The Clothed Body

The Clothed Body
clothed body, is today a non-naked body, the fascination of which lies in
playing hide and seek with beauty, as Nietzsche says, then there is a part
of the body which presents itself as naked par excellence, even from under
the mask of makeup: the face.
Perhaps we can speak of the face’s nakedness because we learn to recognize
others especially by their face. It’s more difficult to recognize a person
by other parts of their body or their gestures: for example, let your gaze fall
on their hands or way of walking, concentrate on their voice or the stylistic
flourish in a billet-doux from a virtual lover … lovers’ secrets, these,
or the prerogative of astute observers. Gazing at the face is, above all,
seeking the other’s gaze. This ‘face-to-face’ goes beyond mirror-like reflection,
though it may recall it, and goes beyond the identity of self. Gazing
into another’s eyes always brings with it a deflection from the flatness of
the reflected image to the refraction of a dialogue.
The veil over the face is foreign to western culture, perhaps because the
western ‘subject’ is constructed largely on reciprocal gazing. Nevertheless,
every culture is formed by looking at what is distant, and by constantly
looking to the past as a time to regain. Fashion is fully aware of this prerogative
and today stands at the intersection between cultures world-wide,
and between themes that bring together past and present, sacred and
profane, near and far. The gaze may be deviated yet again and the face veiled
to excess by the thick warm fabric of a cagoule. A Tuareg citation, perhaps?
In Islam the veil for women was introduced by the caliph Omar, who
based his ‘invention’ on certain verses in the Koran which recommend that
women lower their gaze and cover their head in public. The Tunisian
scholar, Majid El-Houssi, has demonstrated that the use of the veil for
women is closely linked to the importance of the gaze in the Islamic world
(1987: 20). Being Muslim means controlling your gaze and maintaining a
rigid divide between male and female. A woman’s intimacy is protected by
her veil; and in Islamic tradition this intimacy is called ‘awra, the root of
which (‘awr) means the ‘loss of an eye’, as El-Houssi points out, recalling
the relation between prohibited sight and loss of sight. In the Hadith the
punishment recommended for men who look at women not related to them
is loss of the faculties of sight, touch and smell. In her analysis of the veil
in Islam, Fadwa El Guindi (1999a) looks at the complex relations between
the traditional religious dress code for women in different Muslim societies
and the hierarchies of power, women negotiating their independence and
aesthetics. In Islam the gaze is perversion of the eye, its interdiction, its
zina, just as the word is the zina of language, physical contact the zina of
hands and walking in desire the zina of feet. Only poetry, at once within
and without laws and interdictions, can celebrate the gaze and voyeurism.
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