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What hides behind the headscarf issue




















The Turkish Bath - Jean Dominique Ingres (1862)
The Louvre Museum Why


Why the controversy over the headscarf has been unleashed by the most xenophobic extreme right (remember who started the famous mayor of Vic), the same as a paradigm of female worship almost always wearing veil (the Virgin Mary etc.)? Why the veil of the Mother Teresa of Calcutta, for instance, is not considered an attack the dignity of women and instead the Islamic women themselves? What is the difference? What explains the ongoing persecution of the Islamic veil?

My humble opinion is that behind the headscarf ban is cooked and sets a policy clash of civilizations, marinated Islamophobia. In turn, after Islamophobia, which is a part of the strategy of the new world order starting after the fall of the Berlin Wall, made about 20 years, is hiding something other than the conquest of oil. The importance and political significance of what's going on and hides behind the controversy on the Muslim veil is what's going on and hides in the body of the woman who is covered with a headscarf, forbidden sexuality.

Cervantes said in the famous speech of the goatherds Quixote, that women in the golden age (ie before the patriarchy and the slave society) went 'in braids and hair', ie, bareheaded and without risk that might offend some lust. I recently read an article on the Mosuo, matrifocal people in southern China, one of the few that survive in which kinship relations are not based on marriage and enjoy sexual freedom, in which the article highlights the absence of aggression and sexual violence that freedom produces. The same was also said Cervantes, on women in the golden age, because the society before the taboo of sex in the absence of repression of sexual drives, the sexuality of women was equally free and could speak freely without fear of aggression or abuse, and I add following Reich, Borneman and tant @ s otr @ s, not only could but female sexual freedom was an essential element of harmony between the sexes. (*)

The regime of sexual repression was accompanied by the robes and veils to hide the body and his charm, as they say in the same book of Genesis, appeared shame, modesty and decency in societies lacking spontaneous, when there was nothing to prohibit the operation of the body organ systems. Clear that sexual repression who was specifically concerned with women, and were they who had to cover for disclosed only to the husband. We are talking about the days when there was still that other female sexuality that has now disappeared because, as Freud's own words, to have been the subject of especially inexorable repression , and therefore it is now difficult to return to life, Freud, of course referring to women of the nineteenth century European society.

However, this sexuality that has been especially inexorable repression has not disappeared. While the West-Saxon culture was putting in place a masculinized female model, with a huge dose of violence internalized to inhibit all non-phallocentric sexuality, in the prisons of Islamic patriarchy that sexuality has remained in captivity. As the insect fossil is preserved inside a piece of amber, the other female sexuality has continued to occur in the spaces cloistered female Islamic culture has maintained a female concentration areas, villages and neighborhoods of cities. The danger is that with globalization and migration and tourism, Western women can come into contact with the woman behind the Islamic veil, and discovering that his body is something other than what we now think it is. Because then, what seems so difficult to come back to life, perhaps would be, and our bodies shriveled easily recover their vitality.

In the eighteenth century, a Saxon lady, Lady Montagu, recounted his visit to women's baths in Turkey, a story that inspired the famous painting by Ingres 'Turkish Bath', which is in the Louvre Museum. Lady Montagu In his letters, published in 1781, claimed that Arab women had more freedom, including sexual, than European, and were more open and more hospitable. It said, among other significant comments, making fun of the corset with which "Western husbands locked up their wives." Them with the naked body and free from under the robe, could not understand the use of a garment like a corset.

the same impact that caused him to Lady Montagu's visit to the Turkish women's bathroom in the eighteenth century, it occurred to me me a visit to a hammam in the medina of Fez in 1993. In 2003 I wrote about it in a speech to a conference in Vitoria (hung on the google casildarodriganez site), and somehow came to mean what I now read in the account of Montagu, the same surprise, including the hospitality of the women who invited us to go for a swim.

