Abstract
Heated discussion in the media, costly and laborious government commissions, and restrictive legal recommendations in France and Québec, Canada, have recently focused on the undesirability of face-covering veils (burqas and niqabs) in the public sphere. This article charts how these sites have, at the same time, concretized a contrasting idealized presentation of a desirable secular female body. This examination is grounded in recent Secularism Studies scholarship that argues that, like forms of religiosity, secularisms include a range of social and physical dispositions (Warner, 2008; see also Asad, 2003; Calhoun et al., 2011; Fadil, 2011; Jakobsen and Pellegrini, 2008; Mahmood, 2009). Through consideration of two recent niqab-wearing women’s cases outside of Paris and in Montréal, and with reference to theories of governmentality (Fassin, 2010; Foucault, 1980, 1988; Guénif-Souilamas, 2006) and to Joan Wallach Scott on seduction (2011), I examine the regulatory functions and normalizing delineations of female sexuality within restrictions against full-face hijabs.
Le voile intégral est le sujet de vives discussions dans les médias, de commissions gouvernementales coûteuses et de recommandations juridiques restrictives en France et au Québec. Cet article examine comment ces débats ont, en même temps, généré une image idéalisée et contrastée d’un corps féminin désirable et laïque. Cet argument fait suite aux discussions académiques soutenant que, comme différentes formes de religiosité, les laïcités incluent aussi une série de dispositions sociales et physiques (Warner, 2008; voir aussi, Asad, 2003; Calhoun et al., 2011; Fadil, 2011; Jakobsen and Pellegrini, 2008; Mahmood, 2009). J’examine les fonctions de réglementation et les délimitations de normalisation de la sexualité féminine contenu dans les restrictions sur le voile intégral en retraçant deux cas récents en banlieues de Paris et Montréal et en référence à la théorie de la gouvernementalité (Fassin, 2010; Foucault, 1980, 1988; Guénif-Souilamas, 2006) et à celle de Joan Wallach Scott sur la séduction (2011).
Keywords
Introduction 1
Recent heated discussion in the media, costly and laborious government commissions, and restrictive legal recommendations in France and Québec, Canada, have focused on the undesirability of full-face-covering veils in the public sphere. Although the French and Québécois governments have long-standing differences with regard to the management of religious diversity, the two countries have recently become more aligned with respect to their approaches to niqabs and burqas, with Québec moving closer to France’s republican paradigm of laïcité (French secularism). 2 Unlike other Western European nation states like Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands that have emphasized securitization in their justifications for legislating prohibitions on full-face veils, rationales for the 11 April 2011 law in France and for the proposed Bill 94 in Québec appeal to a desire to safeguard women’s equal rights. That is, Government documents in France and Québec frame face-covering hijabs as countering hard-fought advancements related to sexual liberation and gender parity. 3 This paper maps the alleged threat to expressions of female sexuality and women’s equal rights engendered by these garments and the counter discourse generated in response. I will demonstrate that, in restricting full-face-covering garments, French and Québécois governmental documents and commissions have concretized an idealized modern secular body. In seeking to curtail niqabs and burqas, they effectively demarcate a juxtaposed naked-faced secularized female form with its own attending mores, values, and desired performance.
This argument draws from recent Secularism Studies scholarship that illustrates how secularisms, like forms of religiosity, include a range of social and physical dispositions or what Michael Warner (2008) calls “a framework of corporeal experience and struggle” (see also, Asad, 2003; Brown, 2012; Calhoun et al., 2011; Fadil, 2011: 96; Jakobsen and Pellegrini, 2008; Mahmood, 2006: 323, 2009). From this perspective, secularity ensures the visual accessibility of women’s bodies in contemporary France and Québec. According to the documents analyzed in this paper, a public sphere free of religious signs emboldens women to freely express their sexuality, and concomitantly ensure gender parity. 4 While portrayed as neutral secular projects, bans on full-face-covering hijabs thus involve prescriptive sexual politics. The consumptive public accessibility of women’s faces and bodies clearly matters.
