Trying to Look Different: Hijab as the Self-Presentation of Social Distinctions

Norma Claire Moruzzi

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Volume 28, Number 2, 2008, pp. 225-234 (Article) Published by Duke University Press

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Trying to Look Different: Hijab as the Self-Presentation of Social Distinctions

Norma Claire Moruzzi

Context

ne of the fundamental problems of modern society is the question not of womens public presence but of womens public representation. How should women look, or be looked at, in public (the problem of the gaze)? How should women act or behave (the problem of agency)? Who sets the rules (the problem of propriety and, beyond that, the problem of the law, whether the law is understood as social convention, legal stricture, or phallic authority)? In societies where citizenship is accepted as the basis of the polity, feminism is essentially the struggle over defining womens citizenship, that is, their role as citizens, and their public participation as members of the polity. Within the historical scope of that definition, feminism is inextricable from the process of democratization.1 Democratization itself is inevitably a modern experience, taking its inspiration from a classical city-state ideal but having evolved as a scattered and stuttering process over the past three hundred or so years. That is a relatively short historical frame, spread across a wide geographical area. Although womens formal participation as citizens, as members of the o f public, is habitually initially resisted, it is also almost inevitably eventually granted as part of ies d u t the local struggle over claiming and defining democratization.2 Democratization opens up eS ti v d a r an a the question of citizenship, citizenship opens up the question of womens civic participation, a p c i m fr Co ,A and womens civic participation opens up the question of women in (the) public. Once women si a A are citizens, they are members of the public, and as such they cannot unproblematically be u th st So Ea le excluded from participating in the public sphere, from being in public themselves. Therefore d d Mi the modern question, the modern argument, is not over womens public participation, as the th e 08 01 conclusion to that is relatively foregone. The question, the argument, the struggle, is over , 20 8- 0 .2
All interviews were conducted in Farsi. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are mine. 1. Although feminism often functions as a social (as opposed to a strictly political) movement, it is always linked to its contemporary political context. Recognizable modern feminism begins with the fundamental challenges of the French Revolution, whether the first feminist(s) is identified as Mary Wollstonecraft or Olympe de Gouges, Sophie de Condorcet, and the Cercle Social. Premodern writers on womens role or nature, like Christine de Pisan, wrote within the paradigm of fixed, ordained identities, without the preoccupations with rights and agencies that are the marks of modern democratic arguments.

re 2. This is true not only in the West, where the 150-year-long yP /1 0 si t r 5 struggle for womens suffrage began to succeed in the early and 1 e iv .12 Un i 10 mid-twentieth century. The same pattern can be recognized in ke do u D other parts of the world, particularly in the Middle East, where by 08 womens rights are sometimes granted as legitimating parts of 20 an authoritarian modernization project, as in Egypt, but can also be incorporated in populist revolutionary projects, as in Iran.

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womens public (self-)representation: the manner of their presence, the limits to their actions, and the autonomy of their role.3
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This article deals with that most superficial of outward appearances, the codes of dress. Particularly in societies in which dress is actually legislated, whether through sumptuary or modesty laws, the codes of self-representation are both publicly explicit and keenly personal.4 Within set limits, I define myself, and I am defined, by my adaptation to the representational code. But whether I efface myself or flaunt my identity depends as much on others interpretation of my representation as it does on my intentions themselves. How well have I utilized the codes? And since a code is also a (masked) language, how well have others deciphered its meaning?5 In the contemporary Islamic Republic of Iran, the codes of dress have been most contentiously utilized by women, especially younger

