New Criticals



Briefly, Griselda Pollock’s words offer a productive frame with which continue the conversation opened by Princess Hijab's critique of (and complicity within) processes of globalization, queering, and commodity culture. Pollock writes of the work to be done: “The game is not to strip away the veil and expose the truth—it is to know what masks we wear, to define the texts we perform and to accept the necessity for critical knowledge at the condition for new pleasures, a new language of desire” [7].  Princess Hijab’s paradoxical amalgamation of hyper-visibility and invisibility, within her queering of the veil, and its implications for viewers, offers an alternative mode of entry into a new, highly complex and layered language of desire, one that savvy visual culture readers may interpret in order to better understand the processes through which a range of identity positions, anxieties and investments are mediated and maintained.