Jennifer A. Selby

Un/veiling Women’s Bodies Secularism and Sexuality in Full-face Veil Prohibitions in France and Québec

Heated discussion in the media, costly and laborious government commissions, and restrictive legal recommendations in France and Québec, Canada, have recently focused on the undesirability of face-covering veils (burqas and niqabs) in the public sphere. This article charts how these sites have, at the same time, concretized a contrasting idealized presentation of a desirable secular female body. This examination is grounded in recent Secularism Studies scholarship that argues that, like forms of religiosity, secularisms include a range of social and physical dispositions (Warner, 2008; see also Asad, 2003; Calhoun et al., 2011; Fadil, 2011; Jakobsen and Pellegrini, 2008; Mahmood, 2009). Through consideration of two recent niqab-wearing women’s cases outside of Paris and in Montréal, and with reference to theories of governmentality (Fassin, 2010; Foucault, 1980, 1988; Guénif-Souilamas, 2006) and to Joan Wallach Scott on seduction (2011), I examine the regulatory functions and normalizing delineations of female sexuality within restrictions against full-face hijabs. Le voile intégral est le sujet de vives discussions dans les médias, de commissions gouvernementales coûteuses et de recommandations juridiques restrictives en France et au Québec. Cet article examine comment ces débats ont, en même temps, généré une image idéalisée et contrastée d’un corps féminin désirable et laïque. Cet argument fait suite aux discussions académiques soutenant que, comme différentes formes de religiosité, les laïcités incluent aussi une série de dispositions sociales et physiques (Warner, 2008; voir aussi, Asad, 2003; Calhoun et al., 2011; Fadil, 2011; Jakobsen and Pellegrini, 2008; Mahmood, 2009). J’examine les fonctions de réglementation et les délimitations de normalisation de la sexualité féminine contenu dans les restrictions sur le voile intégral en retraçant deux cas récents en banlieues de Paris et Montréal et en référence à la théorie de la gouvernementalité (Fassin, 2010; Foucault, 1980, 1988; Guénif-Souilamas, 2006) et à celle de Joan Wallach Scott sur la séduction (2011).

Islam in France Reconfigured: Republican Islam in the 2010 Gerin Report

This paper examines the 2010 Gerin Report on the prevalence and dangers of donning the voile intégral (full-face veils, namely niqabs and burqas) in the Republic to consider the implications of its configuration of Islam in France. With reference to five other recent reports and commissions in France on the visibility and appropriateness of religious signs in the public sphere, I suggest that the Gerin Report differs in two significant ways. First, the Report does not explicitly promote French secularism. While laïcité is underscored as integral to a vivre-ensemble (living together), the document positions full-face coverings not as religious symbols but as political, Islamist signs. Second, the Report singularly focuses on disputed Islamic head-coverings and, with reference to religious experts, carefully constructs niqabs and burqas as outside of theologically “proper” Republican Islam. Following consideration of these two features, I conclude by pointing to how the Gerin Reports politicization of the voile intégral is reflected in recent citizenship decisions and through the interactions of a large French feminist organization with Muslim women in a Parisian banlieue (suburb).

French secularism as a ‘guarantor’ of women's rights? Muslim women and gender politics in a Parisian banlieue

This paper considers contemporary discourse in France that positions secularism (laïcité) as a guarantor of Muslim womens rights. In the first section I sketch a socio-historical genealogy of this discourse focusing on key shifts in its articulation. I suggest that the current identification between secularism and Muslim womens rights has its main expressions in recent public policy commissions and, as an example on the ground, in the positions taken by Frances largest feminist organisation, Femmes Solidaires. Informed by one another, these commissions and this organisation (a) conceptualise Islam as overtly political and patriarchal and (b) define secularism as the primary way to ‘liberate’ Muslim women. The second section examines the impact of this discourse on Muslim communities in Petit Nanterre, a Parisian suburb where I conducted extensive anthropological fieldwork. Significantly, Muslim women in this suburb are uninterested in headscarf-related debates on secularism and more vividly engaged in the 2005 Pork Affair, a locally oriented controversy in a public school. I conclude that the religious concerns of the Muslim women positioned at the centre of the secular debate are expressed in certain forms of activism, efforts ignored by commissions and womens advocacy groups.

Re-posing the “Muslim Question”:

The ‘‘Muslim Question’’ (MQ) is an increasingly referenced polysemous schema that constructs and abstracts Muslims and Muslimness in problematizing their integration within a western secular public sphere. The reader is perhaps already questioning this definition and the taken-for-grantedness of all these concepts—integration, Muslim, the West, secularism, and the public sphere—that have themselves been sites of significant scholarly debate and critique. Yet, despite being firmly lodged in these enduring concepts, the genealogy of the MQ is recent. The coinage appears with frequency alongside socio-legal debates about the visibility of Islam in western nation-states, whether through so-called conspicuous religious signs and practices, gendered norms, or through the racialized presence of minorities. The ‘‘question’’ has peaked following terror-related events, beginning with 9/11 and re-appearing most recently following the November 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris. There is no reason to think that the ‘‘question’’ will disappear in the immediate future: many countries (including Canada, Germany, Lebanon, Sweden, and Britain) are receiving a large number of refugees from Syria, and one of the pervasive themes of public discourse is their integration. Mobilizing stark, threatening, and Islamophobic characterizations of Muslims has served as an expeditious ‘‘wedge’’ political tool for some western governments. We saw this in Canada earlier in 2015 on the question of the acceptability of niqabs, a garment worn by a few dozen women. It differs from Islamophobia. The MQ, to cite contributor Matteo Gianni [p. 23], ‘‘is a conglomerate of discourses, attitudes, and practices that call into question the agency, subjectivity, and moral equality of Muslims as individuals, as bearers of religious values, and as citizens.’’ In this way, the MQ includes analysis of discriminations and violences to which Muslims are subjected but is not reducible to these foci. It is also sometimes linked to the ‘‘Jewish Question.’’ In general, the papers in this issue situate the MQ in two registers: First, in a Huntingtonian sense, in ways that call into question the visibility of Muslims and reify and affirm a variety of secularization projects. In this way, ‘‘Islam’’ as a singular object is