women. The most casual visitor to Tehrans streets has been able to observe the progress in womens adaptation of state-mandated hijab : more and more visible hair and makeup and shorter and tighter jackets and pants. The ubiquitous Tehran badhijab is usually taken to be a youthful resistance to the regimes authority, or even an eroticization of the public sphere.6 The corollary to this is the assumption that young women who individually insist on modest veiling are the unfashionable remnants of a repressed, premodern element of regime supporters.7 But is this an accurate reading of the (dress) codes of interpretation? If dress is recognized as a form of public self-representation, and if womens public self-representation is one of the key questions of the local process of democratization (in Iran as it is elsewhere), is it not important to comprehend how local practitioners use the codes? What are young women saying through their dress? Is the language of hijab only a discourse of modesty and eroticization, or
ing remark has been eagerly taken up by those who would read Iranian youth street fashion as a radical political statement. Boys on skateboards and girls wearing tight coats and makeup became the apparent symbols of a youth movement the observers were generally determined to identify as political. Particularly in the later Khatami period (20025 ), this was the standard interpretation of Iranian (or specifically Tehran) street life by outside observers, whether international journalists or academics on a flying visit through the capital. This interpretation has often rested on the observers taking at face value the assertions by middle-class youth that their life is entirely empty and Islamically repressed, compared with their highly idealized conception of a prerevolutionary youth utopia of liberated fun and games. (This despite the counterarguments by their elders that they actually enjoy much greater social freedom than did the previous generations, as a result of a lessening of family supervision and a much greater tolerance for unsupervised heterosexual mingling.) The class component of particular youth behaviors is also usually missing from these interpretations. See for instance Mahnaz Shirali, Visibility in Public Space, in Islam in Public: Turkey, Iran, and Europe, ed. Nilfer Gle and Ludwig Ammann (Istanbul: Istanbul Bilgi University Press, 2006), 31333. 7. Even writers who presumably have a firmer grasp of Iranian youth culture often betray a startling willingness to project their own conceptions of veiled girls Islamically oppressed lives onto their tantalizingly unknown subjects. Despite the freshness of her prose and perceptions of her own life and social circle, this is true even of Azadeh Moavenis Lipstick Jihad: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America and American in Iran (New York: Public Affairs, 2005).

3. Scholarship on Western womens historical presence (whether in life or in literature) has extensively examined the preoccupation with modern womens entrance into public life and the controversies over nice girls and ladies being (mis)taken for public women. For various examples of historical documents and studies, see Patricia Hollis, ed., Women in Public: The Womens Movement, 18501900 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1979); Kathy Peiss, Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in Turn-of-theCentury New York (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986); Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 17891860 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987); and Mary P. Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 18251880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990). For an example of literary studies on the narratives of womens entrance into a more public life, see Cynthia Wall, At the Blue Boar, over-against Catherine-Street in the Strand: Forms of Address in London Streets, in The Streets of London: From the Great Fire to the Great Stink, ed. Tim Hitchcock and Heather Shore (London: Rivers Oram Press, 2003), 1026. 4. There is an extensive scholarship on the meanings and modes of Muslim womens dress, ranging from passing discussions in the eighteenth-century travel writings of Lady Mary Wortley Montague, to Frantz Fanons mid-twentieth-century analyses of the Algerian revolution, to more recent studies of the politicization (or not) of contemporary hijab. For some of the more noteworthy examples, see Fatima Mernissi, The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Womens Rights in Islam, trans. Mary Jo Lakeland (New York: Addison-Wesley, 1991); Arlene Elowe Macleod, Accommodating Protest: Working Women, the New Veiling, and Change in Cairo (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991); Leila Ahmed, The Dis-

course of the Veil, chap. 8 in Women and Gender in Islam (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992); Franoise Gaspard and Farhad Khosrokhaver, Le foulard et la Rpublique (The Headscarf and the Republic ) (Paris: La Dcouverte, 1995); Nilfer Gle, The Forbidden Modern: Civilization and Veiling (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996); and Camron Michael Amin, The Making of the Modern Iranian Woman: Gender, State Policy, and Popular Culture, 18651946 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002). 5. One of the most important analyses of the differing manipulations of the codes of Muslim womens self-representation, as well as their representation by others, remains Afsaneh Najmabadi, Veiled DiscourseUnveiled Bodies, Feminist Studies 19 (1993): 487518. Najmabadis study of Bibi Khanoum Astarabadis nineteenth-century narrative strategies for responding, in her text Vices of Men, to the misogynist contemporary advice manual Disciplining Women offers an early instance of a womans playing with recognized cultural codes to satirical, and proto- feminist, effect. In a different interpretive sphere, some of the most provocative writings on the linked issues of representation and observation have been produced by feminist film theory, particularly its development of the theory of the (male) gaze as productive of womens (self-)representation. See Laura Mulvey, Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema, Screen 16, no. 3 (1975): 618; and Mary Ann Doane, Film and the Masquerade: Theorizing the Female Spectator, Screen 23, nos. 34 (1982): 7488. 6. Hence, in a Muslim context, the existence of a democratic public space depends on the social encounter between the sexes and on the eroticization of the public sphere (Nilfer Gle, The Freedom of Seduction: Defining Identity in Non-Western Terms, New Perspectives Quarterly 19 [2002]: 78). Gles pass-

is it also, like other sumptuary codes, a discourse of differential class and of social status?8
Argument

