The Veil

1NC Shell 1/4

The affirmative team’s attempt to epistemologically apprehend and relate to _________ are efforts to locate the ever-elusive “Orient” as a stable base for the Western subjectivity to reproduce itself. In spite of this lashing out of knowledge, the veiled woman remains a perpetual site of non-knowing.

Yegenoglu 1998 (Meyda “Colonial Fantasies: Towards a feminist reading of Orientalism” page 40-41.)

The question of why the veiled woman has such a high profile in the French colonization of Algeria seems obvious at a first glance: in the colonizer’s eye Algerian resistance is condensed in the veil which is seen as an obstacle to his visual control. Conquering the Algerian women is thus equal to conquering Algeria, the land, and people themselves….I would like to argue here that the case or tropology of the “veil” is not simply a signifier of a cultural habit or identity that can be liked or disliked, be good or bad, but in a world bewitched by the invisible powers of the other” for a subject, i.e., for the European subject in our case, it signifies the production of an “exteriority,” a “target or threat,” which makes possible for that subject to “postulate a place that can be delimited as its own and serve as the base.” This enables him to produce himself vis-à-vis an other while simultaneously erasing the very process of this production.

1NC Shell 2/4

The veil as concept is thus central to any conception of the “Orient” while also perpetually inhibiting the same attempts at understanding. This means that the affirmative team’s epistemological project is always already doomed to failure.

Yegenoglu 1998 (Meyda “Colonial Fantasies: Towards a feminist reading of Orientalism” page 48-49.)

The veil is thus turned into a privileged concept-metaphor in the construction of the reality of Orient; its very ontology…It is not for nothing that I have not said a word on the veiled woman herself so far, as my analysis here concern’s man’s question, his subjectivity and not hers. The attempt to represent what is concealed behind the veil and what the veiled being of the Orient/feminine is, is one that starts and ends with the subject of representation.

1NC Shell 3/4

The alternative is to reject the affirmative’s attempts at epistemological unveiling of __________.

Because the veil is able to both create and eliminate the desire to see and understand, our alternative is the only way to solve for the epistemological domination of the affirmative. The affirmative’s speech act as an attempt is a reason to vote for the alternative alone.

Yegenoglu 1998 (Meyda “Colonial Fantasies: Towards a feminist reading of Orientalism” page 62-63.)

We have seen above that the colonial subject’s desire to control and dominate the foreign land is not independent from his scopic desire, from his desire to penetrate, through his surveillant eye, what is behind the veil. … To recapitulate, it is through the veil that the colonial/Western desire to see emerges and is erased simultaneously, and this is what enables the veiled other to destabilize the identificatory process of the subject. It is this moment of seeing or these eyes that filter through the veil which frustrate the voyeuristic desire of the colonialist and displaces his surveillant eye.

1NC Shell 4/4

The “veil” is the only way to resist the impact of epistemic violence and inevitable colonial domination of the affirmative.

Yegenoglu 1998 (Meyda “Colonial Fantasies: Towards a feminist reading of Orientalism” page 41-42.)

The veil can be seen as resisting data or tropology of this modern power whose program aims to construct the world in terms of a transparency provided by knowledge as power….

Perhaps it is no more than to ask that the subtext of the palimpsestic narrative of imperialism be recognized as ‘subjugated knowledge’…