My objective is not to determine the impact of face- and body-covering garments in the public sphere. Rather, I seek to untangle how niqabs and burqas are positioned in France and Québec as (1) a hindrance to the goals of gender equality and women’s free expression of sexuality, and (2) opposing the visible accessibility of female bodies. The paper begins with a brief history of the management of religious diversity in these francophone contexts to illustrate their recent convergence. Next, it compares two emblematic cases that ignited public anxieties about full-face hijabs: the June 2008 citizenship request of “Mme M.” in France and the March 2010 exclusion of Naima Atef Ahmed from adult education classes in Québec. The restrictive responses to these cases instigated the 2010 French Gerin Commission Report 5 and the Québécois hearings on the proposed Bill 94, 6 as well as a government-financed report from Québec’s Council for the Status of Women entitled, “Affirming secularism, a step toward real equality between men and women.” 7 I will argue that while offering anti-niqab rationales, these reports simultaneously delineate regulatory mainstream values on gender and secularism. Differing feminist politics in France and Québec influence the rhetorical schema of these restrictions: in France these garments and their perceived accompanying social comportment impinge on the visual accessibility of the female body, while in Québec the covered female body evokes vestiges of oppressive Catholic patriarchal religiosity. I conclude by discussing some of the ironies in the feminist emancipatory discourse central to these prohibitions.
Secular Politics in France and Québec
Despite how governments in France and Québec have similarly restrictively responded to the public visibility of Islam, the historical underpinnings of their management of religious minorities differ. These histories have been well delineated by Jean Baubérot (1990, 2004) and Micheline Milot (2002, 2005, 2008; Baubérot and Milot, 2011; see also Koussens, 2009a, 2009b, 2011), so I do not replicate their particularities and complexities. Instead, it bears mentioning that, most simply, Canada and its provinces do not have a constitutional separation of church and state, while France does (Beaman, 2008). France’s strict Republican separation of church and state has reflected an assimilationist social model where a uniform treatment ideally ensures that all citizens are granted the same rights (Castles, 1995: 298; Sauer, 2009: 79). Québec’s distinct society model “has its own history [and] a common language and specific values” (CSF [Conseil du Statut de la Femme] Report, 2011: 82). It has often been positioned as espousing a third path between Canadian multiculturalism and the French Jacobean model (see Juteau, 2002; McAndrew, 2001). Co-commissioner for the Bouchard Taylor Report, 8 sociologist Gérald Bouchard (2011: 438) has championed the protection of minority cultural and French-language identity through “interculturalism” (see also, Bouchard and Taylor, 2008: 40; Legault, 2000; McAndrew 2001). In theory, these distinct approaches would effect legislation on full-face veils. 9 However, in practice, I seek to show how the niqab has inspired increasing similarities in their restrictions.
Previous differences in the management of religious diversity have been reflected in disparities in the outcomes of debates about religious symbols in French and Québécois public schools. The 2003 French Stasi Commission Report 10 that led to the 15 March 2004 law banning conspicuous religious signs in public schools and the 2006 Canadian Supreme Court decision in Multani v. Commission Scolaire Marguerite-Bourgeoys to allow a Montréal Sikh boy to wear his ceremonial kirpan to school differ in scope and focus but reveal contrary positions in their then-prohibition (in France) or acceptance (in Québec) of non-Christian visible religious signs. In recent French government commissions, the absence of religious symbols in schools ensures a common basis for citizenry so as to foster a spirit of vivre-ensemble (living together; see also Debré Commission Report, 2003: 42; Stasi Report, 2003: 22; Gerin Commission Report, 2010: 88). For many Québécois, the Multani Supreme Court decision by Justice Louise Charron revealed the beginnings of a rhetoric of “reasonable accommodation,” said to be a guiding principle in managing religious diversity in Canada (Beaman, 2012a: 2–3). 11
Despite these contrasting generalized approaches toward religious signs in public schools, in the 2010s, similar concern by both governments with the citizenship and the anti-sexualized comportment of full-face-veil-wearing women suggests a newfound shared restrictive handling of religion in the public sphere. In the 1990s, as the province of Québec’s non-Christian population grew and diversified, 12 the French term laïcité began to appear in government reports and recommendations (Milot, 2009: 31). If French and Québécois approaches to religious diversity have previously had significantly different goals, Bill 94 and the Conseil du Statut de la Femme Report now critique Québec’s current laïcité ouverte (open secularism) model for what is at stake for women’s bodies. Notable in the definition of laïcité ouverte in the Bouchard Taylor Report is its authorizing of religious signs in state institutions (Bouchard and Taylor, 2008: 45–47). This position has since sharpened as the Parti Québécois (PQ) announced a Charter of Québec Values in September 2013 that, among other aims, seeks to go further to ban all overt religious symbols among civil servants (CBC, 2013).
