Chapter 15 Cultures of Headscarves
Feminist Intercultural Adult Education through a Challenging Exhibition
In: Feminist Critique and the MuseumSearch for other papers by Gaby Franger in
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Abstract
This chapter is situated within the complex discourses and polemical debates that surround women who wear headscarves and veils and the challenges this represents for feminism. The authors tell the story of a travelling exhibition – Cultures of Headscarves – that seeks to educate the public through a feminist intercultural understanding that positions diverse historical and contemporary practices of wearing veils and headscarves as normative to women’s cultures worldwide. Reasons for wearing these garments are also outlined within discourses of convenience, aesthetics, or religious belief, illustrating how women control and are controlled by this piece of fabric. Wading into stereotypes and other impossible situations in which women find themselves, the exhibition imaginatively and provocatively tackles narratives of patriarchal titillation, fears of “Orientalism” as well as misguided political prohibitions that tend to perpetuate anti-immigration stances. Critical to the pedagogical strength of the exhibition is the inclusion of the stories of women refracted through lenses of inter-connected personal and political determinants that ultimately bring readers to the issue of a woman’s right to choose as central to a feminist imaginary of a world that can and must be different.