Method

I maintain that aspiring young Tehrani women choose their style of hijab as one way of publicly staking their claims to different forms of recognized social capital. Badhijab girls use minor innovations in dress cut or color to distinguish themselves as fashion leaders, identifying their best options for an upward social trajectory with a Western model of consumer culture and sexualized modernity. But chadori (modestly veiled) girls do not necessarily always wear their chadors. These young women describe adapting their veiling to suit particular social circumstances (head scarf and manteau to do impersonal local grocery shopping, and chador for personal and professional social occasions) and very consciously describe their specific modest hijab as the public social marker of their affiliation with elite religious families. 9 While the chadors of provincial girls are seen as simply religious or traditional forms of dress, Tehran chadori girls wear a chador to claim a place in the social trajectories of an established elite, without implying a specific political or religious commitment. For educated young urban Iranian women, self-representation through hijab is a conscious manifestation of different forms of social status more than a naturalized indication of political or religious identification.
8. Gle is one of the few scholars who has consistently insisted on placing the question of modern Muslim womens dress within the framing concepts of public space / the public sphere, distinction, performativity, and the historical experience of creating a socially recognizable self-representation, rather than addressing the question as one of essentialized religious identity. See Nilfer Gle, The Gendered Nature of the Public Sphere, Pubic Culture 10 (1997), 6181; and Gle, Islamic Visibilities and Public Sphere, in Gle and Ammann, Islam in Public, 343. 9. Manteau, the French word for overcoat, has been adopted as the Farsi term for the overgarments ( jackets/overcoats/capes) worn by more secularminded Iranian women in order to fulfill the requirements for public hijab. A manteau can be outerwear worn on the street or a more fitted jacket worn indoors as professional dress. 10. During winter 2006 and spring 2007, young Iranian men for the first time embarked on the kind of radically provocative street fashion that had for years been the exclusive province of young women. While young womens badhijab had ceased to become espe-

During 2005, in-depth interviews were conducted in Tehran with young women aged nineteen to twenty-nine, most of whom were university students. Approximately twelve in-depth interviews were conducted, supplemented by more informal conversations as well as participant observation in both public spaces (streets, coffee shops, and university areas) and private homes. The relatively small number of interviews precludes any absolute conclusions about young womens style of dress. But their responses definitely indicate a self-conscious deployment of dress as a constructed form of social representation, according to what they understand to be publicly recognizable signs of social identity. In spring and summer 2007, follow-up research was done in Tehran, which included the period of the governments freshly enthusiastic crackdown on Islamically improper dress, a crackdown that almost exclusively targeted young people of both sexes.10 The youth response to the increased official repression of individual dress styles bore out the implications of the earlier research, that youth clothing choices are social rather than political responses to opportunities and pressures in the larger public context. The theoretical interpretation of these social ethnographies draws on Pierre Bourdieus work on the embodiment of social distinction within a familiar spatial, cultural, and economic

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cially noteworthy, in that it continued to make quantitative rather than qualitative changes in a fairly standardized dress style (ever shorter and tighter jackets, lots of exposed hair, and heavy makeup), the hairstyles of boys in this period suddenly exploded. This was almost literal: gelled and spiked, the hair of the young men on parade in the upscale shopping areas of north Tehran often stood out several inches above and around their heads. This was not merely styled long hair, but a particular fashion innovation (a kind of punk look without the grunge attitude, sported by would-be yuppie clubbers) that was indigenous to Tehran, although slightly less extreme versions could be spotted in other parts of the country. The boys rather abrupt entrance into the street competition for badhijab distinction meant that the latest police crackdown on un-Islamic appearance and behavior was not targeted only at women. The simultaneous crackdown on thugs in more working- class neighborhoods seems to have been part of the same wave of youth repression, even though for those young men appearance was not necessarily the main criterion.

