Aneesa explained the release felt when changing out of the clothes used to contain her body within her work outfit.
I get home, I drop off my bag, first thing that comes off is the hijab [she laughs] and then –
I love the ‘throw it away’ motion that you just did
-and then get changed, and then a dirac [shiid]. And then the make- up comes off, straight away as well. Get a wet wipe, wipe it off, wash it, moisturise, done.
(Aneesa, 24, social worker)
Aneesa’s change as she moves into home speaks to the gazes constructed as a part of her work outfit. In dressing for work, she puts on a headscarf and make-up to prepare herself for the gazes that she feels she negotiates through these public spaces. The shiid (much like the ankara for Zainab’s friend) is positioned as deviant when worn outside of the boundary of home and is thus removed to enable a particular form of visibility within public spaces. Once within the home, this shiid is not viewed as a potential source of deviance, and a different kind of presentation is possible.
127
By situating these changes in relation to one another, it is evident how we layer multiple presentations of our beings across different spaces. Aneesa’s changing clothing practices show the importance of understanding our presentations beyond any fixed visibility as Black (and/or) Muslim women. She illustrates the shifting presentations of individual Black Muslim women, and assists in moving away from homogenising this grouping of Black Muslim women as fixed to any particular presentation.
These shifting experiences of being a Black Muslim woman are also highlighted through a conversation with Laila regarding different experiences of migration and constructions of home and public spaces.
I guess the move from Manchester to Sheffield is always going to be a little bit weird because Manchester… Because I was living at home, erm, it was more of a family situation and I was surrounded by a lot of other Muslims. And all of a sudden when I'm in Sheffield, and back in the university situation and speaking to like a lot of white people, like a lot of white people all the time. I guess I was really aware of not seeing many Muslims, not seeing many Black people all the time and that made me kind of… nervous after a while
Really?
Yeah
I think maybe it's the opposite for me. Because, erm, the fact that I grew up in Saudi and then moved here and in both places it was predominantly white. So it got weird when I saw Black girls like "woow, there are actually Black people, there are Asian people, there are different cultures." So yeah, it's interesting that you would find that weird.
(Laila, 25, university student in Engineering department)
It is clear that we are speaking of home on different registers: whilst I refer to ‘a family situation’ and a move across cities, Laila is thinking more broadly about the countries that she was located in prior to her move to the UK. However, both of our experiences of visibility are understood through previous interactions that construct our comfort (and discomfort) in the spaces we now navigate. Whilst I reflected on feeling the visibility of my racialized positioning more explicitly through the move to Sheffield, Laila reflected on her experience as a child in Saudi Arabia to feel a comfort within her visibility amongst a wider variety of racialized minorities within the British context. In both cases, our understandings of being (visible and comfortable as) Black Muslim women are layered through experiences across different spaces.
5.6 Conclusions
This chapter has examined how Black Muslim women feel and negotiate visibility within work outfits. This is part of an overarching task to explore different experiences of being Black Muslim women: how do we situate ourselves when feeling visible as deviant from the somatic norm? This chapter unpacked some of the different ways such a visibility was negotiated as we move through different outfits in public spaces.
128
This began by illustrating how such a visibility could be produced when abaya-wearers (like Aaliyah) were attempting to construct a professional outfit. Through this, the firm, straight lines that Longhurst (2001) attributes to the managerial body (i.e. a
professional outfit) are contrasted with the soft, flowy edges of the abaya. Within this context, the boundaries of the abaya clash with those imposed through the professional outfit. Abaya-wearers notice their visibility through the abaya’s deviance from the somatic norm of the professional outfit.
This deviance from the professional outfit is vital to explore because of the professional outfit’s role in presenting a properly ‘managed’ body. In attempting to fit into the professional outfit, there is an awareness of how one’s body could be seen as
mismanaged, and through this, mismatched with a position of authority. This leads to the use (or avoidance) of specific clothing practices so as to construct an outfit that we feel positions us as part of the professional outfit, and (by extension) a part of the bodies that have been managed effectively. However, even as we attempt to perpetuate social norms to build this position of authority, our very presence (as space invaders) troubles these social norms.
This speaks to the ambivalence surrounding our attempts to construct outfits to fit into these spaces whilst negotiating gazes that are felt to position us as out of place. These gazes do not need to be explicitly looking: rather, it is about how certain bodies have a right to look due to their positioning as part of the somatic norm (or as an extension of the social norms that make up the central watchtower in the Panopticon). Such an understanding of the function of gazes builds from work on the Panoptic by connecting gazes to the bodies that are able to gaze within different spaces.
This also works to situate our presentations in relation to the valuing of different gazes. Whilst some are felt to be explicitly looking and regulating presentations across
different spaces (e.g. uniform guidelines enforced by managers/teachers), others are implicit (such as the social discourses that perpetuate the somatic norm). In exploring how these gazes are felt and valued, there is an understanding of shifting negotiations of visibility in relation to an economy of gazes. This nuances the different gazes negotiated across (and within) different spaces.
This nuancing of gazes is illustrated through the role mothers play in the process of learning how to present ourselves within and beyond the home. As mothers notice their own (and their children’s) racialized visibility, they use a maternal gaze to pass on understanding of how (or how not) to present one’s body. This is explored as one of the ways in which we negotiate our visibility as Black Muslim women. We both draw from and push against the social codes perpetuated through these intimate gazes to
construct our understandings of how to be a Black Muslim woman.
In returning to this concept of an economy of gazes, parental gazes should also be situated alongside the role of schools as spaces of social normative learning. These spaces are amongst the first encounters we have where we learn how our bodies may
129
be visible as deviant from the somatic norm. These are moments where we learn how to orientate our bodies in relation to different gazes within these public spaces. These spaces of social normative learning also illustrate how we attempt to distance ourselves from a visibility that is felt to fix our bodies as racialized objects. However, in constructing this distance, we can also end up locating these processes of racialisation on Other(ed) Black bodies. Although this perpetuates the process of stigmatization that we are looking to push against, it also exposes the difficult negotiations made to avoid visibility as a spectacle. This speaks to the implicit function of social discourses that position Black Muslim women as out of place within Britain more broadly. Any
discussion on how Black Muslim women might gaze at one another (or other racialized bodies) must be situated within an understanding of how the British grammar of race functions, and how it teaches racialized bodies to function.
Within this context, we can understand our presentations as shifting in relation to different gazes (and specifically, social norms) negotiated through our movements. Black Muslim women are thus constantly reworking negotiations of our visibility in relation to the different bodies and audiences we feel looking at us (and who we look back at). These experiences are a part of the ever-developing performative layers we use to negotiate presentations across different spaces (and temporalities). Through our movements, we layer multiple presentations of how to be a Black Muslim women, and illustrate the necessity of challenging the fixing of Black Muslim women to any single presentation.
130