C L O S E R

Visual representation of Muslim women and the state

Posted on December 7th, 2009 by martijn.
Categories: Gender, Kinship & Marriage Issues, Public Islam.

In several previous posts I have paid attention to the use of images of Muslim women in government ads, see HERE and HERE. Such campaigns usually produce some debate and yes we have a new one again. On a website for internships at state instutions the following picture is used:

Think Ahead

Conservative-liberal party VVD asked the government for clarification on this matter. According to the VVD the campaign suggests that the government wants to employ more women with face-covering clothes. According to spokesman De Krom:

This is a campaign aimed at attracting young adults for a job at a state institution. Face-covering clothes is actually something the government tries to ban from the public domain and foremost from the state’s institutions.

A spokesperson of the Home Office stated that the campaign and its ads is meant to represent issues the state has to deal with.

This shows that there are differences in culture of young Dutch people the state has to engage with. Sometimes this is a puzzle.

Another picure used is this one for example:

The idea of the site is clear, and probably it is well intended. However it again shows the focus of the Dutch state on cultural differences, not all cultural differences but only those that represent people not part of mainstream society or better what is regarded as how mainstream society should be. Also when representing a Muslim woman, the idea always seems to be that she wears a headscarf or something like that. A Muslim woman without a headscarf may not be as recognizable perhaps, but should a (secular) state present such a stereotypical representation of Muslim women?

VVD spokesperson follows an interesting logic here. According to him the campaign suggests that the state is willing to hire women with facecovering. Looking at the second picture, would that also mean that the state is willing to hire kids who are too fat (assuming ‘we’ don’t like that as well)? Since the debate is usually about the representation of Muslim women, it is interesting to see how, again, white non-Muslim men are worried about the clothes of Muslim women, thereby marking and guarding the boundaries between Muslims and non-Muslims but also between men and women claiming the right to decide how women should be dressed or not.

In this case interesting as well is that the image of the women is not new. It has been there I think for several years now. So why now the fuss over the representation of women ánd the state?

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