Abstract
The 'burqa' bans that have recently been put into effect in several Euro-Atlantic countries are a testament to how public space has been rendered into a terrain of increasing securitization and legal control. The new laws are complex in that they are entangled with entrenched historical attitudes, present-day geopolitics, political expediency, and the politics of race, immigration and national identity. However, they provoke a questioning of what it means when states legislate vision and visuality and of why the visual rather than another domain has become the privileged stage to both communicate the alleged conflict between the 'West' and 'Islam' and enact the former's disciplining of the latter. In this paper, I examine the trope of the burqa from the perspective of the cultural history of vision, arguing that situating the garment as a visual text in contesting regimes of art and representation, shaped by their respective pre-modern religious narratives, will provide a critical, yet unacknowledged, perspective on facial veiling which, moreover, offers up the possibility of learning to read the sign across cultures.