On veiling, vision and voyage

Abstract

This article is concerned with the changing significance of the veil in Turkey in the early years of the twentieth century. Its discussion of the political significance of women's dress in a period of accelerated social change is conducted through the analysis of two illustrated books, one by a visiting English feminist and one by a Turkish woman who writes about life in Turkey and her travels in Europe. In this way, the debate about the veil is examined through an analysis of cross-cultural dressing which takes into account the different significations of seclusionary mechanisms for women constructed as Oriental and as Occidental. The study engages with recent theories about cross-dressing and transgression but argues that such theories are often unthinkingly Eurocentric in their valorization of transgression. Its analysis of the photographs and written elements in its primary sources suggests that cross-cultural dressing is a practice unevenly open to differently racialized social subjects. To this end, the article examines the sartorial self-presentation of a Turkish woman who, though elite in local terms, is arguably exoticized and culturally inferiorized within the terms of the dominant Occidental discourse in which she intervenes. This paper extends an analysis of cultural and of racialized difference to discussions of cross-dressing, which are often seen mainly in relation to gender difference. The reading of the photographs draws attention to the role of photography in the development of ethnographic regimes of representation and elaborates the shifting significance of the veil in the performance of an Ottoman female identity for an Occidental audience. The extent to which such performative identities can be recognized cross-culturally and to which individual cultural producers can manipulate transculturated codes is explored.