Sex and secularism by J. W. Scott (review)

Far from encouraging equality between sexes and sexualities, ‘secularism’, on the contrary, establishes gender inequality. Moreover, it has acted as an effective rhetorical strategy for affirming the religious and racial superiority of Western countries, both in the past and in the present. In opposition to Samuel Huntington’s (1993) theory of a ‘clash of civilizations’ between the Christian West and Islam, Joan Wallach Scott presents a rich and richly documented analysis, drawing on numerous historical studies on the unequal and hierarchical foundations of the very process of secularism.

It is difficult to do justice in French to the term ‘secularism’, which is rendered as laïcité in the French translation of the book (Flammarion, 2018). Taking what she presents as a Foucauldian ‘genealogical’ approach to the concept, in her analysis the terms ‘secular’ (‘referring to things nonreligious’), ‘secularization’ (‘the historical process by which transcendent religious authority is replaced by knowledge that can only originate with reasoning humans’), and ‘secularity’ (‘a nonreligious state of being’) are superimposed (p. 5). This is ultimately not a problem, since the aim of the book is not to give substantial content to secularism as a concept but to capture the discursive logics associated with it and how they have evolved over time. Scott writes that ‘although it may not reflect the reality it claims to describe, the secularism story (secularization, secularity) does have an important influence on the way these realities are perceived’ (p. 9). This is a highly original aspect of this book, which distinguishes it from many others that seek to explore the foundations of secularism, or the content and limits of the process of secularization. The concept of ‘secularism’ functions here as political discourse.

The genealogy of the concept of secularism has considerably evolved over the last centuries and is based on the play of multiple oppositions. In its earliest uses, it carried a negative connotation and referred to intraworldly relations. This logic was reversed in the 18th century. At the time of the French Revolution, secularism came to positively refer to the State and its representatives, with religion becoming its negative counterpart. The 19th century was characterized by new oppositions: between women and men, masculinity and femininity (with the public and political sphere reserved for men, while women were relegated to the religious sphere), but also between ‘civilized’ (Christian) nations and ‘primitive’ nations in Africa and the Ottoman territories. In the second half of the 20th century, during the Cold War, the idea of a free (Christian) religion, as against the cold and authoritarian domination of communist atheism, was integrated into the very concept of secularism. In the most recent period, there has been a direct association in Western countries between secularism, democracy, and gender equality, on the one hand, and religion, Islam, and gender inequality, on the other. ‘Gender equality is portrayed in terms of the difference between uncovered and covered societies’ (p. 14). The concept thus confirms the political and moral superiority of the West over other countries, and in particular predominantly Muslim countries.

The first chapter, ‘Women and religion’, surveys a large historical literature in order to show that the association between women and religion is a product of secularism itself, not the relic of ancient practice. The French Revolution of 1789 established the idea of the reasonable and reasoning man and the emotional woman, under the influence of clergy and confessors. The gendered division of labour (women are the guarantors of men’s morals, while being economically and politically dependent on them) became a marker of ‘modernity’ (p. 48). The same logic can be observed in the modernization of the Ottoman Empire, in particular around the transformation of sharia into a standardized, modern civil code. Here again, secularism and the colonial enterprise established or reinforced gender inequalities, which would sometimes be reinterpreted as ‘tradition’.

The second chapter, ‘Reproductive futurism’, emphasizes the role of science in the subordination of women, by way of the imposition of heterosexual marriage and reproductive teleology as a requirement of nature itself. The Western...