Sex and Secularism by Joan Wallach Scott (review)

It is commonplace in contemporary political discourses to posit secularism as the guarantor of gender equality. In Sex and Secularism Joan Wallach Scott provocatively challenges this association. Scott argues that the claim that secularism ensures women's emancipation is historically false. Moreover, this claim has functioned to conceal the centrality of sexual difference to the foundation of modern secular regimes, as well as to justify "white, Western, and Christian racial and religious superiority" (3).

Sex and Secularism builds on Scott's earlier book The Politics of the Veil (2007), which examined the headscarf controversies in France through the lenses of secularism, racism, individualism, and sexuality. This time around, Scott foregrounds her inquiry into secularism by tracing the shifts in its gendered meanings from nineteenth-century anticlericalism, Protestantism, and the colonial "civilizing mission" to the more recent history of the Cold War and anti-Muslim campaigns. She also broadens her geographic scope by including cases from a variety of Western and Middle Eastern contexts. The starting point and principal focus of the book, however, is the Muslim question in western Europe.

Early in the book Scott clarifies that she approaches secularism not as a political and social reality or "a fixed study of analysis" but as a discourse whose operation and "generative effects need to be examined critically in their historical contexts" (4). She convincingly shows how this discourse, in all its variations across time and place, has relied on different articulations of gender, defined as "attribution of meaning to the difference of sex" (24). The first chapter narrates the association of women with religion as a pretext for denying them political rights in early nineteenth-century Euro-Atlantic modernity. The second chapter shows how scientific discourses in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries emphasized women's reproductive capacity to "answer the uncertainty of life without God" (73) while maintaining gender asymmetry at home and in politics. The third chapter interrogates how the sexual division of labor at the heart of secularism determined the conditions under which women became citizens—that is, as the "second sex" rather than as abstracted individuals. The fourth chapter argues that Western secularism incorporated Christianized and capitalist conceptions of democracy, individualism, and freedom during the Cold War against the socioeconomic framing of women's equality under Soviet "atheism." The last chapter analyzes the further deployment of ideals of sexual freedom in the post-Cold War period, this time in polemics against Muslims in the West and the Middle East.

In this extensive analysis Scott effectively uncovers the discursive operation of gender asymmetries as it informs the secular notion of separate spheres: "the public and private, reason and passion, objective and subjective" (68). She addresses the complex assemblages of race, sex, and gender in this process without assuming their equivalence: "Women may be men's others, but they are intimate and necessary others. Their standing as insiders [as the nation's reproducers] . . . elevates them above racial outsiders" (24). Nor is women's emancipation equivalent to gender equality, as purported since the twentieth century. They have distinct genealogies that become obscured in secularism's claims about its religious and racial others. However, Sex and Secularism treats the analytic categories of sex and gender as almost synonymous with women. The references to homosexuality, lesbianism, and gay rights appear rather abruptly, without sufficient explanation. Future work could fruitfully delve further into the analytic distinctions between sex, sexuality, and gender to explore how secularism could be engaged outside its binary paradigms and beyond "the woman question" (16, 55,105,125).

The book's arguments are most solid and detailed when drawing on the French case, likely owing to Scott's decades-long research on the gender history of France. Her comparative analysis of French laicism and the history of secularization in the United States, Germany, and Britain also provides a productive case for identifying the patterns of gender differentiation and inequality common to these diverse settings. The book's treatment of Middle Eastern contexts, however, not only is...