I think it is necessary to explain these experiences, because only through the logical-rational can not go through the dogmatic magma of our civilization, one of whose pillars is the normalization of the state of repression of women. My views on female sexuality, in any way arise from this visit to the hammam in Fez, and other experiences that once touched me deeply. Otherwise, I would never have imagined what is the woman, though I be, but educated and trained in a basically distorted vision of our sex.

Often I referred to the experience of motherhood and the shock experienced in the first postpartum did not understand the logical-rational way almost 20 years later, when I read The baby is a mammal Michel Odent: explanation of the stamp, the production of higher discharges of oxytocin in the life of a woman re-placed the experience in the field of female sexuality. I spent several years looking for literature that maternal relationship and sexuality (in the library of the Institute for Women in Madrid, entering the two words 'sex' and 'motherhood' only came an article by Ana Maria Carrillo published in a Mexican magazine, which claimed that it could be pleasure in childbirth and lactation, without providing explanations or data). The comprehensive monograph on Pregnancy and Childbirth joyful (before buying the magazine for RBA) put me in contact with the midwife Adela Campos and she photocopied and sent me the book of John Meredith Barbera. Thus began my discovery of female sexuality. Understand my experience and wrote the book The Suppression of maternal desire and the genesis of the unconscious state of submission: Go disintegration of the schemes and what a change in worldview which involves the mere fact of putting motherhood as a process of women's sexuality! Nothing less than the opening for desedipización, as if a gale had suddenly opened doors that closed the area of \u200b\u200bprimary psyche wide.

When we experience a major shock, although at present not understood, somehow remains fixed in the body, in cells in general, and memory, and if information appears below that explains and makes reasonably consistent, the shock is revived and then becomes the most profound convictions. For something similar to what happened with my motherhood, I also went to visit it seventeen years, the Moroccan hammam, the same shock, as I say, that of Lady Montagu, which led to the box description Ingres.

We were on vacation and we ended up at a guesthouse in the medina of Fez, ie not in the European quarter, but at the same medina, a pension, which of course had no showers, because the people bathe medina in the hammam, which was just across the board. 3 to 8 pm for the women told us -pension- and men in the morning and after 8 (we were a group of two women and three men). When we entered the hammam we were petrified, as if we were on another planet in a science fiction story: a large room and the women sitting on the floor, in small groups, with cliques, naked, throwing water to each other with buckets and bowls, chatting, laughing, leaning henna eating oranges, offering slices and orange blossom (it was Easter) each other, of all ages, old, less old, young, so young, girls, etc. Then we saw that there were three more rooms, the latter with the trough which contained the jet of boiling water and a basin of cold water. The system runs on black polyethylene cubes, hot water is picked up and mixed with cold to obtain the coveted temperature. In addition to the cubes were small basins to catch water in buckets and throw each other over the head and body. I think even the appearance of running water and shower system, people washed well, and I remember sometimes in prison had no shower and we washed our echándonos jugs of water, each other. But the shock, of course, it was not for the washing system, but by women. Never seen a type of women so as to laugh, the sparkle in his eyes, the way they talk to each other, sensuality, complicity, especially confidence, trust in collective group, such as of puppies from a litter of dogs, wrapped a @ s @ s otr @ s to be dropped over a otr @ s @ s, as obvious and natural thing in the world. Everything was amazing, both the expression of each woman, as the relationship between them, and most surprising of all was the existence of human group that degree of trust and intimacy, a degree of trust and intimacy that only occurs in everyday normal relations. I remember we were petrified because we had the feeling of desecrating an intimacy from which we were foreign, but to realize them in our embarrassment, and that we were about to turn around and run, came to invite us to spend and we guided about where to leave the clothes lockers, and then the pylons which would take the water. It was not a formal invitation, but a gesture of openness to be one among them, a gesture that we could not match because we were not to rise to the occasion. To them we were women and that was enough to be considered their sisters or girlfriends. But we did not know, we did not feel part of that party and we failed to accept the invitation. A woman accompanied us to the pylons and while we washed us with gels, it was us throwing water in a basin, then we dried off, got dressed and we left quickly.

