SUSPENSIÓN POR DELITO GRAVE COMETIDO FUERA DEL RECINTO ESCOLAR

At home it’s just like, you just wear stuff that, you just wear stuff that’s comfy you know? Even if it’s like a mismatch, even if it doesn’t look right, even if it’s weird.

(Babs, 26, lives alone)

In this recollection, Babs speaks of wearing the ‘weird’ within the boundaries of home. This builds on the previous section’s understanding of the different functions of Britishness by focusing on the construction of the visible body. Despite finding a place wherein different forms of visibility were possible, her presentations are still

understood as potentially miss-matching with one’s surroundings, as that which ‘doesn’t look right’ in relation to the somatic norm (i.e. ‘the matched’). It is the ambivalence around this positioning that is explored within this section.

When understanding the relations that produce mismatching, the contexts wherein bodies (or clothes) are thought to match is brought to the forefront. Through these banal negotiations of one’s body and its in/ability to ‘fit’ within (and beyond) the context of home, I expand on the previous discussion on belonging and Britishness. Despite the boundary constructed around home, the wearing of these clothes is still done within the context of Britain. This is comparable to Gorman-Murray’s (2006) coining of the term ‘unhomely homes’ to describe how heteronormativity within the home was queered by the experiences of Australian gay men. Through changing the practices that are normalised within the boundaries of home, the very notion of home (and the national context wherein that home is constructed i.e. Britain and Britishness) become altered as well.

This highlights national identity as ‘a relative concept always constituted through definitions of Self and Other, and always subject to internal differentiations’ (Matless cited in Tolia-Kelly, 2006b: 341). However, what happens when notions of belonging are broadened out to incorporate our own mismatched experiences as the Other within the nation? It is within this context that Tolia-Kelly explores the potential for British Asians to engage with banal nationalisms within Britain.

The desire of the British Asian diaspora to attain a cultural nationalism in situ (at home) and in the everyday, are formed and communicated through materials which reflect alternative discourses of national and cultural identity of a variant Englishness. The diasporic community, through these material and visual cultures (at home) asserts spaces of connection with landscapes and sites of belonging within and without the British landscape that secure various hybrid cultures of boundedness and stabilise claims to citizenship (2006b: 345, emphasis in original).

Returning to Asiya’s negotiation of the shiid (in relation to new homes), the shiid signifies an unstable performance of cultural nationalism. Asiya’s (and by extension her mother’s) legitimacy as ‘Somali’ can be called into question through the movement of these performances into the context of British homes. Importantly, this also signals the blurring of boundaries around different performances of national identifications.

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This blurring of the boundaries around national performances is also reinforced through conversations had with shiid-wearers about what was worn under these garments. For Aneesa, Asiya, Khadijah and Sahra, the shiid was paired with leggings or pyjama bottoms, especially during winter when the shiid material was felt to be too thin to provide complete comfort. This was another point of conversation between Asiya and her mother, as her mother stressed the importance of wearing a shiid with a gorgarad (underskirt) as a part of her performance of Somali identification. In rejecting this, Asiya alters assumed ‘appropriate’ performances of her body through

mismatching, creating room for a presentation that speaks to her own sense of comfort within her construction of home. The potential within mismatching lies in its ability to speak across contexts. In this case, there is a connection to past performances of identity that disrupt the assumed stability and distinctiveness of both Somali and British national performances. There is also a connection made to future experiences of being by manoeuvring one’s body to connect and belong across both of these

categorisations, necessitating an expansion of these categorisations to include these performances.

Identity, says [Stuart] Hall, belongs to the future as much as to the past. ‘Cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories. But, like everything which is historical, they undergo constant transformation […].’ Our role in the making of history depends on how we conceive of ourselves as active, changing subjects, in ways that generate meaningful links between ‘how we have been represented and how that bears on how we might represent ourselves’ (Ang, 2000: 1).

In pairing shiids with pyjama bottoms, Asiya moves towards developing clothing practices ‘that bear on how we might represent ourselves.’

Although this reflects the potential within mismatching, it must also be understood alongside concerns that have been identified with hybridity (see Anthias, 2001; Easthope, 1998; Werbner, 2001). There are particular connotations apparent within the process of miss-matching that prevent the painting of an overly ‘hopeful’ image of the potential within this term. In order for a mismatch to be produced, there is a retention of the notion of a ‘matched’ body that does look right in relation to its

surroundings (Anthias, 2001; Easthope, 1998). As a result of this, mismatching stays on the periphery, as the deviant from the matched, no matter how much room to move is experienced through the mismatching.

