Enoughness, accent and light communities: Essays on contemporary identities

 

29 

Leppänen, Sirpa & Ari Häkkinen (2012) Buffalaxed super-diversity: 

Representations of the ‘Other’ on YouTube. Diversities (in press). 

Marcuse, Herbert (1964) One Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon Press. 

Simmel, Georg (1971 [1904]) ‘Fashion’. In D. Levine (ed.), On individuality and 

social forms. London: University of Chicago Press.  

Turkle, Sherry (2011) Alone together. Why we expect more from technology and 

less from each other. New York: Basic Books.  

Varis, Piia & Xuan Wang (2011) Superdiversity on the Internet: A case from 

China. Diversities 13 (2). 

www.unesco.org/shs/diversities/vol13/issue2/art5

 

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Chapter 3: 

How to ‘how to’? The prescriptive micropolitics of Hijabista 

 

Introduction  

Identities have always been subject to prescriptive ‘how to’ discourses; there is 

or has been no lack of guides and instructors for identities.

8

 The expansion of 

identity repertoires that we currently witness in the context of superdiversity 

naturally comes with an expansion of ‘how to’ literature, and the Internet is the 

prime vehicle for this. We see a mushrooming of self-help and ‘how to’ websites, 

films and social media groups, all targeting specific modes of behavior and thus 

aimed at producing people recognizable as X or Y. From ‘how to be a Goth’ to 

‘how to become a Facebook star’, over ‘How to trick people into thinking you’re 

good looking’ and ‘How to know if you’re a metrosexual’: the list of potential 

targets for prescriptive discourse and illustration is endless and appears to 

respond to an increasing demand. YouTube, for instance, abounds with such 

material – how to dress like a skateboarder; how to be a good husband; how to 

be more feminine, etc.; ‘Howto and Style’ is also, together with for instance 

‘Music’, ‘Education’, ‘Sports’ and ‘Pets and animals’, one on the list of 17 main 

categories for browsing videos on 

http://www.youtube.com/

. 

These prescriptive ‘how to’ discourses have a clear scope and they operate on a 

series of assumptions that, recapitulating arguments developed elsewhere, we 

can sketch as follows. Acquiring and assembling identities are matters of 

perfection and exact precision; when appropriately practiced, they achieve 

recognizability for you as someone or a certain kind of person. In fact, identity 

work boils down to collecting and arranging a bundle of small details measured 

as to their appropriateness and ‘enoughness’, the ordered display of which 

generates recognizability as X or Y. Hence, say, dressing almost like a 

skateboarder is not quite good enough, as combining skater wear with, for 

instance, cowboy boots (at first sight a harmless detail) will ultimately lead to a 

failed projection of ‘skateboarder’ identity. One is ‘not enough’ of a skater and 

‘too much’ of something else. Perfection and precision, thus, require sustained 

and disciplined focus on the detailed micro-practices of ‘getting it right’. These 

micro-practices, we argued earlier, are governed by ‘micro-hegemonies’: specific 

sets of norms that dictate the place of certain details in the ordered bundles that 

produce identities. Consequently, small changes in style – changing one detail 

sometimes – provoke big changes in identities, because such small changes 

rearrange and reorder the whole bundle. Every detail, thus, can be seen as in 

need of organization and ordering, and can so become an object of ‘how to’ 

discourse (Blommaert & Varis 2011, 2012).  

In this chapter, we focus on a phenomenon called the Hijabista, and the online 

‘how to’ literature that attempts to regulate this phenomenon. Hijab refers to the 

                                                        

8

 A profoundly revised version of this paper, incorporating also a strongly 

revised and abbreviated version of chapter 2, appeared in Semiotica (2014). 

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31 

sartorial norms, including the head cover, observed by Muslim women, and to 

the ‘modest’ style of Muslim women in general. Hijabistas, then, are Muslim 

women who dress ‘fashionably’ and/or design fashionable clothes, while 

orienting towards what is being prescribed by their religion in terms of dress

9

. 

Being a hijabista can be seen as a sartorial technology of the self (Foucault 1988; 

see also Fadil 2011 for a discussion on not-veiling as an aesthetic of the self) that 

finds its expression in a complex of micro-practices revolving around 

recognizable emblematic values of fabrics, cuts, accessories and styles. This 

phenomenon is not exclusively visible on the internet, but still very prominent in 

different online environments: one can find blogs (e.g. 

http://www.hijabstyle.co.uk/

), shop in online stores (e.g. 

http://www.hijab-

ista.com/

), watch YouTube videos (more on this below), ‘like’ Facebook pages 

(e.g. 

http://www.facebook.com/Hijabista

), and engage in discussion with others 

on these and other sites.  

‘Hijabista’ as a word has its roots in the older ‘fashionista’, which refers to a keen 

follower of fashion and/or someone who dresses up fashionably. ‘Hijab’ is not 

the only word that has been used to form such a ‘fashion portmanteau’ word – 

another example of this would be ‘fatshionista’ (see e.g. Diary of a Fatshionista

10

). 

As the name suggests, fatshionistas are people who go against the received idea 

that fashion is only for the ‘skinny’, and both hijabistas and fatshionistas can in 

fact be seen as transgressive modes of fashionista, as neither Muslim nor 

overweight women are seen as the ideal targets of the prescriptive discourse on 

acceptable Western female bodies regulating their desired shape and the ways in 

which they should be (un)covered.  

The relationship between Islam, female fashion and individuality has in fact been 

fraught with conflicts. In 1994 an international row broke out when Chanel 

designer Karl Lagerfeld showed a dress on which verses from the Qur’an were 

printed. Globalized fashion, so it seemed, should not in any way be confused with 

the Muslim faith. Conversely, wearing the hijab has in Western societies quite 

consistently been branded as a kind of uniformization of female Muslims, and so 

associated to the denial of individual liberties, the absence of freedom to 

articulate female identities, and the oppression of Muslim women in general. It is 

seen as a remnant of pre-Modernity and pre-Enlightenment, which is why 

Atatürk banned the hijab from his modernized Turkish state and Shah Reza 

Pahlavi banned it from his equally modernized Iran. The same arguments 

motivated a hotly contested debate in France in the 1990s and in several other 

European countries since then, leading to the call by Mr Wilders in The 

                                                        

9

 It should be noted that, perhaps in contrast to what is generally believed, the 

issue of head cover and what (not) to wear is by no means a simple ‘Muslim’ 

thing – just one example of these complexities is Brenner’s (1996) discussion of 

Indonesia, pointing to the fact that there, wearing the veil has not necessarily 

been seen as an ‘Islamic’, but as an ‘Arab’ practice. This is a further indexical 

layer in a broader discussion that is unfortunately largely beyond the scope of 

this paper.  

10

 

http://diaryofafatshionista.com/

 

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