In both contexts, contemporarily, restrictions focus on full-face-covering veils. In France, following a six-month-long commission on the voile intégral and the submission of a commission report in January 2010, on 11 April 2011 the French National Assembly passed a law restricting their visibility. The law calls for €150 fines or citizenship classes (or both) for a woman caught covering her face. It carries far stiffer penalties for husbands, fathers or brothers convicted of forcing this veil on a woman. A €30,000 fine and a year in prison would be doubled if the victim were a minor (Le Monde, 2010). In Québec, on 24 March 2010, the government tabled Bill 94 to ban those who wear face-covering garments from accessing government-funded institutions and public services. Bill 94’s title stresses “guidelines” for accommodation and specifies that an individual must “show their face during the delivery of services [as] a general practice, and that if an accommodation involves an adaptation of that practice and reasons of security, communication or identification warrant it, the accommodation must be denied” (Bill 94, 2010). It proposes to limit accommodation. It does not name the full-face veil outright, but would limit niqab- and burqa-wearing women from accessing public services, including hospitals, universities, and public transportation (Toronto Star, 2010). Similar bills have not emerged in other provinces, but on the federal level, in December 2011, Jason Kenney, Canadian Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism, issued an immediate order to ban the wearing of niqabs at citizenship oath-taking ceremonies (Globe and Mail, 2011), a symbolic gesture that excludes full-face veils from the civilized “us” (see Beaman, 2012b, for her critique of Canadian honor-related violence in these boundary-making terms).
In sum, despite these historically different models and outcomes related to religious signs in public schools in the 2000s, and despite more widespread parliamentary disagreement in Québec on Bill 94, approaches in France and Québec to niqab-wearing women have dovetailed in the last decade. In addition, even if their presence is limited, in both cases there is popular support for their restriction. Polling data suggest that 70% of the French agree with a ban and 95% of Québécois agree with a ban as described in Bill 94 (see Blitz, 2010; Payton, 2010; Scott, 2010). 13 This widespread critique sheds light on why two cases of women wearing face-covering hijabs – Mme M.’s application for French citizenship and Naima Atef Ahmed’s desire to remain enrolled in government-funded language classes in Québec – received so little public support and led to the reports under examination. I now turn briefly to these cases and their resulting reports to argue how their articulations of secularism reflect a governmentalized discourse on the regulation of women’s bodies.
France’s “Mme M.” Case
On 27 June 2008, the citizenship request of “Mme M.” (alternatively known as Mme Machbour or Faizi Silmi) was denied by the French Conseil d’État 14 on the basis of Article 21 (4) of the Civil Code, which allows for applications to be refused on the basis of “insufficient assimilation, other than linguistic competence” (cited in Gerin Commission Report, 2010: 166). Mme M., aged 32, was born in Morocco and married a French national in 2000; they had three or four children (the Commissaire du Gouvernement and the New York Times present different figures) and lived in a suburb 30 minutes outside of Paris. She spoke French fluently. Mme M. adopted the niqab while in France. Her citizenship request was the first to be rejected on the grounds of her “radical” practice of Islam deemed incompatible with the “essential” French value of gender equality. While her niqab was not explicitly mentioned by the Conseil d’État, it became clear that the French state viewed her voile intégral (full-face-covering veil) as imparting radical religiosity. This philosophical and sartorial incompatibility with the state was determined based on personal interviews, government reports, and notes from social workers who visited and observed her and her family in their home.
Most significant among these documents was a report submitted to the Conseil d’État by the Commissaire du Gouvernement (Government Commissioner) Emmanuelle Prada-Bordenave. It details Mme M.’s soumission totale (total submission) to the men in her family (Le Monde, 2008b). According to Prada-Bordenave’s report, while she sometimes shopped alone, Mme M. most often went to the supermarket with her husband. Mme M. typically spent her mornings accompanying her children to school and cleaning her apartment and her afternoons visiting her father or father-in-law. It is also noted that she wore a niqab when she was interviewed at a municipal office (Prada-Bordenave, 2008: 3). The Government Commissioner concludes that Mme M.’s testimony revealed that the niqab was imposed by her husband upon her arrival in France and that she wore it, worrisomely, “out of custom rather than conviction” (Prada-Bordenave, 2008). Mme M.’s hijab is therefore deemed a reflection of gender inequality and not seen as genuinely expressed religious modesty. In addition, she and her husband are categorized as Salafists, a conservative group who have become shorthand in France for the most undesired form of radical Islam (Gerin Commission Report, 2010: 31; Selby, 2011a: 389). At the same time, in the same 2008 report, the Commissioner acknowledged that some of Mme M.’s actions nevertheless reflect positive “French” values, namely that her children attended a public school and that a male gynecologist delivered them (Prada-Bordenave, 2008).