Although this presented a particular difficulty for scholars espousing hybridity as producing new subjectivities (e.g. Hall, 1996b), this is less of a concern when thinking about mismatching. Embedded in the term itself is the assumption of a brief

temporality: mismatching is a moment produced through the context of power that structures these moments. Its positioning on the periphery of normative behaviour is therefore understood as the context wherein comfort can be achieved through mismatching.

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Yet it is important to highlight mismatching as a tool in the production of both comfort and discomfort. It exposes how presentations that transgress social norms can provide (more or less) space to move within our surroundings. This builds on the work from Interlude I by illustrating how comfort is not an ‘easy, unthinking state’ (Holliday, 1999), but a continuous negotiation of our bodies’ relations to different spaces. Within this logic, there is also a wider question about which bodies are presumed to produce mismatches, and which ones can sink into normative national discourses. Lewis (2009), McNay (1991) and Noble (2005) all point to how ‘Western’

constructions of identity include the ability to incorporate ‘ethnic’ (read strange) differences into the positioning of the unmarked white Self as universal postmodern citizens. However, such a manoeuvre is not open to those bodies fixed as Other within this context. Returning to a quote used in Chapter 1 (albeit with a different focus):

While middle England prides itself that the nation’s favourite meal is the Indo-Anglian hybrid of chicken tikka masala, and trendies demonstrate their cultural capital through the consumption of diverse cultural foods, forms and fashion styles, the British Muslim woman wearing the hijab is not presumed to be engaging in cool postmodern fashion bricolage. Instead she is likely to be essentialized as a victim of Muslim patriarchal control or as evidence of the security risk posed by Muslims’ presumed lack of social/national integration (Lewis, 2009: 69).

This perpetuates an imagining of the nation wherein racialized bodies become fixed and expelled as Other to the nation’s Self. This particular function of British

nationalism moves from Massey’s (2000; 2005) work on the multiple trajectories that construct space and time, and the ways in which certain trajectories ‘can be

immobilised while we proceed with our own’ through ‘their relegation to a past (backward, old-fashioned, archaic)’ (Massey, 2005: 8). Even as the (white, British) Self becomes known through its ability to consume elements of the Other’s culture, this is done within a context where the Other must remain fixed as strange/alien to the (national) Self. Mismatching recognises the way these distinctions are constituted and can potentially provide a language to negotiate it.

This is an important step taken through mismatching: it does not limit itself solely to an understanding of the body and how it might (or might not) be matched with one’s surroundings. It also begins to provide tools for Black Muslim women to speak back to normative understandings wherein bodies are (or are not) matching. As part of an exchange between Aneesa and myself, a connection is formed over where the shiid should (and should not) be worn by white friends who are given these garments as gifts.

Do you, do you have these as well?

Yeah

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Yeah, at like home. It is weird because, I've gotten a couple for some of my white friends and they were like "oh, we can wear them outside" and I was like "No."

[She laughs] no, no, you wear them, you wear them inside the home

Also like, I can’t be giving you these things and then you wear them outside, like, you cannot be one of those white hippies, no no no no. Like, not with clothes that I know, no.

(Aneesa, 24, lives with parents and sisters)

Although my own connection to these clothing practices came from a different cultural context from that of Aneesa’s, there was still a connection formed over the wearing of these garments and the comfort found through the boundary of home. A clothing practice that is understood as outside of normative performances is accepted within this conversation as a source of connection and comfort rather than deviance. Through the connection made to this garment as ‘clothes that I know’ (emphasis added), there is a looking back at the white body as mismatching these garments with surroundings. As we share an understanding of the boundaries wherein these garments can (or should) be worn, the white friends are positioned as potentially transgressing these

boundaries. The ‘white hippies’ who take on and present these garments as part of their own ‘cool postmodern fashion bricolage’ (Lewis, 2009: 69) are visible and marked as deviant within this conversation. Through this, the social categories within which Black Muslim women’s clothed bodies and white bodies are produced as visible are reversed, and there is an opening up of what these social categorisations could potentially mean as we move towards representing ourselves.

The experiencing of comfort through mismatching is still located within these social categories (wherein bodies can be matched). Thus mismatching works alongside wiggling: it is potentially because of the boundaries maintained around the body (through e.g. constructions of home) that room is created for these presentations to exist. Wiggling and mismatching highlight the different forms of comfort that can be achieved in relation to gazes negotiated within (and beyond) constructions of home. In other words, the comfort that is possible through wiggling (and mismatching) is also dependent on the gazes that our bodies are feeling and negotiating. For example, both Babs and Hind noted the wearing of ‘national’ Sudanese garment outside of the home (in Britain) as ‘impractical’ or causing discomfort. What is it about these clothing practices and accompanying gazes that produces sensations of discomfort? I explore this further by considering which gazes we feel we are negotiating within this construction of home.