Veiling and Unveiling: Annemarie Schwarzenbach’s Travels in Iran and Afghanistan

As fascism was taking over Europe, the queer Swiss-German journalist and photographer Annemarie Schwarzenbach traveled throughout the Middle East and Central Asia between 1933 and 1939. Schwarzenbach spends considerable time photographing and reflecting on the veil, namely the hijab and the chador, a full-length cloak that covers the hair, body, and frequently the face. Her travels coincide with seismic shifts in dress codes in Iran and Afghanistan, most notably Reza Shah Pahlavi’s 1936 directive banning Iranian women from wearing the hijab and a controversial unveiling campaign in Afghanistan that ended in the reimposition of the chador in 1929. Like many European travelers, Schwarzenbach espouses racist prejudices about the veil, yet her reflections are complicated by several additional layers. Through a close reading of Schwarzenbach’s photographs, this article explores the surprising affinities between the photographer and the veiled woman. I argue that Schwarzenbach is preoccupied with veiling practices because she experiments with concealing and revealing her gender identity, sexual orientation, and drug addiction with her narrative voice. More than an object of feminist social critique, the veil becomes a multivalent mode of perception as well as a form of forgetting and flight from reality. Both a floating signifier and real-world object, the veil connects her social observations and landscape descriptions with her personal struggles and desire to cross borders. Yet, her travel texts also highlight the hypocrisy of her position as a European observer who denounces the veil as oppressive for women while appropriating it metaphorically as a form of authorship. Not only does this contradiction unmask her feminist critique as a form of imperialist ideology, it also exposes the danger of the veil as metaphor.