The Face-Veil through the Gaze

Abstract

The paper is to display through critical discourse analysis discursive structures of six opinion articles taken from three Canadian newspapers discussing the niqab after the ban of it in France: two newspapers are national – Globe and Mail and National Post – and one is locally published in Ottawa -Ottawa Sun. Studying these articles through a CDA lens, I have found that the discourse of the opinion articles features two ‘ways of seeing’ (Berger 2008) towards the face veil: one is the colonial gaze, which comes from a history of colonization and for which the face veil stands out as a barrier to obtaining knowledge about these women and thus conquering them. The other coded way of seeing is that of nationalism which translates Muslim women as symbols of anti-nationality and inability to assimilate into the ‘imagined Canada’ (Jiwani 2006; Berland 2009). The theoretical investigation of the paper relies on discussions of Orientalism, and on critical descriptions the socio-historical and political context of Canada. It is substantiated by a qualitative critical analysis of the data to illustrate discursive patterns that characterize ideologically loaded presentations of the face-veil and Muslim women.