s program (similarity 0.84)
• European observers read the veil as concealing beauty that should be forcibly exhibited (similarity 0.84)
• In European dreams, raping the Algerian woman requires first rending her veil (similarity 0.82)
• The female body’s shaping inverted from seduction into tactical concealment (similarity 0.82)
• The revolutionary struggle itself loosened the veil’s taboo, then reversed it (similarity 0.82)
• The veil’s meaning reversed from resistance symbol to revolutionary instrument (similarity 0.82)
• Unveiled Algerian women unsettled European women by excelling at Western femininity (similarity 0.80)
• Algerian women who had abandoned the veil re-donned it in response to forced unveiling (similarity 0.80)
• The European’s impulse to unveil Algerian women is an act of possession (similarity 0.80)
• Forced public unveiling drove Algerian women back to the veil in solidarity (similarity 0.80)
• French unveiling campaigns aimed to demoralize Algerian men, not liberate women (similarity 0.79)
• In European dreams rape of an Algerian woman is preceded by tearing the veil. (similarity 0.78)
• European doctors in Algeria saw unveiled women as disappointingly ordinary (similarity 0.78)