Mme M. disagreed with this portrayal of herself as submissive and Salafi. In her rebuttal submission to the Conseil d’État, she argued that her continued links with her Moroccan culture of origin were not incompatible with French citizenship and that she did not dispute the country’s commitment to secularism. On the contrary, she stated that “French secularism is a chance to practice one’s religion” (Prada-Bordenave, 2008). In a New York Times interview Mme M. called herself an “orthodox” Muslim and asked, “But is that not my right?” (cited in Bennhold, 2008). Mme M.’s appeal was denied and the decision against her citizenship application has not changed. 15 The ruling received a great deal of support across the French political spectrum, as well as by NGOs, Muslim organizations and the public (Gabizon, 2008). The rejection of her request was the first time that a French court judged capacity for assimilation on the basis of a determination of religiously-based gender comportment in the “private” sphere (Mullally, 2010: 195; Vakulenko, 2009: 147). Indeed, as we will see in the third section, below, on the 2010 Gerin Commission Report, the Mme M. decision was precedent setting in limiting citizenship rights for niqabis in France (Gerin Commission Report, 2010: 161).
The Naima Atef Ahmed Case in Québec
In March 2010, the Québec Human Rights Commission received a complaint from a 29-year-old Egyptian pharmacist claiming religious rights violations. Naima Atef Ahmed (sometimes spelled Naema Atef Amed) had been expelled twice from her government-funded French classes for new immigrants, for wearing a niqab, first in March 2009 from the CÉGEP de Saint-Laurent and second in March 2010 from an unnamed French-language community center (CBC, 2010b; CBC, 2012). The director of the CÉGEP de St-Laurent stated that the school made a number of accommodations for Ms. Atef Ahmed, which included “allowing her to wear the niqab, giving her the front seat and letting her make her presentations from the rear of the classroom with her back to the class so that male students didn’t see her” ( Times of India, 2010). This agreement dissipated when, with a new session of classes and more male students, Atef Ahmed allegedly refused to sit with men around a U-shaped table for conversation skill development. When she asked for an alternative arrangement, the school found her request for accommodation “excessive,” saying that her mouth must remain visible for the teacher to assist with proper elocution (CBC, 2010a; Globe and Mail, 2010; Scott, 2010). Atef Ahmed, a permanent resident of Canada, lodged a complaint following the first expulsion. Atef Ahmed was given an ultimatum, supported by Québec Immigration Minister Yolande James, requiring her to show her face if she wished to continue taking language classes at the second community center. Atef Ahmed received little public support in her human rights violation case. Former Premier Jean Charest defended the second school’s decision on her expulsion and, prefacing Bill 94 and the Charter of Values, said, “people who expect to receive public services must show their face” (CBC, 2010a).
Unlike Mme M., who launched a formal appeal, Atef Ahmed fought this decision through the media. She spoke to Radio Canada, and seeking to underscore her agency, explained that for her, “Québécois society is a free society that allows me to dress as I’d like. Me, I see the niqab as clothing I’ve chosen to wear, that I want to wear and where I’m at ease. When a woman chooses to wear a dress, a skirt or pants, it’s her choice” (Radio-Canada, 2010). 16 She added that wearing a niqab did not reflect a desire for exclusionary politics: “If I didn’t want to interact, I would have stayed at home” (cited in Globe and Mail, 2010).
These two cases acted as catalysts for discussions that positioned full-face veils outside of national identity and citizenship, and they are both heavily referenced in anti-niqab policy. The next section points to how subsequent government reports position these women’s sartorial expressions as unacceptable to normative social standards of secularism and sexuality.
Secularized Sexuality in Government Documents
Face-covering hijabs have received a great deal of attention and little protection from Western governments. Thus far I have argued that in popular opinion and in policy there has been increasing convergence between the French Republican and Québécois models’ treatment of these garments. What is noteworthy in these contexts is the common rationale that undergirds their restriction: that the visibility of women’s bodies symbolizes their emancipation from traditional religious traditions, and their rights (Lefebvre and Beaman, 2012). To be fair, these sophisticated and lengthy documents are multifaceted. They generally propose four broad arguments against the legitimacy of full-face head coverings: (1) a denial of the equality of the sexes, (2) and of women’s freedom and dignity; (3) a rise in dangerous Islamism (and historically, Catholicism); and (4) concerns with security and neighborliness. Of these, I focus on how full-face veils are seen as “an attack on a woman’s dignity and on the assertion of her femininity” so that “her very existence is denied” (Assemblée Nationale, 2009: 4; see also Gerin Commission Report, 2010: 318). Religious accommodations are depicted as weakening women’s rights. This mapping is useful in order to then consider – through their critiqued counter-examples – which female-focused forms of sexuality are deemed acceptable.