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frame: the hierarchies of social capital naturalized in the space of the habitus.11 The key to Bourdieus class mapping is the recognition that each unique but generalizable individual is located in a spatial and social context in which they recognize themselves and are recognized, and that their identity within that space of habitual self-recognition (the habitus) is a dynamic coordination of three social vectors: type of social capital (whether economic or cultural), amount of social capital, and change over time. The integration of time into the social map is critical, as it is the transient factor that reveals the combined instability and consolidation of class positions. But the specification of types of social capital is also important, as it clarifies the competition between parallel class fragments and acknowledges the often vicious competition for hegemonic claims between different fragments of the same general class position. Bourdieu, writing about the hegemonically dominant cultural values of the French nation-state, distinguishes between cultural capital and economic capital and leaves it at that: bohemians versus bourgeois. But within modern Iranian national history there is no clearly hegemonic cultural system, and the cultural sponsorship of the state carries an emphatic value. Compared with Bourdieus simple French dichotomy between economic and cultural capital, Iranian society is still involved in a competition for hegemonic dominance among two forms of cultural capital: secular and religious. Thus the Iranian social map involves an additional, confusing dimension in that cultural social capital is itself competitively bifurcated, in addition to remaining in competition with economic social capital. This further pluralization of social capitals complicates but does not otherwise dramatically alter the inherent structure of Bourdieus social mapping. The valence of class position is worked out of the combination of types of social capital (economic capital, secular cultural capital, and religious cultural

capital), combined amount of social capitals, and change in both amount and composition over time. It is not at all that society and status in Iran are chaotic but that their social structure is more complexly pluralistic and dynamic than most.
Dressing Up in Tehran

University students are actively engaged in the negotiation of their class position, since the commitment to education is an investment that is presumed to yield greater benefit in the future than in the present. University education is by definition secular education, even at a religiously affiliated university, if the curriculum is based on the secular disciplines of hard and interpretive science rather than the parallel tradition of theological interpretation and commentary. A doctorate in religion is a secular degree, no matter the level of faith of the doctor. Even in the Islamic Republic of Iran, religious students who study at secular universities, as opposed to theological seminaries, are pursuing through education an investment in secular cultural capital. Secularly identified students are pursuing a similar investment. Apparently, both types of students have made a choice between types of cultural capital and have identified their future trajectory with a secular education. But dress, which is often the prime public indicator of religious or secular cultural orientation, indicates a more complex situation. In a national context in which the state affirms religious identification but values technocratic knowledge, dress becomes a tactic for emphasizing ones priority or hedging ones bets. Among young Tehrani women university students, different styles of (state-mandated) hijab have become a way of negotiating the dress codes of public self-representation. Observers often assume that badhijab girls are rebelling against the patriarchal repression of the state. But interviews with the young women themselves indicate that they are consciously
of view of the conditions of production of habitus, i.e., with respect to the elementary conditions of existence and the resultant conditionings, one can construct a space whose three fundamental dimensions are defined by volume of capital, composition of capital, and change in these two properties over time (manifested by past and potential trajectory in social space) (emphasis added). Bourdieu, Distinction, 114.

11. See Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); and Pierre Bourdieu and Loc Wacquant, An Invitation to Reflexive Sociology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Bourdieu uses the term habitus according to his own definition: Endeavoring to reconstitute the units most homogeneous from the point

I myself follow fashion, but I make fashion, because when I dress like this, it becomes a kind of fashion. My younger sister sews everything for me which I describe for her. For example, I told my sister to sew an orange manteau and I was wearing it, and there was a store in the street where I was passing every day, and the shopkeeper saw me in an orange manteau, and after that he put an orange manteau in his shop window, and I noticed that, because before there was no orange manteau in his vitrine.

She identifies this ability to set trends not merely with her own personal style but with the style of art students generally: I think the girls who study art have a great share in this [changing the style of dress] because they invent something, and then it becomes widespread among other girls. This young woman art student and her colleagues take pains to emphasize both their affiliation with and distinction from secular, commercial, Western youth culture. Although they set themselves apart in relation to a Western cultural model, their local experience, particularly the experience of hijab as a youth street fashion, is an indigenous creation: This [street fashion] hasnt been brought by satellite [television], these are styles that have been invented by Iranian girls. Maybe in some parties they are wearing like in satellite TV, but not in the

