Contested Clothing

Imagine a teacher at a public primary school in Dortmund appeared in class wearing the jersey of the Bayern Munchen soccer club. The teacher would likely cause a great deal of commotion among the student body.

Surely, it would be. Whoever teaches at a public school does so voluntarily and in full knowledge of the consequences of his employment: being responsible for minors who cannot escape his gaze. Pupils may refuse to actively participate or pay attention in class, or they might make use of other forms of ‘Great Refusal’ (Herbert Marcuse). And the teacher will certainly not succeed in converting his wards to the Munich team — this is Dortmund, after all. This notwithstanding, it is surely within the rights of the pupils that the teacher’s appearance be con­ducive to their education. And outside the context of an ethics class about the burdens of tolerance, the jersey does not meet this criterion.

Undoubtedly then, there do exist circumstances where public school teach­ers have no choice but to accept that they must obey certain rules concerning their appearance. Further still, if the teacher is a civil servant, then he/she stands before the class as representatives of the government. He/she is an embodiment of the state he/she has chosen to serve. This choice bears consequences for the freedoms the teacher enjoys while serving. And in any case, according to classi­cal liberalism, claims to freedom are primarily aimed at protecting citizens from the state. Citizens’ claims to freedom are related to those of civil servants in an asymmetrical manner, in favour of the former.

But the latter are not completely without rights either.

Just as a jersey, a veil too can be perceived as offensive. It can be understood as the symbol of a religious community and as the marker of a political position­ing: veils covering the hair on the head of a female are nowadays primarily as­sociated with Islam or even with its fundamentalist formations. Many people think it conveys missionary intent or, in any case, the refusal to fully assimilate. It is taken to signify aggression, or at least a separation from the majority of so­ciety. The potential for these and similar interpretations has determined legal rulings in some ‘veil cases’. The most important of these cases, and the one that carried the most juridical weight, was that of Ludin.