The 2010 Gerin Commission Report
Since 2002, government-mandated commissions have been the preferred mechanism in France to debate and legislate on matters of religiosity and laïcité generally and on issues related to Islam specifically (Bowen, 2007, 2012; Selby, 2012: 192, n. 6). The 2010 Gerin Commission Report represents the first French commission devoted solely to the voile intégral. One month after the Mme M. decision, in July 2008 in the National Assembly, communist member André Gerin chronicled a rising number of women wearing full-face veils in his district, which he felt reflected a mounting tide of radical Islamism (see also, his 2007 book, Les ghettos de la république). He was not alone in this belief; support for Gerin’s characterization of a surge in fundamentalist Salafism through niqabs fell across the political spectrum (58 deputies across political parties co-signed resolution no. 1725 requesting a commission; see Assemblée Nationale, 2008), with some vocal members of the Muslim community agreeing, as well as academics and the general public (Selby, 2011a). Former President Nicolas Sarkozy was similarly explicit in his pejorative characterization of niqabs and burqas, noting in June 2009 that “we cannot accept women imprisoned behind a grid, cut off from society and deprived of identities” (cited in Gabizon, 2009). Sarkozy formed a 32-person commission, appointing André Gerin as its chair. 17 Over a six-month period, the commission interviewed 211 individuals who, combined, spoke for more than 90 hours on the subject.
The completed 658-page Gerin Commission Report was presented to the National Assembly on 26 January 2010 and includes the commission’s findings, its summary of interview transcripts and concluding recommendations. I examine two arguments made in the Report that reveal a latent idealized modern secular female body. Firstly, a number of scholars and activists who testified before the commission claim that full-face veils promote a sexual conservatism that precludes the wearing of skirts, the right to not be a virgin at marriage, and the ability to seduce, all of which are considered as symbols of women’s emancipation. Secondly, more generally, the Report contends that niqabs and burqas constitute an explicit rejection of French Republican sexual values.
In the first place, the Gerin Commission Report argues that a woman who wears a full-face veil is denied control of the visibility of her body and therefore of her sexual power. This loss is exemplified in a section of the Report that describes discussion of the 2009 film La journée de la jupe (“Skirt Day,” dir. Jean-Paul Lilienfeld). 18 The film chronicles the experiences of a high school teacher who, one day, violently responds to her suburban-living socio-economically disadvantaged male students, holding them hostage with one of their guns and forcing them to acknowledge her frustrations related to their comportment and sexual ethics. Discussion of this film in the Report is quite compelling (see also, Dorlin, 2010, and Wesselhoeft, 2011).
Noteworthy are those invited to speak. A prominent feminist philosopher at l’École Polytechnique, Elisabeth Badinter is a privileged interlocutor in the Gerin Commission and is one of the most cited persons in the Report (Dorlin, 2010: 432). 19 With reference to a classroom discussion of La journée de la jupe that she attended in a middle school in Paris’s socio-economically disfavoured 18th district, Badinter describes how few young women in the public school wear short skirts, attributing their reluctance to a Maghrebian influence on modesty (Gerin Commission Report, 2010: 334). Also speaking on this film is the president of the feminist organization Parole de Femmes (Women’s Speech), Olivia Cattan, who says that in the poor, largely non-white middle school where she teaches, there might be “one girl” who wears a skirt in a class of 20 students (Gerin Commission Report, 2010: 135). The inference in Badinter and Cattan’s statements is that the recent perceived paucity of skirts in public schools reflects a broader degenerating equality among women and men. As National Assembly member Danièle Hoffman-Rispal echoes in her testimony, “Skirt Day is not just a film, it’s every day” (Gerin Commission Report, 2010: 596).
This lengthy discussion cited in the Report poses the question: how is the anecdotal rarity of skirts among young women of Maghrebian origin in Parisian public schools relevant to commission hearings about the acceptability of full-face veils in the public sphere? Women’s Speech president Olivia Cattan makes this tenuous connection through her concern about the decline of skirt-wearers in her school and a rise in garçons manqués (tomboys), another problematic deviation from mainstream French expressions of femininity (see also Wesselhoeft, 2011: 402). Cattan argues that, like full-face hijabs, tomboyish-ness denies girls femininity and is particularly prominent among young women of immigrant origin. Cattan attributes cultivated boyishness to a defense mechanism against the harassment of the grand frères in suburban neighborhoods. 20 In other words, the female pant-wearing student characters in La journée de la jupe are not tomboys by choice. It is in this sartorial constraint informed and imposed by surrounding gender politics that the plight of tomboys is positioned by the writers of the Report as parallel to fully-veiled women in France. Both are forced by their backward and conservative milieus to present themselves in ways that deny their femininity.
