Learning about/from psychoanalysis

“although the chador as a social object is embedded in the sphere of culture and politics, in its psychic dimensions it carries multiple meanings and functions in women’s (as well as men’s) individual psychic economies.”-absolutely, there is meaning behind the object, which is then interpreted and associated with certain connotations depending on the context and who is viewing the object“It is a complex entity located within the public and private contexts at varying intra- and interpsychic axes.”-particularly, for Western individuals that only see things through their lens and thus as a form of oppression, which is baffling and so wrong“Sayyid (1997) has argued that femininity in Western views is authentic only when it is unveiled. This places the veiled subjects as ‘‘something lesser, not quite real, not quite the right thing’’-it’s all about othering. The US restricts many rights of women, yet we don’t view it within the same context because we don’t associate it with the “other” that is Islam; and even worse when we compare oppressive laws (SB8 in Texas) to Islamic traditions as a way to further “other” what we view as so anti-American even though restricting the rights to women’s bodies is very American.“It is the ideological imposition on women to cover their hair in public that is under attack by feminists and in many contemporary human right circles”-exactly, white feminists and human rights circles who believe that the West has the right to determine what a Human Rights issue is and how it should be handled, which usually just ends in occupation“The obsession with chador [Tchador] in France – and, more recently, in England – may speak to a much deeper, subconscious, guilt-ridden conflict over the country’s colonial past.”-do not want reminders of the harm they have perpetrated or what those differences stand for“Decolonization and the Algerian War (1954–62) marked a major shift in the dominant, eroticized representation of the veiled subject. The shift stemmed from the role of Algerian women in their bloody anti-colonialism struggles with France, as described in Franz Fanon’s (1989) Studies in a Dying Colonialism. The erotic fantasy ⁄ image of unveiling the veiled, exotic ‘other’ female was transformed into a hyper-veiled object of fear, a signifier of political danger and terrorism (Macmaster and Lewis, 1998)”-all about the West’s gaze and their view, which is why opinions change and lead way to harm when their destinations no longer align“The chador is both a social symbol and a psychic object, albeit there is no sharp distinction between, on the one hand, the sociopolitical and religious dimensions of the chador and, on the other, its psychic dimension. Social objects become personalized, and their psychic functions move beyond their status as social symbols.”“The chador is a carrier of the symbolic representations of both the maternal and paternal functions that at times may come into conflict with one another.”“The chador may elicit the fantasy of shared skin with the mother. It may also come to stand as a ‘second skin’ for the ego, as a boundary, or, concretely, as a skin.”“according to one clinical psychologist, many girls who wear a chador have inherited the custom from their mothers. It is very unlikely that a girl will wear a chador if her mother does not. In some curious way, the mother seems to be more concerned than the father about protecting the girl from the ‘male’s gaze.’ When a girl who had been wearing chador is dechadorized, she usually reports a profound sense of betrayal of the mother. To the father she symbolically says: ‘‘Although I love you I cannot have you as a man, so I have to choose another man because of the law of incest.’’ But the primary betrayal is to the mother, by leaving the maternal space. The mother now feels that: ‘‘After all [I] have done for her, she has left me for him – the father; I am now only a maid to two lovers’’ [statement of an analysand on the couch].”-interesting way to connect sexuality to this model“At the psychic level, the chador may constitute a cathected object of holding, covering, concealment and invisibility. In the preceding we have presented some analytic vignettes, along with our own clinical and theoretical commentaries. We suggested viewing the chador as a complex and rich object of fantasy that enjoys multiple functions.”“The chador’s psychic function may not only be one of holding; it may also work in covering and concealing the inner self, especially in cases of sexual fantasies and conflicts.”-makes sense; any form of containment or hiding, even sunglasses, can provide a barrier“Of course, there is a difference between socially constructed conditions, which render members of certain groups invisible, and the individual’s own inner experience of invisibility. The private experiential pursuit of invisibility is coordinated through socially (symbolically) negotiated ways of looking: the gaze. The eyes of the (m)other, which reflect back to the child its image and the eyes of the child, which ‘see’ that image in the mirror of her face – similar to the cinematic eyes of the camera – have already been structured to see the self and the world and the self in the world in a particular way. The sexual difference between men and women, along with its condition of visibility and invisibility, is discovered, conceived, and constructed through the assimilation and introjection of the visual order – the gaze – on both perceptual and discursive levels (Berger, 1998; Irigaray, 1985). Here the distinction between the body and the chador as an item of fashion or dress is trivial. Women’s fashion serves the function of representations of the female body and provides a significant text for how culture constructs femininity”“In fact, anyone who has travelled to Iran can observe that, within a few minutes after takeoff from the Tehran airport, the Iranian women on board go through a metamorphic transformation by shedding their scarves, exposing their long hair, and changing into completely different, stylish, colorful outfits, a process which is reversed on their way back as the pilot begins the descent into Tehran.”-what point is this trying to make? It still feels like it’s associating the Chador with only a feeling of hiding or negativity, rather than power or agency; feels biased and not agentic to the people their speaking on behalf of