A look at Western fantasies of unveiling and its disregard for Muslim women’s values

MADRID – The Iranian Parliament has definitively passed the legislation known as the “Support for Families through the Promotion of the Culture of Chastity and Hijab,” more commonly referred to as the Hijab Law. According to official sources, the new regulation explicitly prohibits “nudity, the removal of the hijab, and inappropriate attire in public spaces, both physical and virtual.”

In Western discourse, the hijab has been frequently employed as a cultural or religious symbol to justify questionable and inhumane policies towards Eastern nations. No care is taken in understating the philosophy of hijab, or how Muslim women say they feel more protected, valued, and independent wearing it. 

For the West, which is often tied to secularism, an exclusionary approach that validates certain sensibilities while marginalizing others, the hijab is presented as a symbol of lack or absence of agency, a marker used to define and position women who wear it as subjects devoid of autonomy or decision-making power. However, this perception does not necessarily reflect the experience of those who choose to wear it, but instead responds to a discursive logic that prioritizes values such as visibility and individual freedom, understood within a Western framework.

Moreover, as political scientist Wendy Brown points out, if the West places freedom at the core of its ideals, it must also, inevitably, define its opposite: the lack of freedom. Brown emphasizes that “the earliest conceptions of freedom are always limited and, potentially, require the structure of oppression that freedom combats.” The interaction between the veiled and the unveiled creates a visual psychic economy in which the issue of freedom is imagined as resolved. In this context, the veiled is associated with oppression, absence of agency, and lack of freedom, with the solution to these absences seen, from this perspective, in Westernization, specifically understood as unveiling.

The fantasy of unveiling seeks to establish a power dynamic, in which the veiled Muslim woman becomes an object to be unveiled, understood, and controlled by the WestIn this sense, it can be argued that, from the Western discourse, the veiled woman forms part of what Anne McClintock calls a “panoptic time,” which represents modernity and contrasts with the “anachronistic time” of the veil.
In most analyses of the veil from a Western perspective, the presence of the veiled woman is constructed as a constant reminder of the existence of an “Other” that obstructs the desire for assimilation into modernity and, by extension, into whiteness.

On one hand, the body that is, or can be, exposed is presented as a modern, free, secure, conscious, and human body, visible in its presence. This body is contrasted with the invisible body, veiled by insecurities, vulnerability, and, most notably, subhuman in its absence.

In the Western imaginary, freedom, understood as the practice of the body, is identified with the performativity of unveiling: the body always unveiled, reflecting the accumulation of the desire for transparency characteristic of modernism.

In this context, the veil evokes the notion of a suffering and wounded body, as Wendy Brown describes, where women who wear it are seen as victims of oppression. In the fantasy of liberation through unveiling, it is assumed that the veil symbolizes suffering and submission, and that, therefore, the women who wear it embody a wounded identity that needs to be liberated. This liberation is projected as an action that must be facilitated by liberal states, which present themselves as protectors of these women. However, in practice, the act of stripping them of the veil can become a way of imposing a homogeneous vision of freedom and autonomy, without considering the realities of the affected women.

Thus, the veil is not only perceived by the West as a symbol of oppression, but also becomes a space for political intervention, where the state, through the imposition of liberal norms, seeks to “save” women. This approach overlooks their experiences, choices, or particular contexts. In this way, there is a risk of stripping women of their agency, turning their attire into a problem that must be resolved from an external and normative perspective.

The veil, by erecting a barrier between the body of the Eastern woman and the Western gaze, seems to place her body beyond the reach of Western desire and observation. This opaque and enveloping veil creates a mysterious and elusive figure, frustrating the Western desire by making it invisible and inaccessible. The veiled figure’s refusal to be observed generates disillusionment in the Western gaze, which, frustrated, subjects this enigmatic figure to constant scrutiny.
The representation of the East and its women, “as the unveiling of an enigma, making visible what is hidden,” becomes a process in which the veil plays a crucial role. The veil is one of those tropes through which Western fantasies of penetrating the mysteries of the East and accessing the interiority of the other are materialized. This fantasy of unveiling not only seeks to dissolve the mystery surrounding the Eastern woman but also to establish a power dynamic, in which the Western subject, by removing the veil, gains access to knowledge that was previously inaccessible to them.

Through this process, a narrative of domination is constructed, where the other— in this case, the veiled Muslim woman— becomes an object to be unveiled, understood, and controlled by the West.

Without delving into the specifics of the recently passed hijab law by the Iranian Parliament, the key point is that when discussing the veil, one must avoid the trap of an Orientalist discourse that reduces female agency to a single narrative.