Page - 94 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 02/01

94 | Elham Manea www.jrfm.eu 2016, 2/1, 91–110 woman employed to represent everything that contradicts Swiss values. The clip of the woman in the blue bra ironically introduces the agency of a woman who took to the streets while covered to protest the actions of the army and hence became the subject of the brutal force of a police state. At the heart of all three images is the body of the Muslim woman, covered or stripped, as a field of religious, political, and ideological battle. Islamists treat her body and its mandatory coverage as a symbol of a strict Islamist social order imposed on all who live under their control. European xenophobic forces see in her Burka a threat of Islamisation that must be stopped. The authoritarian Arab state uses the exposure of her body as an instrument of intimida- tion intended to stop her from practising her political rights. In the three pictures there is an image, utilised to represent religion and gender; a woman, who defies these representations and develops a space of resistance that challenges the religious, authoritarian, and xenophobic symbolisation of her body; a context that is conspicuously absent from the narratives and representations of the Muslim woman in all of these images; and most significantly a constructed Muslim identity that encapsulates the Muslim Woman, hiding her humanity, personality, and diversity – this constructed image that is exploited by different actors for different purposes. I look at visuality, normativity, and gender through a contextual prism within the indispensible concept of universality. Both normativity and visuality are shaped by context. In Saudi Arabia a woman walking without covering her whole body, including her hair and face, would stand out as both odd and foreign, and, most importantly, would be perceived as promiscuous and threatening to public morality. She might be arrested and flogged as a result. Yet, this same woman would not draw atten- tion if she walked in the streets of Berne or Zurich, where her appearance – wearing jeans, skirt, or dress, and with her hair and face uncovered – are considered “normal”. We visualise through our prisms of meanings, concepts, and norms of acceptability. But these prisms tend to vary over time, for they are not immune to modification or change. Likewise, gender roles are often constructed through their social context: a wom- an’s role in family, her treatment as a child and later as a woman, and her function within society are all shaped by her familial, social, religious, cultural, economic, and political contexts. That said, while her roles, and her worth or lack of worth, vary from one context to another, every woman is born with inalienable and universal value and rights that are irrespective of context: she is born equal in dignity and rights. The tension between the worth attributed to a woman by her context and her worth as a human being gave birth to the universal women’s rights discourse. I use the term “woman” here as an example for gender, which encompasses women, men, and transsexuals.