Sex and Secularism by Joan Wallach Scott (review)

Among the challenges to the mainline secularization thesis mounted over the last quarter-century, Talal Asad's Formations of the Secular has proven the most fecund. In its wake, a new secular studies has emerged, an interdisciplinary body of scholarship that enlivens its key term (and its various declensions) to accommodate not only the evident persistence of religion in public life, whether in the "West" or its fantasized Others, but also the failure of objective definition to clarify its aims and operations. With Sex and Secularism, Joan Wallach Scott has made an essential contribution to this field. Her loosely periodized, revisionist history of secularization reads against the grain of the self-perpetuating myth of liberal modernity to reveal how sexual subjection and gender inequality have been enshrined at the very core of secular democratic societies in Western Europe and the United States. Critiques of (neo)liberalism are not new, of course; Scott builds not only on Asad's research but also on arguments by Wendy Brown, Saba Mahmood, Sara Farris, and Joseph Massad when she lifts the curtain on the biopoliticized valence of the liberal tradition. Before Sex and Secularism, though, no book had synthesized this body of work so succinctly nor brought its insights to bear on the embeddedness of sex (and the gender identity ideologies in and through which sex is constructed) within secular self-understanding.¹

Like Asad, Scott eschews both metanarrative and universalism in favor of genealogy. She deftly balances attention between the historical contingency of secularism's various articulations, from its advent during the transatlantic age of revolution to its reemergence after the fall of communism, and key points of continuity between them. The first chapter documents the synonymy of women and religion in several contexts: anticlericalism in revolutionary France, Protestant secularism in the early American republic and in Germany, and the liberalization of Islam in postcolonial states. Secularization operates in each case by insisting on the dialectic of public and private, then naturalizing their opposition by mapping it onto an axis of sexual difference. Narrowing focus to the nineteenth century, chapter 2 shows how reproductive heterosexuality came to compensate for one of the most acutely felt casualties of disenchantment. Properly disciplined through marriage, women's sexuality secured a bourgeois-secular model of futurity, a "way of guaranteeing the perpetuation of the present, a way of conquering death" without the promise of an afterlife (73). Moreover, the same rhetoric and policies that served to consolidate the structure of the middle-class family also consolidated an ideology of white supremacy. Chapter 3 moves forward chronologically, addressing the centrality of gender asymmetry to emancipatory reforms in postrevolutionary France and, later, suffrage-era Europe and the United States. Even as the public/private dyad fractured and women came to be associated with the liminal space of "the social," sexual difference continued to justify discriminations and exclusions (119). Thus enfranchisement, a measure of formal equality, reinscribed substantive inequalities.

The most striking reformulation of the sex/secularism relation took place in postwar Europe and the United States, Scott argues in chapter 4. First in Cold War polemic and then in Islamophobic clash-of-civilization rhetoric, sexual freedom confirmed the "secularity of Christianity"—its exclusive claim to compatibility with liberal rights discourse (126). The superiority of secular nation-states manifested in the sexual autonomy of their citizens, especially women. Chapter 5 amplifies this line of argument, with Scott scrutinizing the false equivalency of sexual emancipation and gender equality, which was promoted through images of the covered, subjugated "Muslim woman of the East" (182). According to Scott, twenty-first-century secularism has replaced rational self-determination with sexual self-determination, substituting one universal, presocial human quality for another as its criterion for rights-bearing citizenship. A discourse that had once relied on compulsory reproductive heterosexuality for its legitimation now measures its ascendency by the freedom of choice it offers within a pluralized marketplace of sexual pleasure. But "the focus on...