As I was walking to class today, I found myself alongside a woman wearing traditional Muslim hijab and talking loudly on a bluetooth headset. Naturally, my first thought was something along the lines of "How interesting. An ancient, patriarchal sense of shame meets an all-too-modern sense of shamelessness. This woman is truly a paragon of post-postmodern man's struggle to wed faith and reason...God and science...to exist in that always-vanishing, hyperliminal space between the past and the future. But wait! Now who is being paternalistic? 'Post-postmodern man'? There I go again, phallocentrically using 'man' qua 'human being,' as if women aren't even a part of history. Fie! There I go again! 'History'? As if women don't also have a story to tell? Hell's bell hooks! What is wrong with me? Or is it me? How can we break free of our ignominious past when its vestiges are embedded and insulated at the insidious level of language, which Nietzsche rightly stated is nothing more than an attempt to turn free-flowing ideas into stagnant (and illusory) truths? How can we break these linguistic, inculcated shackles when they're everywhere? And what of religion? Are we any more capable of shedding our seemingly anachronistic beliefs (soteriological or otherwise) than we are of exorcising sexism from our language? And if these changes are possible, can they happen in our lifetimes? And is my desire to see a world in which patriarchy is truly an anachronism simply a reflection of my modernistic desire for instant gratification - the very same shallow solipsism that causes this woman to babble loudly on her bluetooth in a crowd of people? What a mobius-strip world we live in!"
Just kidding. I thought "Man, it's too nice out to be wearing that. Religion is stupid." Then I went to class and doodled boobs.
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I originally stated in this post that the woman was wearing a burqa, but after some simple and long-overdue research, I learned that hijab is more accurate, since burqas generally cover the entire face in addition to the rest of the body. The woman I saw, while otherwise covered from head-to-toe, left her face exposed - likely producing one (and only one) doozy of a tanline. Anyway, I am an idiot. That is all.
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