This chapter explores the life and writings of three main personalities who contributed to shaping an aesthetics of veiling in disparate but analogous ways. In their writings and their performances of a public self, these writers construct a sense of the psychic space that the outward sign of the veil helps cultivate. This psychic space, this spiritual interiority, is created by veiling but also by the words, discourses, narratives, and images of the veil in public culture and public circulation. Each writer has been profoundly invested in the politics of performance—in television (Kariman Hamza), film (Shams al-Barudi), and theater and cultural criticism (Safinaz Kazim). These three early exemplars were pivotal in formulating the ideological and conceptual contours of the genre. They set down motifs and described psychic transformations that would become classic signposts on the path to veiling. Their narratives envisioned new kinds of Islamic media in which the visual signifier of the veil would become ascendant.
‘A Kind of Critique that Works by Allegorising’: An Interview with Patrick Wright