In addition, according to a number of individuals interviewed by the Commission, expressions of sexuality among full-face-hijab wearers impose a second undesirable restraint for women: that a woman must be a virgin at the time of marriage. Badinter makes this linkage in her testimony (Gerin Commission Report, 2010: 97) as does Sihem Habchi, president of Ni Putes, Ni Soumises (NPNS; “Neither Whores Nor Submissives”), a polemical banlieue-focused feminist organization that has emphasized the rights of second-generation young women of North African origin and that, in 2003, supported restrictions on conspicuous religious signs in public schools. Habchi notes that with niqabs:
we no longer have self-control; our daily lives become routinized by a [religious] schedule, and respect for a prescribed dress code when the skirt is banned and where, ultimately, sexuality is controlled and gauged via a sacrosanct virginity […] Rumors about “easy” girls is another form of pressure: only the wearing of a veil guarantees respect. (Gerin Commission Report, 2010: 98)
For the president of NPNS, full-face veils entail a loss of control of a woman’s self, time, dress, and hymen. In her audition before the Commission on 9 September 2009, Habchi identifies herself as a Muslim of Algerian origin and describes a “new feminist fight” (Gerin Commission Report, 2010: 319) against burqas and niqabs, citing the case of Karima, whose husband’s abusiveness culminated in forcing her to wear a burqa, which Habchi calls “the highest degree of chauvinist oppression” (Gerin Commission Report, 2010: 328). While a gesture not cited in the Report, French scholar Sylvie Tissot notes (2011: 45) that when Habchi declared before the Commission that she was not ashamed of her body, she removed her jacket to reveal bare shoulders. Applause from the panel clearly indicated approval of the visibility of her body and accord with the performativity of undressing (for a similar example of dramatized exposed shoulders in a televised debate on the 2004 veil law, see Fernando, 2013: 150).
A last way in which sexuality is curtailed by full-face veils according to the Gerin Commission Report is how they reflect a form of subservient gender complementarity that denies women expressions of seduction (Gerin Commission Report, 2010: 38, 431). This sexual curtailment is best exemplified in the testimony of a former minister and mayor of Nancy, André Rossinot. In his submission, Rossinot rhetorically questions the niqab’s symbolism and concludes that it implies a gender system wherein a woman is the property of her husband, her father, her son or her brother and that “when women do not have control of their image, they are not free to show themselves, to exist on the outside, even less to seduce” (my emphasis; Gerin Commission Report, 2010: 110). For Rossinot, the niqab impedes a woman’s ability to seduce or to outwardly perform an undefined form of sexuality. He causally links this undesirability of feminine sexuality to arranged and forced marriages (2010: 110), which impede an idealized heteronormative French female socio-sexual freedom (see also, Ticktin, 2008, and Fernando, 2013, on this point). The next section further considers how the exclusion of the niqab sets male desire as the basis for feminine identity. For Rossinot, full-face veils symbolize a loss of sexual power in that they curtail women’s ability (and responsibility) to seduce men.
In the second place, interlocutors in the commission position the “naked” face as a visual enactment of French Republican values. In a philosophical Levinas-informed discussion about neighborliness and security (Gerin Commission Report, 2010: 116–118), obstruction of a woman’s face is deemed as denying her accessibility to full membership in Western civilization. In her testimony before the commission, Nadeije Laneyrie-Dagen, a history of art professor at the École normale supérieure, notes how in “our” Western societies the face is the part of the body that carries the individual’s soul, reason and personality: “for us [in France], it’s a secular cultural heritage [to see the face]” (Gerin Commission Report, 2010: 590). In her testimony, Laneyrie-Dagen traces the centrality and nobility of the nudity of the human face through Greek and Roman history as a reflection of citizenship and a symbol of belonging. She acknowledges that the female face is socialized and masked through social codes and cosmetics (2010: 511), but says that its visibility is necessary to ensure mixité – the comingling of men and women – a core Republican value. Laneyrie-Dagen suggests that the covered face is not part of a Western cultural heritage. The fully-veiled woman rejects the country’s secular “heritage.” On this point we can note again how interlocutors who might argue for the religious freedom to express religiosity are not interviewed, nor are women who wear niqabs.
