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Dining with French People
- University of Minnesota Press
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80 Others DiningwithFrenchPeople For an American academic—and I am one—to study the controversies that have taken place in France over Muslim headscarves before and after 9/11 feels a bit like landing on a distant and mysterious planet or falling down the rabbit hole into a world where everything seems to have been turned upside down and stopped making any kind of sense. I must confess my admiration for scholars such as the feminist historian Joan Scott, the anthropologist John Bowen, and others, who have so eloquently refuted every single argument ever put forth by proponents of the ban on religious symbols in French public schools. My own reaction, which I may very well explain by the fact that I am not just American but also French, has been far less sanguine and more along the lines of “Have you people completely lost your minds?” Once, during a stay in Paris, I was invited to a (lovely) dinner at which I forgot once again to arrive twenty minutes late. (Immigration can be so disorienting, although not just to immigrants, I believe, which is one reason why it’s so interesting.) At one point in the flow of the conversation, I expressed my exasperation with people who say“Ça m’agresse!” as a reaction to seeing women wearing a hijab on the streets. (Bowen’s fine reading of this phrase, which describes something between feeling offended and assaulted , inspired me that night.) One of my friends, whose intelligence is not in doubt, replied,“I’m sorry but I do feel it is a form of aggression.” In the republican culture of modern France, the term public traditionally refers, when used in a political sense, to entities run by the state or local government . A school can be public; so can a library, a museum, or a swimming pool. But a restaurant, for example, is not. As for the street, it is a dicey business. Is it an extension of the home, as so many people’s behavior would suggest, and in this case private in nature? Or does it belong to the public sphere because it is maintained thanks to the citizens’taxes? The latter view explains why French people so often take their political grievances to the streets; the former why some find littering or kissing in public perfectly natural. Perhaps unfairly, I chose to ignore the fact that streets, by virtue of their spatial and cultural in- betweenness, inevitably get caught up in all sorts of friction, and I went on a rant about how slippery the definition of the“public”can become and how easily we go from public schools to government offices to the streets, which were supposed to belong to everyone and, if I’m not mistaken, to remain free from excessive state intervention. Case Others 81 in point: the eventual banning of the niqab, the burka, and all full facial veils from the entire territory of the Republic. What I should have said was this: for a while now, young Arab men have been largely defined as delinquents (Nicolas Sarkozy used more controversial terms) who simply refuse to integrate into French society and whose alleged acts of so- called incivility are typically described as “aggressions.” Now, it seems, time has come for the young women to be guilty of the same crime, and their hijabs are the telltale signs of their refusal to live in harmony with others. Thanks to a rhetorical trick, members of a minority subjected to racism and many forms of social exclusion find themselves redefined as the aggressors, while members of the majority become the victims. How clever. What a smart way to say, in essence ,“I don’t want to encounter these people in my neighborhood.” Another dinner, another story: I was once asked to participate in a graduate seminar at another university.I had agreed to talk about Guillaume Dustan,a gay,HIV-positive author who was rightly or wrongly made to embody a certain“ghettoized” gay lifestyle that once made a subject of controversy in France.During the dinner that followed,I found myself sitting next to one of the grad students,a young,white,French woman who soon started criticizing what she understood as my defense of communautarisme—the word often used in a variety of French discourses (political, philosophical, etc.) to mean, and denounce, something like identity- based separatism. Because the gay community hasn’t occupied center stage in that debate since roughly the...