Veiling in Africa

Nine: Vulnerability Unveiled: Lubna’s Pants and Humanitarian Visibility on the Verge of Sudan’s Secession

nine Vulnerability unveiled: lubna’s Pants and Humanitarian Visibility on the Verge of sudan’s secession AMAl HAssAn fAdlAllA Journalist Lubna Ahmed Al-Hussein traveled to France to sign a book based on her story on the 23rd of November, 2009. Internet sales of her book . . . reached half a million copies, each selling for 18 Euros, 6% of which will go to Lubna. Lubna told reporters that the book will be translated into various languages. —Reuters (Paris), 2009 in July 2009, the transnational media circulated news about yet another grave human rights violation perpetrated by Sudan’s Islamist regime, the latest in a series of violent crimes against humanity.1 Lubna Al-Hussein, dubbed “the pants journalist” for wearing pants in public and hence countermanding the prevailing dress code of modest body covering, was sentenced to flogging after an arrest by the public order police in Sudan. This case became one of the most widely reported narratives about the subordination of Muslim women in the world.2 Lubna was arrested, along with twelve other women, in a public restaurant in Khartoum and charged with disturbing public order by dressing indecently. Lubna contested the immodesty charge by addressing the media and arguing that at the time of her arrest she was wearing baggy pants, a long blouse with long sleeves, and a headscarf. during her first trial, Lubna, a UNAMId employee, asked that her UN immunity be revoked in order to allow her to contest the charge as a sudanese national.3 in her second trial and in response to transnational attention, the judge altered the flogging sentence and sentenced her to 206 AMAl hAssAn fADlAllA one month in prison or the equivalent of a US$200 fine. Although Lubna chose to go to prison, the head of the journalists’ union paid the fine on her behalf and she was released. Lubna’s case mobilized human rights advocates, politicians, and diplomats to contest the legitimacy of Sudan’s Islamist regime and to shame the government (see also Fadlalla 2008, 2009; Keenan 2004 for earlier examples of this human rights strategy of shaming). The sensationalized media coverage of the case, with its focus on the heroic struggles of human rights activists and the condemnation of their oppressors, however , downplayed complex issues such as the debate over equal citizenship rights and the culture of dissent present in this turbulent country. Missing from the media narrative of suffering Muslim women is an oppositional feminist politics concerned with equal citizenship rights and invested in protesting both local and global hegemonies and oppressions. I argue that Lubna’s pants served as a symbolic site for competing transsovereign visions about Muslim women’s dress, about the meanings of veiling and unveiling, and about morality and freedom. One vision represents a transnational hegemony anchored in neoliberal moral ethos and in discursive practices of universal humanitarianism and human rights (see, e.g., Clarke 2009; Fadlalla 2008; Malkki 1994), and the other represents a translocal order that thrives on moral religiosity and discourses of containment and exclusionary citizenship rights.4 Within the sovereign transnational vision, Lubna is made visible through the neoliberal ethos of secular democracy, freedom, and humanitarianism, pitted against a competing (oppressive) moral other.5 But the exclusionary moral terms present in both transnational and translocal visions of women’s struggles leave little room for women’s maneuvering strategies of empowerment and political dissent that veiling or unveiling may represent. On the one hand, as global citizens, subaltern Muslim Sudanese women can only make their voices heard through a cause célèbre fitting preconceived orientalist narratives of Islam’s misogyny (Mohanty 2004; Said 1978, 1981). On the other, as national citizens, they can only gain recognition by lending consent to a hegemonic civilizing Islamic project. Feminists and anthropologists have paid increasing attention to mass media as a site where gendered discourses and imageries of identities, nationhood, otherness, and imperial racism are reproduced.6 The fastgrowing influence of neoliberal capitalism and the expanding realms of high-tech communication have facilitated the travel of images and stories and have challenged the construction of locality and nationhood in various ways. For instance, the retreat of the neoliberal state from previous social VULNERABILITY UNVEILEd 207 responsibilities and the expanding governmental roles of communication networks and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) (e.g., Ferguson and Gupta 2002; Harvey 2005) have led to the spread of a human rights culture that has...