In this reading of the Gerin Commission Report through the lens of its underlying concern for female sexual equality, I have sought to show how it promotes a secularized and sexualized female body. This discourse powerfully excludes full-face-veil wearers, who are said, like tomboys, to deny femininity and promote virginity and unagentic non-seduction. The promoted female sexuality is, in contrast, expressed through the wearing of skirts, in sexual availability, in the responsibility to choose one’s husband, and in ensuring the Republican value of mixité with a “naked” face. 21
Québécois Injunctions against Full-face-covering Veils
I now turn to how female sexuality is attended to and constructed in the Québécois documents on the full-face veil. Bill 94 was introduced to the National Assembly by the then-Minister of Justice Kathleen Weil on 24 March 2010 in response to the allegedly unreasonable requests for special accommodation made by the aforementioned Naima Atef Ahmed in a French language class for new immigrants. While the parliamentary debates focus on it almost exclusively, the Bill itself does not explicitly name the full-face veil. It describes “guidelines governing accommodation requests” that would have a disproportionate impact on women who wear the niqab (Fournier and See, 2012: 63). Given the brevity of the Bill, I also examine a 161-page February 2011 report from the government-funded Conseil du Statut de la Femme (CSF), created in 1973 to defend women’s rights in the province (CSF Report, 2011). This document, “Affirming secularism, a step toward real equality between men and women,” endorses the Bill’s importance with examples from Québec’s historical relationship with the Catholic Church; unlike the Gerin Commission Report it does not solely focus on full-face veils. Yet, despite this careful couching, the timing of the CSF Report makes its target clear. This full-face veil focus in Québec is also evident in provincial parliamentary debates, where clause 6, which delineates that the entire face must be visible in the provision or imparting of government services, is most discussed. Bill 94 would apply to institutions providing educational, health and social services, child care, and so on.
Despite pervasive popular support, unlike in France, the initial vote on Bill 94 was far from unanimous. Fifty-six members voted for, twenty-nine against and two members abstained. In addition, examination of the briefs submitted related to the Bill from private citizens, municipal officials, labor unions, feminist activist groups, civil rights organizations, and religious rights organizations, reveals that there were 19 that supported it, 24 that were opposed, and 23 that come down neither for nor against the Bill, but rather contribute more nuanced positions and general thoughts (Conway, 2012). 22 Dissent emerged to different degrees among feminist organizations. For instance, following the Parti Québécois (PQ), the Conseil du statut de la femme supported restricting all religious signs in the context of public services but expressed concern that in focusing on those who receive these services and not on those who administer them, full-face-veil-wearing women would be overly stigmatized. There is, in sum, far more debate in Québec than in France about whether and how to restrict full-face-covering veils.
The version of secularity developed in the the Conseil du Statut de la Femme Report emphasizes women’s rights as the reason to bar all conspicuous religious signs in Québec, including the niqab. In this overarching argument, the CSF document echoes the Gerin Commission Report in equating secularism with women’s rights, and cites the 2004 French Stasi Commission Report on how secularism can no longer be conceived without a direct link with the “equality principle between the sexes” (CSF Report, 2011: 50). In black and white terms, the Report strongly critiques Canadian multiculturalism as threatening this laïque vision of gender equality, referencing literature (such as Moller-Okin, 1999) that argues that the rights of women are denied by multicultural protections. Very starkly, it states that “Québec must make a choice” because religious accommodation requests like Naima Atef Ahmed’s are “fragilizing women’s dignity and rights and are mobilized to heighten fundamentalism and the religious right” (CSF Report, 2011: 44; see a similar statement in the Gerin Commission Report, 2010: 318). Problematic, it says, is that Québec’s former model of laïcité ouverte, which allows for accommodations, neither protects women’s rights nor creates social cohesion. Examples demonstrating problems with the contemporary application of open secularism are almost exclusively confined to Muslims and include family law arbitration related to Sharia (when faith-based arbitration was available to all religious traditions in Ontario), so-called honor killings, and whether one can testify in court with a full-face hijab (CSF Report, 2011: 6). Like in the parliamentary debates for Bill 94, the Report also cites the 2009 Alberta v. Hutterian Brethren of Wilson Colony Supreme Court decision as a positive example of the limits of the discourse of religious accommodation, 23 and the 2006 Multani Supreme Court decision as not reflecting Québec’s context. 24
The CSF document thus states plainly that full-face veils reflect a multiculturalist open secularism that “neglects the citizenship project and engenders tensions and fragmentations within the population” (45) and weakens the rights of women in the province. For young women who wear hijabs, this laïcité ouverte is dangerous because it is “incapable of countering the instrumentalisation of faith and is susceptible to participate in the expansion of political extremist movements” (CSF Report, 2011: 75). Women’s clothing choices can therefore serve to mobilize dangerous extremism, even if unbeknownst to their wearers. The Report suggests that a more restrictive interculturalism model better protects the identity and heritage of Québécois society while at the same time it constructs a citizenship that is enriched by “foreign cultures” (2011: 81) and promotes an “inclusive feminism” (2011: 9).