Although at the time did not understand I had seen, the shock also stuck with me and several years later, with readings from Meredith Barbera, Melandri, Irigaray, Choisy, Serrano Vicens, and Newton., same thing happened to me with the experience of motherhood , and unrest has also become a deep conviction he had seen with my eyes a glimpse of what Freud said it was so hard to bring back to life. Of course Freud was never in a hammam where everyday women bathe together, and only knew the women who came to his office to psychoanalyze. The paper I presented at Vitoria in 2003, and said they could understand why these women had to wear the veil and go down the street covered and well covered, so you do not see what he did not even exist. What he could not transcend the public space and should remain cloistered.

There is thus a female sexuality that has survived in the Muslim world, as the fossil remains of early generations of women from speaking Bachofen in Das Mutterrecht: sexuality, enclosed and fenced, but also a so recognized. As the female collective space is the hammam, a recognition that we do not have European women, and it is hard to imagine that men in our society accept their wives from switching every evening of their lives together in a Turkish bath as Ingres box. It is not that they were nothing more than to wash. The women of Fez were there solace, installed, spending the afternoon. As I said in the Gongora mountain of Cuenca, who went to the pine forest, 'one by pine and other to dance. "

The domination of man over woman extended over the whole world over 5000 years, has taken different forms and channels, and one of them is the form assumed in the Islamic world: man is the master of woman who holds and hides for their exclusive use. But this model based on external repression strict women, at least in the current appearance is rather more lax regarding the requirement of self-repression of sexual drives, and Arab women is less internalized repression, which preserves to some extent non-phallocentric sexuality, in other models that have been cut off from so completely, with an infallible: removing spaces women's groups. I do not know if the hammam in the medina of Fez, and others, continue to exist. It is possible that the Anglo-Saxon model is penetrating through the Arab monarchies have good relations with the West. But certainly, what he saw and described Lady Montagu the eighteenth century has continued to exist at least until the late twentieth century.

to be calmer, said a woman wearing burka, in a recent interview published in the journal Public ; because she wanted to and not because her husband or the Koran it sent. He said he started to use its own decision five years after marriage, and now wore a widow four years and continued using it, therefore it was not because her husband to send him but because he wanted it, because it 'was calmer ': reason is obviously the most powerful. By reading this statement I remembered Cervantes and the times when women had to wear veils to go quiet, and could go "and braid hair." Ourselves with our bodies can also walk quiet stuffy displaying our bodies in the state of armoring and shrinkage in the normally pulsating survived. And clothes get tight, because the tighter less freedom and less likely to touch body. Fortifying the epidermis becomes ready for outside contact, in contrast, exterior armor, a defense system, coming to be tight clothing as a second line of defense. Instead loose clothing (Muslim women are usually naked under the robes), leaves the body free below. Before, life had used women skirts (and men), and also had the meaning that we change women's skirts for pants.

I think the statement that the robe and veil undermine the dignity of women, as is said in the media, is a half truth, and to the extent that it seeks the whole truth , becomes a mechanism for hiding the truth elsewhere. Women use the robe and veil not to publicly display their sexuality and to preserve privacy in this world of repression can not be displayed. And because covering her robes and veils do not have to stretch or shrink the body to be displayed with the appropriate level of body rigidity that society requires, as I said the woman interviewed by Public, you can be more relaxed. It is best to wear a veil to tense muscles and make the own face in a mask. True, the other part of the truth is that in so far as to the only man who discovers Islamic women is the husband, the veil can be regarded as an indicator of male dominance. But this part of the truth, that just like that, out of context, is a concealment of the reality of Muslim women.

