Who's Afraid of Female Agency?: A Rejoinder to Gill

Our initial article was meant as an intervention in both mainstream and feminist debate, and a critical response like Gill’s is therefore more than welcome, in fact it was exactly what the article was aimed at.Nevertheless, Gill’s response is disappointing for two reasons, which we elaborate in the remainder of this article. First, by presenting her own work on porno-chic as the illuminating example of how feminist research on clothing styles should be carried out, Gill falls back into one of the key problems we identified in our article, namely that of separating analysis about porno-chic from examinations of the headscarf. As a result, her response suffers from internal inconsistencies that are unhelpful to under-standing the issues at hand, as we show later. Second, in putting us up as naive neoliberals mutely supporting (Gill uses all these terms to qualify our work) a false discourse of free choice and individual autonomy, Gill seriously misreads our argument.