Hijab as the Self-Presentation of Social Distinctions

defining themselves much more against their peers than against a legal statute. As with trendsetting for young women everywhere, this is a delicate game involving distinguishing oneself both from the ordinary crowd and from those girls who are perceived as going too far, as making too much of a spectacle of themselves. One young woman, an art student, identified the girls who are too aggressively showy (arz-eh andom) as those who wear oversize sunglasses (especially if perched up on top of their scarf) and who emphatically color their hair (a sort of twenty-first-century Persian youth Jackie Onassis look). Yet this same young woman proudly identifies herself as someone who can set a trend. During spring and summer 2005, manteaus in Tehran suddenly started appearing in particularly bright fashion colors: hot pink, lime green, and turquoise. According to this young woman, these color innovations came from the Tehrani youth themselves, including her own example:

streets. Satellite television, which in this period primarily meant the programming of Iranian exile stations produced in Southern California (and two years later included the more professional Persian-language broadcasts of Voice of America), provides an accessible imagery of an apparently authentic Western youth culture. But these secular Tehrani youth insist on their own authenticity; rather than merely mimick appropriated foreign styles, they position themselves as independent innovators. Like any classic avant garde, they claim the social capital of substantive creators, not mere fashion plates or fashion followers. In order to best position themselves on an upward trajectory of social positioning that would display their sophisticated accumulation of secular cultural capital, they must identify themselves as serious students and easy cultural negotiators. The girls with the big sunglasses, fancy hair, and too much makeup are dismissed as superficial show-offs; their investment is in feminine capital appropriate only to the marriage market, rather than to the wider social field. Describing her own self-presentation in the university, one such student explained that she uses less makeup there than others do, and less than she otherwise uses socially: Because in the uni everybody wants to show off. Normally girls whose work is very good, they dont need to show off, but girls whose work is not so good, they want to compensate with makeup. Thats why I dont want to use a lot of makeup. Asked whether she thinks that makeup is a kind of compensation, she says, Yes, because they want to be pointed out, thats it. But I cant make my hair like them, I cant use makeup like them. Therefore I said to myself, I cant compete with them, I have to distinguish myself another way. This young woman chooses to distinguish herself as a good student and even a trendsetter, but she carefully distances herself from the girls whose overly fashionable self-presentation compromises public recognition of their other capacities. Another student describes the need to temper feminine self-expression with self-restraint: Sometimes I would like to be in green [in a bright outfit], and it makes me so happy that I dont care about the strange looks. I want to feel like this [freer in her dress], but often I cant. For the young women who would position themselves in the

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Iranian social field through the deployment of secular cultural capital, the tension is between being recognized as a cultural leader, and being mistaken for a floozy. In order to be taken seriously, a Tehrani girl, like girls everywhere, has to distinguish herself from her peers, while taking care not to compromise her options by making the wrong kind of feminine spectacle of herself.
Choosing Chadors

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For Tehrani chadori girls, the language of dress is not necessarily any simpler. If anything, it may be more complex, because the nuances of this form of hijab, when worn by university students, seem to be more opaque to outside observers. Among themselves, Tehran university students agree that a students wearing of a chador can mean one of three things: that the girl is from the provinces, in which case she will probably switch to a manteau/russari (coat / head scarf) combination after a few months; that she is from a poor or traditional family, in which case she certainly will not be regarded as a trendsetter; or that she is from an elite religious family, in which case her chador is taken as a marker of social status rather than a sign of piety. Among Tehran university students, continuing to wear a chador is a sign either of traditional, workingclass identity or of very high elite status. Chadori students explicitly describe wearing the chador as different from other forms of modest veiling. A chadori industrial design student, asked if very modest hijab (wearing a tight scarf or maghneh , with no visible hair and no makeup, and a loose dark manteau) is similar to being chadori , says, No.12 When asked how they are different, she answers simply, In our society veiling is different from being chadori . Part of it is related to a kind of self-distinction. Asked if she means a kind of class status and social distinction, she responds, Partly. When she is asked if she means that they are not religiously different but different in that way (social distinction), she replies, Exactly. For these young women, religious obligation can be as well ful-

