Banning The Burqa Campaign

The monolithic construction of the “Third World Woman”, as proposed by Mohanty, is demonstrated in recent campaigns by right-wing nationalistic groups in Australia and around the world to ‘Ban the Burqa ’. This was a campaign proclaiming to protect and support and empower Islamic women. We argue that in Western discourse there indeed exists a disconnection between women as the subaltern ‘other’ women and their ‘real’ manifestation as the “material subjects of their collective histories” (Mohanty 1984, p. 334) because the ‘Ban the Burqa’ campaign lacks historical contextualisation and discursively paints all women who wear a full facial covering as oppressed without any consideration as to what the individual women themselves would prefer. Mohanty
John Hirst’s article ‘Should we ban the burka?’ (2014) in The Australian newspaper provides us with some of the arguments for banning the burqa. It also contextualises society’s perceptions as it is a relatively representative position of many Australians both liberal and conservative. It is important to note though that The Australian newspaper’s editors are often critiqued by third-party scholars for an alleged bias as the newspaper often reflects the views of its owner, Rupert Murdoch a very wealthy Australian-born, American citizen with strong conservative ties. Observing this potential bias we can dissect Hirst’s arguments in favour of a burqa ban. Foremost in his argument is that wearing full body clothing is consistent with an attitude of “I can see you but you cannot see me”. He argues that this shows “contempt” for Australian values as it “discourages normal human interaction” on the basis that facial signals cannot be read (‘Should we ban the burqa?’, 2010, para. 3). This point seems fair in an open society such as Australia’s, however, this does not qualify as a reason for enforcing what women can or can’t wear. It may be a noble end but it is in no way a noble means. As outlined in earlier paragraphs the enforcement of such a ban denies the women it affects the agency to affect their own changes. The apparent neglect in addressing this point in the article is indicative of the accuracy of Mohanty’s argument that Western hegemonic discourse subjugates its