Un-Veiling Dichotomies

Dr Giorgia Baldi is Lecturer in Law at the University of Sussex, UK. Between 2013-17 she worked at Birkbeck, University of London, School of Law, as Associate Lecturer, teaching a variety of law related modules. Previously, she has worked for several years in the field of International Cooperation and Development, playing leading roles in women’s rights related programmes in the Middle East (2004-2011). Her research interests are state-religion relations, Gender and Religion, Women’s Rights and Human Rights, political theory, feminist theory etc.

• Introduction.- Part1. Law, power, and the Muslim female dressed body.- Chapter1. Islamic law and legal sources.- Chapter2. The veil and Islamic law.- Chapter3. The Veil and Muslim cultures.- Chapter4. Imagining nations, imagining women: the regulation of female clothes in the era of  nations.- Chapter5. Regulating clothes, regulating subjectivities.- Chapter6. From multiplicity to a monolithic homogeneity: the veil as symbol of a ‘clash of civilizations’.- Part2. The headscarf regulation: reconfiguring religious practices in the secular Europe.- Chapter7. (Un)masking the legal subject.- Chapter8. The secular/Christian/‘humane’ subject of law.- Chapter9. Reading the European Court of Human Rights legal decisions over the practice of veiling.- Chapter10. Switzerland and state neutrality.- Chapter11. Burkinis, face veils and hijab: laicite in France.- Chapter12. ‘Is Multiculturalism bad for women?: the Begum case in the UK.- Chapter13. Reconfiguring religion and religious practices in the secular space through law.- Part 3. Revealing paradoxes: Muslim women in secular contemporary Europe.- Chapter14. On Freedom and Agency: an East/West Perspective.- Chapter15. Habit, Habitus, and habits.- Chapter16. Representing the un-representable: on symbology, secularism and the law.- Chapter17. ‘Is secularism bad for women?.- Conclusions.