At the same time, the media made them all too visible with ubiquitous images of their bright blue, embroidered headdresses splashed on TV, on the internet, in film, magazines, and newspapers. As Cristophe Ayad observed, "The burqa is an abomination, that is understood, but... it is also photogenic" (Libération, Oct. 17, 2001).
Over time, however, with the subduing of the Taliban, the burqa shifted from a symbol of absolute difference to a virtual commodity advertised in the media. By fall 2006, the burqa had appeared on Paris runways and in Vogue fashion spreads. Photographed by the venerable doyen of fashion photography, Irving Penn, and modeled by girl-of-the-moment Gemma Ward, the burqa was no longer a freak sideshow, but had become the main attraction.
In the early days after 9/11, the media depicted certain practices forbidden by the Taliban as modes of "resistance": fishnet stockings under the burqa, lipstick, fingernail polish, and hair-dos. These "freedoms" are described as punishable by death, assertions of agency in the face of repression and acts of courage.
In the aftermath of the US's Operation Enduring Freedom, Afghan women's bodies became an object of international intervention. On November 17th, the State Department issued a "Report on the Taliban's War Against Women." On the same day, Laura Bush became the first First Lady to speak on the president's weekly radio address, talking on the subject of Afghan women. The speech implicates the Taliban in the terrorism of poverty, poor health, and illiteracy, in addition to denying Afghan women the right to laugh, fly kites, or wear nail polish. "Only terrorists and the Taliban pull out women's fingernails for wearing nail polish," she said. Correspondingly, she depicts the military gains in Afghanistan as emancipating women from the prisons of their homes. About the same time, newspaper headlines took up the metaphor, connecting the liberation of Afghanistan to unveiling: ‘Veil Is Lifted in Mazar-e Sharif; New Freedoms Embraced as City Emerges From Taliban Rule' (Washington Post, November 12); ‘Women Shedding Cloak of Taliban Oppression' (Boston Globe, November 26); ‘Veil Lifts on Afghan Women's Future' (Denver Post, November 27); ‘In Kabul, Still a Veil of Fear,' (Newsday, November 28). In the midst of all this warfare, a plan was hatched to open up a beauty school in Kabul. Vogue magazine was instrumental in the conception and execution of what is now known as "Beauty Without Borders." In May 2002, a short article entitled "the power of beauty" chronicled the magazines role in this "humanitarian" project.
In the Vogue article, the first woman in a burqa to address Di Giovanni does so after the Northern Alliance liberates the city. "Now," she writes, packages of hair dye with scantily clad Swedish models adorn shop windows. The journalist refuses to talk to the women unless they take off the burqa. One of the girls does, "her hair was dyed blond, and she wore pink lipstick and blue eyeliner. She stared at me defiantly... ‘Ah, you see,' she said, ‘I am a person after all." Another woman she meets shows Di Giovanni a picture of herself during the years of the Soviet backed Najibullah government. She is wearing a miniskirt, heels, and pale lipstick. "What I'm trying to show you... is that we were people before the burqa." These quotes demonstrate the burqa as dehumanizing and the woman under the burqa as a non-entity. Under the burqa, Afghan women are unintelligible to both the Western eye and the Western ear. For di Giovanni, the woman's voice is "muffled" until she lifts the burqa. When di Giovanni "sees" her, then she speaks and becomes a person after all. The other source, a radio announcer silenced under the Taliban, "shows" di Giovanni she is/ was a person with a photo. To define, depict, and understand becomes a mission of these reports, as they try and get a glimpse into the "secret" domains of Afghani Muslim culture, hidden from the view of the Western eye.