“Muslimness” and multiplicity in qualitative research and in government reports in Canada

With reference to a qualitative study on everyday religiosity among Muslims in St. Johns, Canada, this paper examines trends in academic sources and public policy on Islam that over-privilege the most committed practitioners, thereby narrowly depicting “Muslimness.” I situate this overemphasis by reflecting on what Mamdani calls “culture talk,” an essentializing discourse heightened in the post-9/11 west (c.f. Shryock on “Islamophilia”). Interview data, along with a trend in social scientific research on Muslims that emphasize the most pious and the outcomes following the Ontario “Boyd Report” and the Quebecois “Bouchard–Taylor Report” show the pervasiveness of culture talk that erases Muslim multiplicity.

The Republic and the Riots: Exploring Urban Violence in French Suburbs, 2005-2007

In 2005 and 2007 France’s quartiers sensibles (disenfranchised suburban regions) imploded with anger and violence following deadly police/youth altercations. Matthew Moran’s seven-chaptered The Republic and the Riots: Exploring Urban Violence in French Suburbs offers a nuanced and contextualized portrait of how the riots materialized in the Parisian suburb of Villiers-le-Bel, 18 kilometers north of the capital. Methodologically, the book situates the suburban riots broadly within Moran’s impressive and extensive media analysis, within a sociohistorical narrative of national tensions and social divides, and more specifically, based on nine months of qualitative participant observation and interviews among youths, local police, social workers, and elected officials in Villiers-leBel. This focus on the perspectives of the banlieusards (suburban inhabitants) and those who engage with them allows Moran to dispel prevalent myths about the riots and to question the fractured application of the Republican model of citizenship and society in the suburbs. Following some introductory remarks, the first chapter situates the riots historically and captures the range of social commentary that emerged in 2005. Was the malaise that spurred this unprecedented violence following the deaths of two teenage boys on October 27, 2005, based on anger toward police and the state (recall then-Minister of the Interior Nicolas Sarkozy’s comments about hosing down the voyous [. . . ] de la racaille)? Was it a response to religious exclusion? A youthful desire to vandalize? An expression of ethnocultural divisions? Unemployment? Communitarianism? Polygamy? Why did riots emerge two years later in 2007 so much more violently? Moran usefully charts the commentary and reportage of the riots, masterfully moving away from reductive explanations. For instance, he shows how French media coverage focused on the destruction of youth/police clashes and not on pressing underlying social problems. Ironically, Moran concludes that ‘‘in expressing their frustration at their current sociocultural situation, those involved in the riots assisted in a process by which the suburbs are further stigmatized by the media’’ (p. 38). Moran positions the banlieues as revealing a cleavage in the tripartite Republican ideal. Through this prism, Chapter Two pays attention to the complex and competing notions of égalité as part of France’s nationbuilding project as well as the impact of immigration. We see evidence of how the notion that immigrants of North African origins constitute an ‘‘inassimilable immigrant population’’ (p. 99) gained ground. Moran’s discussion of French secularism could have been woven more within the study’s banlieue focus, but Moran convincingly argues how colonialism paradoxically came to threaten the republican model’s reputation as a source of liberty and equality (p. 79). The third chapter continues this examination of gaps between Republican ideals and their application. It usefully overviews the origins of HLM (habitations à loyers modérés) social housing, which, despite their contemporary undesirability, isolation from public transportation, and their lack of amenities and retailers, were initially considered ‘‘the zenith of urban living’’ (p. 117). The author convincingly charts the cultural stigma attached to residents’ immigrant statuses and the pejorative impact of their (real or perceived) affiliation with Islam. Moran’s primary contribution here is his attention to the notion of la galère (profound malaise). He suggests that young people’s strained relationships with police prohibit reconciliation with mainstream French society. Reviews 107

Marriage Partner Preference

This chapter turns more specifically to how notions of Islam, “tradition,” and femininity are woven through the narratives and the post migration lives of first-generation banlieusarde women. As we saw in chapter 2 , the physical conditions to which these women migrate in Petit Nanterre have shifted substantially. Chapters 3 and 4 charted the changing secular and feminist politics with which they engage. One demographic element, which, to my surprise, has not significantly altered, however, is the number of first-generation women who continue to marry local men in this banlieue . I had not intended to focus on this phenomenon in my research, yet within the first few weeks I spent volunteering with Nadha’s French language and integration courses, I was struck by the number of Maghrebi women who continually arrived to the banlieue through marriage migration to men living in the area. With few exceptions, these women make up the students of the Nadha French language and integration classes for primo-arrivees . Why had most of my first-generation respondents, of varying educational and socioeconomic backgrounds, migrated to France following this marriage pattern? French-born men of Maghrebian origin in this neighborhood typically prefer “traditional” North African wives to women born in France, even when local French-born women are Muslim or have North African origins.1