This article investigates how, within less than a decade, face‐veiling has turned from a non‐issue into a threat to the Dutch nation‐state. With good citizenship increasingly defined in cultural terms, politicians have used a strong affective discourse of dislike that produces a sense of national belonging amongst a wide range of people, but excludes face‐veiling women. Not (only) the act of face‐covering, but the fact that Muslim women are engaged in these acts causes discomfort, anxiety and resentment, as the very same women who are defined as oppressed, turn out to challenge Dutch normativities about gender and sociality through their corporeal presence.

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If in the 1970s modernization theorists predicted the demise of paid domestic work, developments during the last two decades have proven them wrong. Both in the North and in the South the number of those engaged in paid domestic work has grown rapidly. In some cases, like China and India, intra-state migration is predominant. Elsewhere, in the United States, Canada, and Western-Europe, as well as in growth areas such as the Gulf States, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and Malaysia, the presence of large numbers of migrant domestic workers from abroad has been particularly striking. In fact, in a number of cases the growth of domestic labor as a field of employment has led to the feminization of outmigration. By the late 1990s, there were between 1.3 and 1.5 million Asian women working in the Middle East. Whereas in the 1970s women formed about 15 percent of the migrant labor force, in the mid-1990s almost 60 percent of the Filipino migrant labor force was female, and women constituted approximately 80 percent of the Sri Lankan and the Indonesian migrant labor force (Gamburd 2000:35).

Most San'ani women appear in public completely covered in black, often including a face-veil. At first sight, this locates San'a, the capital of Yemen, outside the world of fashion. This article, however, argues that fashion is part and parcel of women's outdoor dressing styles in San~a. While some women link their dressing styles to authentic San ani customs and traditions and others highlight ideological and religious convictions, all refer in one way or another to matters of style and aesthetics. Not only modernist women are engaged in wearing fashionable outerwear, but also women protagonists of an Islamist