filled by other forms of modest hijab. Wearing a chador is a choice to do with social relations, not religious obligations. The same young woman explains that under different national circumstances, she would make different choices in her self-presentation: If veiling was not imposed, I wouldnt choose chador, I would choose colored things, manteau and scarf. Asked whether she meant that she wears chador because she wants to make herself distinct from those who have to veil (although they disagree with it) or have to be chadori , she explains, Exactly. This is a kind of distinction that I make. When asked if veiling were not imposed, would she have any reason to wear chador, she replies, Right. I would have no reason for that. If hijab were not imposed by the state, then wearing hijab would be an individualized public representation of a religious identity and wearing colorful hijab would be a sign of participation in the avant garde of those who make use of religious cultural capital. But while hijab is imposed and colorful manteaus are monopolized by secular badhijab, religious girls choose other forms distinctive public selfpresentation. But they do not always choose to wear their chadors. The chador is a distinctive public dress, a specific statement of identity and elite affiliation. But sometimes putting on ones full public persona is just too much of a bother, and it is easier to grab something else. Even so, there is the problem of getting the public presentation right: When shopping, errands, I wear loose things, for practicality. But with relatives or friends, I wear chador. But they dont impose it. I wear it by myself too. If I dont wear chador, I feel Im making a spectacle of myself [tableau shodan]. But sometimes when I wear chador, Im making a spectacle. I think you should wear what you want, appropriate to the conditions, sometimes chador, sometimes manteau/russari . For this young woman, a university student in Tehran from an important Mashhad clerical family, the chador is a sign of her privileged affiliations. But privilege can also be a burden and an obligation. Asked further about her descrip12. A maghneh is a kind of pull-on hooded cowl, rather like a nuns wimple. It is considered very modest, but some more secular girls also like it, as once you put it on, it stays put, as opposed to the continual fussing required to adjust a head scarf.

tion of sometimes feeling self-conscious when she is wearing a chador, and when she is not, she explains that she feels torn by her desire to choose her dress (and her self-representation), and her awareness that any choice of hijab for her is already over-signified. People expect her to wear chador, and if she does not, it is taken to be a statement of altered identity, rather than a practical choice of the moment. This particular student is highly aware of the problem of public self-representation, not only for her, but also for any young woman in hijab. She makes a clear distinction between the public presentation of her private and her public identity, in other words, between her representation of her individual self and her family persona. When she speaks of being out in public anonymously, she means as a private individual: grocery shopping (even locally where the storekeepers and neighbors know her), hiking, or running errands. As a private individual, she can run around in manteau/russari . But her public identity is more formalized, involving a weightier professional public persona. Then she needs to wear chador, or risk over-symbolizing her choice of dress. In her public persona, not wearing chador would be a scandal; no matter how modest her hijab, she would be making a spectacle of herself. This public/private identity distinction creates a problem of consistency. This is especially true because the distinction itself rests on the perception of spectators, rather than a distinction between home and street. For this young woman, the problem of public self- presentation is the problem of the public sphere, not simply public space. How to keep track of which self is in which public at the moment? Do her public appearances as a private individual (without chador, when not in the public sphere even if she is in the public street) make her a hypocrite when she is chadori (even if she is in a private home, but in the public sphere because she is
13. The traditional black Iranian chador ( chador dori, or swirly chador) has its origins among earlyt wentieth-century (late Qajar period) elite urban women who did not expect to have to carry anything on the street and who wanted a more feminine, floaty, graceful outer garment. The traditional urban chador from that period was a multipiece garment that was layered and more enveloping. (Information from personal communications with Dr. Man-

under the gaze of those who expect her public persona)? The accusation of hypocrisy haunts her:
I dont want to be two persons, so Im almost always wearing it [the chador], except for buying things, but Im usually wearing it, so I wont be two persons. Insofar as I cant manage to be who I want to, I dont want to be seen as two different persons, for instance, before my fathers friends. They know I am without chador in the mountains, or shopping. But even that I dont like in myself. I would want to choose for myself, but I dont have the freedom of decision.

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The lack of freedom she refers to here is the obligation to social conformity. Her family does not require her to wear chador, and she does not like the imposition of hijab by the state. Yet as a member of a public family, she feels the obligation of her familys reputation. Appearing in manteau/russari rather than chador does not risk her familys honor; it risks their (religious) cultural capital, a risk all the same, and one that she is not, or perhaps not yet, willing to take. So she has found an effective, and practical, compromise. Because a traditional Iranian urban chador requires at least one hand to hold it together (unless the wearer is willing to grip it in her teeth, which is not considered at all modern), it gets in the way of getting other things done.13 At the university, this student chooses to wear what is referred to as Arabic chador, which is a chador that usually has some kind of adornment (crochet or lacework) around the face, but it mainly differs because it always has two armholes. A kind of resting-on-the-head cape, it is more common in religious cities like Mashhad and Qom and is associated with Iraq. Although its associations are therefore more religious, the big practical advantage of the Arabic chador is that it leaves the hands free. For this student, this style of chador is a compromise, an easier way of managing daily life while maintaining her obligations to her posi-

soureh Ettehadieh and Dr. Fatemeh Sadeghi.) Like many other historical fashion trends (high heels or the crinoline), and despite its later revolutionary associations, the swirly chador was initially intended to designate elite women who could afford to be impractical while emphasizing their feminine graces.

