Visible space is a series of photographic essays that provide documentation of the visibility of young South Asian LBTQ identified persons in Britain today. It explores the use of cross-cultural dress to assert South Asian queer and ethnic identities, in relation to occupying public and private space. Because of the largely Eurocentric depiction and representation of LGBTQ identity, South Asian persons are often rendered invisible or their queerness misread and erased.
In an attempt to reverse the gaze of invisibility, this project sought to ask South Asian queer women and trans/genderqueer persons how they saw themselves, and how they wished to be represented. Either by subverting and occupying public spaces, or documenting and re-creating private spaces where they felt completely safe and visible to be South Asian and LBTQ simultaneously. Through these visual essays we can witness how dress, is a powerful tool in constructing gender, sexuality ethnicity and faith, and how on the queer South Asian body, different meanings are projected on to racialised bodies depending on the space that they occupy.
Some of the people I worked with for this project, we discussed our personal relationship to Islam, and faith, and being of South Asian descent and queer. I feel these works, and showing them to students would open up some amazing intersectional conversations about the multiplicities of faith, and talking about dress and faith – like Reina Lewis. I have written and worked on essays regarding feminism and muslim dress and gender, and these photo essays expand on that to focus on queer muslim dress and spaces.
Maryam is a queer Muslim activist, and was concerned with using prayer as a form of feminist protest. The practice of women in Islam having to completely cover their hair for prayer, and the sometimes binary separation of gender for public prayer i.e women can sometimes only pray in a women’s designated space rather than mixed. She often mixes ethnic clothing such as kurtas and jeans with leather jackets in order to Queer South Asian dress. Being a feminist Muslim is a huge part of her identity, so for this shoot we went to the first mosque that was ever built in the UK – The Shah Jahan Mosque, built in 1889 by Dr Gottleib Wilhelm Leitner in Surrey – on Orientalist Road.
– and prepared to show a visibly queer woman praying in the public space that would be usually reserved for men. She prayed without the gendering Hijab, though still covering the back of her head with a beanie hat, as many men do not even cover their heads to pray – yet Muslim’s are required to protect their head when they pray. This use of racialised and religious space attempts to look at the structured patriarchy which polices gender and space in Islam and presents a feminist, subverted idea of gender conformity in Islam.
Ungendering prayer. This was a space in which we could replicate A’s formative memories of prayer and worship in the mosque with their father, when they was younger and able to wear looser non-gender specific clothing. The act of public prayer in a religious space today, felt restricted to them, because of the segregation of sexes in Islam and mandatory gendering in Islamic dress and Hijab. They didn’t feel they could enter a mosque itself. We created a safe private queerspace instead; free of gender policing, the constraints of dress, and the implied expected heterosexuality. Documenting a space where they were able to visualise, experience and immerse themselves with prayer whilst being a visibly queer Muslim in safety. We used male Islamic clothing and this was a very healing and impactful moment, enabling them to create this space, document it and the conversations that took place.
Yasmin grew up around Brick Lane, as part of the Bangladeshi community in East London, she chose the area as a place where she can be herself, almost anonymous amongst the vibrant graffiti art she loves rather than the Whitechapel end of Brick Lane, where she feels she would be noticed by family or feel conscious and hyper visible as a Muslim woman in racialised public space. In a sense the white hetero-public space, which used to be racialised but is now heavily whitened and gentrified, she feels that she is able to be invisible amongst the crowds as a Bisexual woman who wears Hijab and this feels like relief. She feels out of place in mainstream queer spaces, where racism and Islamophobia mean that as a Hijabi queer woman she is visible as Muslim, yet invisiblised as Bisexual.
“South Asian femme presenting persons, if wearing ethnic or religious dress or markers on their body, are stripped of any queer authenticity. Thus South Asian queer bodies are placed at an intersection where their racial hypervisiblity outmodes their invisibility as identifying as queer, in particular if they wear any form of ethnic dress. Making this a project that aims to highlight and create Visible space for South Asian queer women and trans/genderqueer persons, and maps out the ways in which queer, gendered and ethnic performativity is established through coded dress.” Raisa Kabir
www.in-visiblespace.co.uk