Veiled Figures: Women, Modernity, and the Spectres of Orientalism by Teresa Heffernan (review)

Teresa Heffernan's timely and powerful Veiled Figures: Women, Modernity, and the Spectres of Orientalism is a significant entry into the discussions that have ensued from Edward Said's 1978 Orientalism. Heffernan responds in particular to two issues. First, she maintains that the links between orientalist discourse and military and political dominance began with the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment – that is, the rhetoric of Orientalism is distinctly modern and thoroughly imbricated in the discourse of power. Second, she argues that the "figure" of the (un)veiled woman has for 300 years occupied the centre of such discourse, and, indeed, this orientalist "spectre" continues to dominate not only Western views of the Muslim world but also Islamist discourse about women. Writers in both the West and the Middle East, Heffernan persuasively demonstrates, have used the "veiled figure" to exacerbate the imagined dichotomies of religion/reason, Islamic umma/Western nations, and Islamism/global capitalism.

Positioning her study across three paradigm-shifting eras, the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and the birth of "secularism," the nineteenth-century racialization of nations, and the rise of global capitalism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Heffernan applies close reading and rhetorical analysis to show how the "metaphoric and semiotic implications" of (un)veiled women's bodies have participated in the discourse of power.

Chapter one, "Islam, the Enlightenment, and the Veil," describes the (un)veiled woman as a powerful and contentious symbol of the "irrationality" of Islam, just as the Ottoman Empire's position of economic and military supremacy was beginning to wane. Nineteenth-century Western travel writing viewed Ottoman "cosmopolitanism" with disdain, pitting it against the (imagined) racial purity of European "nation." In chapter two, "The Great Whore of Babylon," Heffernan shows how both Ottoman and Western writers make the figure of the (un)veiled woman central to the rhetoric of "clashing civilizations." Ottoman women writers Halide Edib, Melek Hanim, and Adelet not only disrupted the image of Muslim women as passive and enslaved but also documented the diversity of cultural and ethnic identities in Ottoman society. But the empire, the "great whore," was seen as a place of miscegenation and direct threat to the racialized idea of "nation." American writer Lucy Garnett, both enamoured and distressed by Ottoman heterogeneity, reported on the Sultan's palace in admiring terms, yet used the "racial science" of her day to argue that the unregulated mixing in the harem predetermined the empire's downfall.

Chapter three, "Two Western Women Venture East: Lady Annie Brassey and Anna Bowman Dodd," displays self-contradictions in narratives of feminism and nation. Brassey submitted to the patriarchal and imperialist ideologies of British culture even as she promoted the liberation of Turkish women from the harem. For Dodd, Eastern decadence lurked in the secrets of the harem where the "very color of the skin" was hidden and racial miscegenation abounded.

Chapter four, "The Great War and Its Aftermath," demonstrates ultimately doomed, feminist, anti-military discourse from both the East and West. Women's bodies assumed new significance in both Europe and Turkey in the twentieth century. Mustafa Atatürk promoted the unveiled woman's body as an emblem of modernity and espoused a racialized idea of citizenship that echoed Europe's nationalisms. Ottoman-Greek Demetra Vaka Brown and British Grace Ellison reported nostalgically on the Ottoman past and ambivalently on the new Turkish woman.

Heffernan concludes in "The Burqa and the Bikini" with a sharp turn to recent events that opens the door to future scholarship. The "orientalist spectre" of women's bodies continues to emerge from both East and West, from Western media coverage of the Afghan and Iraq wars to Turkish President Erdogan's "neo-Ottomanism," which paradoxically revives the militarized nationalism of the Kemalists and claims that attacks on veiled women are attacks on the state.

In framing the (un)veiled woman in historical, global debates, interrogating voices of compliance and resistance, and documenting the troubling new iterations of this trope in the...