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tion and her family. But it is also distinctive to her personally, and it draws a certain amount of attention. It is not the same chador her mother wears, or her friends. At least it was not in 2005. By 2006, this highly self-conscious, individualistic chadori girl had become a trendsetter. In May 2006, the Iranian parliament approved a bill to promote national rather than Western fashions. Despite initial suspicions that the bill was simply part of an attempt to further repress street fashions, at least part of the governments intention was to address the problem that some of the hostility of Iranian youth to the conventional black chador is because they consider it to be old-fashioned, dowdy, difficult to wear, and impractical. The chador needed a makeover, and an official committee was charged with selecting and designing an updated but Islamically approved national fashion. The clothes were publicly unveiled at a government-sponsored fashion show in January 2007, the first postrevolutionary fashion show complete with runway models.14 But the shows big promotional item an Arabic chador with sleeves also drew attention to one of the main complaints: that these colorful, dressy Islamic fashions were too Arab-inuenced and that innovative indigenous Iranian fashions were present not on the runway but on the street.15 The young chadori students smartly carried-off personal improvisation carried very different weight when burdened with the sanction of official government committee approval. Nonetheless, the new sleeved chador was definitely more wearable, and during the increased police crackdown on badhijab in summer 2007, it became noticeably more visible. Girls in manteau/russari outfits toned down their color schemes and kept their sleeves, trousers, and coat hems a little longer. But some girls seem to have decided to opt for the sleeved chador. Wearing it in the summer weather, they avoided

the real hassle of managing an ordinary chador (which not only has to be held in place but should actually be worn over a full under- outfit of manteau and russari or maghneh) and the possible hassle of being bothered by the morals police. But clothing choice is always about self-representation as well as practicality. The young women who decided in summer 2007 to try the new national fashion also were responding to the latest shift in the street-level competition between cultural capitals and were allying themselves, at least for the time being, with the resurgent Islamic template. This does not mean that they, or their society, were becoming more religious. But in the game of social distinction, playing with the codes of secular cultural capital had suddenly become more costly, while the codes of religious cultural capital were at least temporarily ascendant. Wearing the new national fashion, young Tehrani women could be confident that their self-presentation was definitely modern and appropriately distinct: chic, trendy, and secure in the dominant paradigm. But the dominance of the Iranian cultural paradigm is itself not secure. After a few weeks, the police harassment tapered down; Islamic cultural capital may be dominant when backed with the force of the police, but it is not socially hegemonic. Slowly, color started coming back to womens street clothing, and boys continued to gel their hair, even if they did not spike it so resolutely. The competition continues. The sleeved chador is a distinction of the moment, an acknowledgment of ongoing cultural dynamics rather than the consolidation of specific cultural norms.
Public Dress, Private Politics, Social Codes

For modern young women everywhere, management of ones public self-presentation is a balance of different forms of representation. Appropriate display of feminine charms (the
15. I dont think ordinary people will like this show because everything comes from Arab culture, complains Faranak, who says she wants something more Iranian and indigenous. Her friend agrees: Here we didnt see anything interestingin terms of colours and designs we have much better stuff; just look on the streets of Tehran theyre wearing much better clothes. Frances Harrison, Iran Police Move into Fashion Business, BBC News, 2 January 2007, news .bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6213854.stm.

