Voguing the Veil: Exploring an Emerging Youth Subculture of Muslim Women Fashioning a New Canadian Identity

Abstract

The population of 2nd generation Canadian-Muslim women who choose to veil, or wear the hijab, is steadily increasing. Rather than inquire why these women choose to do so, this study explores how Muslim youth use the veil as a fashion accessory. Guided by research questions that focus on the representation of the veil in popular culture, this study explores the veil as a sign as the women negotiate ‘being Muslim’ and ‘being Canadian’. Informed by a cultural studies conceptual framework, veiling in fashionable ways, or, ‘voguing the veil’, is explored as a form of ‘public pedagogy’ (Giroux, 2004). Using an Advocacy and Participatory methodology, the four women and myself engage in a collaborative inquiry examining meanings behind how we vogue the veil. Through a series of interviews, focus groups and journal entries accompanied by personal photographs (photovoice), the women and I co-construct narratives around their identity as women who veil in ways that contest dominant discourse. Together we explore the impact of constructs such as beauty, femininity and sexuality on our identities as Muslim women who veil in Canada. Co-constructing participant case studies permits readers “access to the world from the view-point of individuals who have not traditionally held control over the means of imaging the world” (Berg, 2007, p. 233), at many times surprising and contradicting what is ‘known’ about the veiled Muslim woman. The findings reveal themes that deeply impact how the women choose to veil. These themes include the strategies the women use to employ their veils as a means of agency and how, within and through different pedagogical spaces, the women’s performances and performativity of the veil shifts. The women in the study demonstrate that by ‘voguing the veil’, they are in fact attempting to transform the meaning of the veil as a marker of Canadian Identity. Using the voices, photos and narratives of the four women I argue that through ‘voguing the veil’ these young Muslim women are actively entering into and creating spaces so to be seen as an integral part of Canadian society and as such can be recognized as an emerging subculture.