What happens is that exploits the ignorance of the situation, and ignorance about female sexuality, to give an overview of the veil tortuous, and mostly so we are not aware that there is this other sexuality or not we realize the repression that women have internalized Western which is precisely what makes unnecessary the kind of external repression suffered by Muslim women, or that we realize that yoga and other similar language is now conducive, they are actually keeping gymnastics wizened bodies and exercises sublimation his libido. Then of course, with our degree of cardboard we are free to walk down the street, and half naked if we want.

course it is true that Muslim husbands watch, instruct and order the imprisonment of their women. Of course, the patriarchal repression of Muslim women is medieval. But what is the type of repression is practiced, which is more external and internalized repression minor component, low self-inhibition. While living in a prison and can not go out so little, so in general have a level of self-repression and internalized violence lower. To jail cell, the viscera, memory and awareness is needed to process primal repression from the stage throughout childhood, which is what we do in our society.

In short, contrasts with the condition Islamic women as a situation of repression, to ours as ours was a situation of freedom, when in reality they are two different enforcement models, one with a higher degree of external repression and another with a greater degree of self- repression. And what is intended by the opposition is that Western women, and generally good people, we support the war against the Arab world, supposedly to "liberate" Muslim women, in fact, for them to adopt our model of repression .

2003 Vitoria My paper was titled ' internalized violence in women' , using the expression of Lea Melandri Originally Shame. Our bodies have many, many internalized violence, to have the degree of cardboard they have. Our bodies are made of the repression of our sexual instincts throughout their development from birth (begin to live deprived of the maternal body, which involves freezing abnormal system primal libidinal stage). Violence is internalized, which institutionalizes the inhibition of sexual drive. It is significant that sometimes I have taken the title of 'internalized violence on women' and other more neutral position, as "Feminism and Motherhood." For the title, which summarizes the text of Melandri, really sums up the tragedy of the devastation of women. These words are significant and are censored, for the same reason that Wikipedia describes the box as Ingres 'harem' instead of 'bathroom' group of women. One of the issues on which censorship has been focused on my writing done, at least that I could have learned has been that of female sexuality (the other was the issue of self-regulation, the role of the libido and denial of the nest-making rather than maternal matriarch, etc .-)

To understand the current prosecution is required to headscarf historical perspective of what has been done to eliminate this female sexuality, both physically and conceptually (from the 'disappearance' of 1400 significant sexual histories of women collected by Ramón Serrano Vicens in the middle of last century, to the successive massacres women's groups in different ways kept their sexuality, as in our Iberian mountain and went to live 'in the wilderness "until the Holy Inquisition ended with them, going through the current medicalization of motherhood and all the taboos and prohibitions perpetrated to steal traditional sexuality maternal physiological process, not to mention the invention the religion of pre-patriarchal goddesses to hide the archaeological evidence). The killing of the dragon, the bull and the snake, to consecrate the heroic male archetype of our history, we have completed a very specific and only cover and myths distort Iliad sufferings of the true story of the woman patriarchal (Romeo de Maio).

Nobody better than those who proclaim themselves followers of the early patriarchs, the Dragonslayer sonnemensch that swept the women's sexuality to be his slave, certainly killing more than imaginary dragons, nobody better than them, I say, recognize the scope of female sexuality is still place in the concentration camps of the Muslim world and the danger that their existence implies.

What the aim of this prohibition is not restoring the dignity of women, but normalize the phallocentric model of women in the Islamic world and Muslim women to remove their veils have to internalize the repression, as we do Europe. Which to some extent already have to Muslim women who migrate and leave behind their way of life and customs.

Today as 5000 years ago, the main enemy of women's sexuality is domination of true motherhood dependent, and therefore, a key means of recovery of humanity.

La Mimosa, July 2010

------- (*) Our civilization is intent on hiding the good nature of the sexual instincts. But history, anthropology and archeology have confirmed what the scientific sexology has shown, namely that spontaneous sexual instincts are those of the bodies in a state of love, and produced to ensure the love and care among peers; and not produced in the bodies in the state of war stress (enough to know that the neuro-endocrine system and muscles of a body in a state of war is not only different, but also antagonistic and incompatible with the neuro-endocrine-muscular of a body in love). And is the regime of sexual repression that produces the dislocations of these systems and the aggressiveness of the people.