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111 CHAPTER 6: The French Ban on Headscarves: Rendering Racism Respectable Erzsébet Barát and Ebru Sungun Introduction In our paper we address the French government’s 2004 law that instituted a ban on wearing “conspicuous signs” of religious affiliation in public schools as a representative example of contemporary anxieties about the Muslim faith. France is not the only country in Europe that sees the headscarf as a challenge to secular democracy. Since 2004 Belgium and Spain have also introduced a ban. Nor is the intensity of the anxiety a matter of actual numbers of the population that identify as Muslim in the various countries. The headscarf or the “veil”, standing for the various forms of women’s clothing (including the hijab in France, the burqa in Holland, and the niqab in England), has become a symbol of the stigmatisation of ethnic or religious Muslim others in contemporary political discourse. As Joan Scott observes, “Banning the headscarf or veil is a symbolic gesture; for some European nations it is a way of taking a stand against Islam, declaring entire Muslim populations to be a threat to national integrity and harmony.”1 We challenge the proponents’ claim that the French ban applies to every religion and that its sole purpose is to exclude “conspicuous religious signs” from the public space. The ban does not impact everyone’s life equally. It is most discriminatory against Muslim girls who are likely to wear the headscarf. We have chosen the highly topical French case as the most telling example of contemporary “veil-bashing” in Europe, in order to show that the law’s failure to integrate (former) colonial subjects as full citizens is particularly detrimental to young Muslim girls. Unlike Scott, though, we are not concerned predominantly with the role of sexuality in the criminalisation of the ban but rather with its gender implications. At the same time we share her conclusion that the 2004 ban can not reconcile religious and/or ethnic differences, but instead reiterates them. The French government ’s discrimination against the religious or cultural belonging of Muslims 1 Joan W. Scott, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 3. is played out through the prevailing aspect of the excluded identity, namely gender. Focussing on the 2004 French ban on the wearing of headscarves in public schools, this chapter may be used in classroom discussions to explore similar situations in which a particular garment associated with women is transformed into a symbol of the stigmatisation of ethnic or religious others in contemporary European political discourse. The history of secularisation in the Christian West is tied to the emergence of the nation-state and to the separation of politics from religion. Therefore, in contemporary debates about the compatibility of Islamic values with political democracy and secular modernity, doubts are often raised. As the gendered dimension of secularism is a fundamental feature of male-centred modernisation, French laïcité (the French version of secularism) established a secular public sphere where religion is absent but women as markers of modernity are profoundly present. Within this framework, girls wearing a headscarf in recognition of their cultural and/or religious belonging in public schools are seen as at odds with the principles of secularism and modernity in European society. Consequently, feminist scholars and activists face the challenge of reconciling the headscarf with the principle of gender equality, a fundamental value of western secular societies. Furthermore, in so far as the girls wearing the headscarves come from families that are seen as “immigrants”, “Arabs” or “Africans” from former colonies, the ban on the headscarf appears questionable not only in terms of the equality principle in a democracy, but also as a covert act of racism played out in the name of political progress at the expense of young women. Gender oppression and racial oppression intersect and legitimise once again the majority society’s control over the meaning and terms of multicultural “coexistence”.2 2 When discussing the relationship between racism and gender, we adopt an intersectional approach as the theoretical framework. See Nira Yuval-Davis, “Intersectionality and Feminist Politics,” European Journal of Women’s Studies 13 (2006): 193–209. This approach enables us to examine how various analytical categories are socially constructed within a particular network of social arrangements and particular frameworks of intelligibility and how they manifest themselves in various forms of inequality. See Leslie McCall, “The Complexity of Intersectionality,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 30, 3 (2005...

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