14. The fashion show was jointly sponsored by the Ministry of Interior and the Office of the Tehran Province Governorship. The public spokeswoman for the event was Ms. Ghandforoush, who held a dual post as Womens Adviser to the Ministry of Interior and the Tehran Provincial Office and whose credentials are at least in part based on her marriage to a high government official (a situation common, but by no means limited, to Iran).

capital of the marriage market) needs to be weighed in relation to intellectual seriousness, family connections, and other standard forms of cultural capital, not to mention access to available forms of economic capital and the latest attitudes of the state. It is important to be noticed, but in the right way, and the definition of that changes depending on the location of the individual in his or her habitus: a thrillingly fresh look in one social milieu is simply sluttishness in another; the subtle nuance of elegant distinction in one context is regarded as drab repression in another. So what is a girl to do? The young women students described here are negotiating their way through a contemporary Iranian context in which the borders of each habitus blur and bleed into anothers. They all must wear hijab, but they are all involved in the game of distinctions that is the rule of any modern social field. Their choice of dress is their choice of self-representation, according to recognized codes of social value: their plotting of themselves on the map of diverse Iranian social capitals. All of these young women are attempting to forward their own social trajectory, to distinguish themselves among their peers while keeping within the frame of acceptable social convention. But these conventions are fragmented between competing cultural standards (the competition between religious and secular cultural hegemony) and therefore are more liable to be misperceived, intentionally or out of ignorance. Some young women cling resolutely to a fixed style of public identity and insist on its social dominance. The more thoughtful eye one another, eyeing especially those presenting different forms of cultural affiliation, and tentatively reach out to learn one anothers codes. Often, they express parallel concerns, keyed to slightly different definitions of public life. The loosely covered, secular-identified student who wished she could wear green without causing such a fuss expresses the same kind of concern about experiencing two kinds of public and private self-presentation as does the chadori student from the Mashhad religious family. But for the girl-who-would-be-in-green, self-presentation in public is anywhere out of the house, be it the street, the campus, or the caf. Being in public

means being outside, and the private, individual self is the self that can be presented in private, in the home. For the girl from the elite religious family, being at home often requires presenting her formal, public identity, while the street can afford the privacy of urban anonymity. Both girls experience this distinction between public and private as a sort of self-contradiction, and it concerns them. But their experience of public and private, and therefore their definitions of the relevant space of social tension, is not necessarily the same. Dress as a form of self-representation is an indication of public identity, but it is not a guarantee of behavior or belief. And it is not a guarantee of politics. The orange manteau trendsetter claimed she would defend her right to keep her stylish look even by attending a demonstration. But she also said that if she experienced more insults when walking on her own in the street, she would choose to be more restrained. Participating in a collective action would provide more security, and, as she put it, one fist has no voice. The paradox is that it is unlikely any collective action would be mounted over the right of some young women to distinguish themselves from other young women. The capacity for self-distinction being inevitably individual, the heroic ideal of political agency fades at the prospect of an increase in ordinary minor street harassment. The reality of this limitation became clear during the 2007 police actions, when despite the individual actions of some young people who resisted arrest, and much popular huffing and puffing about the repressive nature of the state, neither the youth nor their elders manifested a general social or political response to the renewed public harassments. Yet the experience of the multiplicity of distinct hijab s does have political implications. These university students, who recognize the local codes of dress and interact with their socially differentiated peers, accept that they represent a plurality of identities. And they understand that these identities are themselves politically plural. The deployment of religious or secular cultural capital does not predict an absolute relationship to religion or the state. The student from Mashhad, the one who wears an Arabic chador, addressed this specifically:

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Norma Claire Moruzzi

Hijab as the Self-Presentation of Social Distinctions

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Sometimes my religious beliefs are very fuzzy, I review them all the time, I doubt them, and Iknow there are people who do not wear chador, but they may believe in something that I cant imagine. I cannot make the connection between chador and being a religious person. We are conformists, we go along with others [javzahdeh]. But its clear that the freedom of dress is one of the basic rights for everybody. What I believe is that insofar as not all of the clergy believe in the Islamic Republic of Iran, not all of the chadori women are religious. But its intertwined with culture, not religion, and people cannot break through the structures, especially in religious cities like Mashhad, or for famous families like mine, for whom the judgment of the people is really important.

For this student, the dress codes of hijab are a social code of public obligation and negotiation. But if she were to go study in France, where she would be relatively anonymous and therefore private, she definitely would not wear chador, and she might not even wear a scarf. Her family agrees with this position. The codes of honor and conduct there would be different, and her responsibilities to them would have to match her different local habitus. Social distinction changes with the social context. This experienced reality itself requires a flexibility of response that acknowledges a certain respect for socially differentiated positions. In Iran, cultural capitals compete, and neither religious nor secular elites are clearly hegemonic. Within a merged social field, distinction is still an open game, and young womens self-representations through the dress codes, whether as badhijab or chadori , are prime forms of contemporary public participation.