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Fort!/Da! Through the Chador: The Paradox of the Woman’s Invisibility and Visibility Siamak Movahedi and Gohar Homayounpour “[E]ach of us enters the world through the body of a woman, – a carnal enigma that has virtually baffled our systems of understanding, rather than fleeing, condemning, or idealising the body of the (m)other, we need to recognize her in ourselves,” writes Sprengnether.1 Perhaps it is the recognition of her in us that is too threatening as a secret to be divulged, and perhaps it is the recognition of her in ourselves that revives the trauma of her loss. The body of the m(o)ther – the mother and the woman as the other – has always been under attack oscillating through visibility and invisibility; being attacked for being visible – unveiled – and being attacked for being invisible – veiled. What is it to be a woman? Is a woman defined by her anatomy, by her physical body, or is what she wears part of the definition of womanhood? Freud’s (1925) question, “what does a woman want?” is not separate from the cultural discourse that identifies someone as a woman in her visibility and invisibility. And in line with Hélène Cixous’ utilisation of the incidental French connection between the two verbs savoir (to know) and voir (to see), how can we know what we do not see and how can we see what we do not know?2 In this paper, we will try to present a psychoanalytic reading of fantasies surrounding the chador, a veil-like outer garment worn in public by some Iranian women, treating it as a psychic object that comes to life in relation to others within a particular cultural context. Eschewing an Orientalist’s ideological position, we will attempt to examine the social and psychic function of dress, and the chador in particular, and the significance of the preoccupation with such clothing in fantasy for men and women. We will also argue that fixation with making the woman invisible and visible through chadoring and de-chadoring may be traced to a ‘fort-da’ movement of sending away and recalling the (m)other as posited by Freud.3 1 M. Sprengnether, The Spectral Mother: Freud, Feminism and Psychoanalysis. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990, pp. 245-46 2 See, H. Cixous and J. Derrida, Veils. Translated by G. Bennington. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. 3 S. Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, The Standard Edition, Vol. 18 (1920-1922), pp. 1-64. Siamak Movahedi and Gohar Homayounpour 114 Although one can undertake an analysis of the chador or veil as it is presented in literature, in this paper we are interested in the chador as an object of desire, a psychic envelope, a container, a transitional object, or a second skin ego. Our focus is on the subject’s relationship to a particular object of fantasy that ‘holds’, ‘hides’, ‘covers’, ‘veils’, or ‘dresses’ the body, a theoretical model similar to the rhetorical use of the concepts “second skin”, “skin ego”, or “psychic envelope” by prominent psychoanalysts such as Bick, Anzieu, and Houzel.4 The chador is a traditional outer garment that is worn by some traditional, rural, or religiously devout women in public in Iran. It is itself a pre-Islamic dress code. Some have traced the origin of the chador to the Achaemenian Persian Empire in the sixth century BC. The purpose of the chador was to keep women of high social status away from the gaze of commoners.5 Regardless of its history, the chador, like any other object that marks public and private boundaries, is highly over-determined. It cannot be pushed into a one-dimensional analysis of one kind or another. The chador as an item of dress is both a social and a fantasy object. As a signifier it travels through different chains and slips under different ‘signifieds’. As a performative object of representation, it can be placed in many different explanatory schemas and can be subjected to a variety of interpretations. As an item of dress, it is the site for multitudes of social and psychological functions. It is a complex entity located within the public and private contexts at varying intra- and inter-psychic axes. It is neither merely a social thing nor can it be reduced to something purely psychic. Nevertheless, the chador (or any form of veil) has captured only the Orientalist’s gaze of the West. In the West any chador or veil-like outfit is...

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