Today on Twitter, a couple of people I follow had a brief conversation about polyamory. It was intriguing, in part because it was tinged with the ambivalence that can often characterize some aspects of modern feminism. Like the relationship towards traditional ideals of femininity, it’s hard to both disavow the structures that produced something – whether sun dresses or monogamy – when those same structures were part of the cultural milieu in which one was raised. To wit, you can be a feminist woman and yet still ‘not feel like yourself’ wearing men’s clothing; you can believe in polyamory and still get wigged out by it.

Polyamory represents an alternative to the social and material practice of monogamy. But rather than only being a different lifestyle, it is also part of a historical moment. The effects and causes of feminism – which is to say the combination of activism and socio-economic change like, for example, women working during World War II – have opened up space for a change in the social organization of sexual relationships. It’s not so much that the notion of polyamory never existed before as much as the social and material conditions for its practice were never very, um, favourable. That we exist in an era of ‘sexual liberation’, feminism, secularism, female economic independence etc. has made the option of polyamory a reality.

At the same time, what was clear during this conversation was the conflictedness that polyamory can introduce. We still live in an age when sexual fidelity and morality are linked. Additionally, there is, I’ve heard, some small amount of discourse committed to celebrating the notion of the lifelong love, ‘the one’ and monogamous marriage as the ultimate goal. What’s more, there are still the psychological impacts of polyamory: of not only the possibility of external, social censure, but a kind of internal punishment too, one that stems from directly contravening one of the core principles around which goodness, the good life and morality is centered.

So, naturally, you can see why I thought of the hijab.

This is an argument I’ve had floating in my mind for some time. In much the same way that polyamory is a sorta’ ‘edgy’ rejection of established social norms that carries with it both external social consequences and also psychological ones that come from flaunting standards, so too is the choice of a Muslim woman to uncover her hair.

I say this because, so often, the hijab vs. no-hijab debate is constructed in terms of freedom and personal liberty vs. repression and misogyny, as if all someone wearing a hijab must do is simply see the light, peel off her headdress and step into the future. But it so often misses that, like choosing to be polyamorous, it is a decision that removes one from – and places one against – an entire network of socio-cultural beliefs. It is not a single act or a solitary moment, but an ongoing reconfiguration of your relationship to a set of structures and practices that have not simply ‘governed your behaviour’, but constituted your identity. It is not about throwing off shackles, but instead, choosing to let your skin be chafed by a new pair.

But making matters even more complicated is the inextricability of rejecting of what are often called ‘traditional beliefs, and the accusation of becoming westernized. In the contemporary moment, articulating something like ‘Eastern’ (or, more specifically, Iraqi or Pakistani) feminism is essentially impossible to do outside of some kind of discourse in which change is a movement from East to West. As Fanon notes, history has been constructed such that the East is the past of a timeline on which the West is forever the present and the future. Or, to put it in slightly more contemporary terms, Microsoft Word recognizes the word ‘westernized’ but not ‘easternized’. That is not a viable option. It does not ‘exist’.

To take off the hijab, then, is always read as the inevitable movement toward the telos of western, individual liberty. But if one is concerned with a kind of ‘fidelity’ to an identity that is not simply about enabling or submitting to a neat East/West dichotomy – that one either participates in ‘traditional beliefs’* or assimilates to a set of western values – this presents a problem. Suddenly, your lack of faithfulness hurts not only those around you, but you yourself hurt too. You have betrayed something by becoming someone who cannot stick to one thing and one system. You have become a floating mark in a system that cannot locate you adequately because you are no longer recognizable by its most treasured precepts, ideas that form the very structural basis of social relations. You have sidestepped the control of female sexuality. You no longer makes sense within the ways of speaking about the individual or the woman or faithfulness because your actions contravene accepted truths.

What you do know though, is that with each step forward, the ‘fine meshes of power’ tug at you ever so slightly. They drag. They weigh. So that, as if walking through a stream of cobwebs, you are constantly reminded of your choice: to exist just on the edges of the world that made you as it keeps trying to pull you in.

Interesting comparison of the monogamy – polyamory versus hijab – no hijab debate.