The CSF Report is not as specific in detailing the visual parameters around acceptable normative female sexuality as the Gerin Commission Report. It more generally suggests that women’s faces must be bare and their bodies a-religious in order to be “neutral” (CSF Report, 2011: 12). An a-religious body enables a woman’s right to vote, her right to divorce, her abortion rights and so on (2011: 40, 54). The inference is that full-face veils impede these progresses. To this end, the CSF Report cites Djemila Benhabib, a writer of Algerian origin who has lobbied against “fascist and totalitarian” political Islam
25
and unsuccessfully ran in the 2012 provincial election as a member of the PQ. Benhabib testified against visible signs of Islam in Québec in the parliamentary debates on Bill 94 on 26 November 2010, noting anecdotally how women in a suburb of Lyon, France, and in Belgium, are paid by extremists to wear full-face veils in defiance of the state. For Benhabib, encroaching fundamentalism is omnipresent without legislation: to not restrict these veils through Bill 94 is tantamount to accepting radical political Islam:
Must the province of Québec legitimize, validate or make commonplace the norms mobilized by Islamists, like the wearing of the Islamic headscarf, whether it completely or partially covers the face or the body, and which means that each woman is a temptress and each man a predator? I certainly hope not. (Assemblée Nationale Québec, 2011b)
Benhabib’s 2009 autobiographical book on Islam and extremism, Ma Vie à Contre Coran (“My Life Against the Current/Qur’an”), proved important in the French restriction on full-face veils, as well (see Selby, 2011a). Benhabib has become a champion for this discourse of secularism, winning the inaugural 2012 international prize for laïcité from the French Haut conseil à l’intégration (High Council of Integration, 2012). Her anti-Islamist perspectives are thus well known in both French and Québécois anti-veil discourses and cited by feminists who position secularism as a way to protect against the dangerous political incursions of Islamism that she describes.
In the Québécois discussion, a “neutral” dress code and naked face act as protections against encroaching androcentric religious traditions. In this context the best way to ensure that women’s rights are protected is to abolish influence of religious traditions in the public sphere, initially related to Catholicism and contemporarily exemplified by niqabs. The covered female body evokes patriarchal religious control. This CSF document goes much further than Bill 94 in documenting the dangers of the so-called open secular model that allows for incursions of dangerous religiosity upon women’s bodies. Solange Lefebvre and Lori G. Beaman note (2012: 99) that the 2011 document reflects a more radical position against all religious language than the organization has iterated to date.
Government reports in France and Québec focus on full-face veils and seek to limit their influence through legal regulations. In describing the unacceptability of full-face veils, this discourse also tells us something about how laïcité should look. In the French context these prescriptions related to female sexuality are more overt and have received almost unanimous government support. The Québécois documents are less prescriptive but nevertheless argue that the female body must be completely devoid of religious signs if she is to be a full citizen. In this section I have argued that the secular discourses present in these Reports can tell us about what exterior and performative elements are implicitly required by the State.
Unveiling Sexuality in Secular Discourses
Expanding on Talal Asad's (2003) and Michael Warner’s (2008) suggestion that secularisms have their own practices and sensoriums, I have argued that while these reports in France and Québec tell us a great deal about perceptions of the full-face veil, they also reveal a programmatic account of women’s sexuality. Of course, governmental regulation of women’s bodies is not new: codes of comportment and dress that express national belonging have been encoded in law and policy for centuries. 26 With reference to the two niqab cases in the second section, above, and the government reports described in the third section, I suggest that this regulatory function echoes accounts of governmentality (Foucault, 1980, 1988; Guénif-Souilamas, 2006) and Joan Wallach Scott’s (2011) discussion of how markers of sexual difference, reified through the performance of seduction, undergird French nationalism. Michel Foucault describes how the regulation of dress and sexuality by the state acts as a mechanism to produce ideal citizens. Sarah Bracke and Nadia Fadil (2012: 42) usefully note the wide-ranging techniques and organized practices in this purview. Governmentality focuses on sexuality. As Foucault notes, “sexuality represents the precise point where the disciplinary and the regulatory, the body and the population, are articulated” (2003: 252). Extending Scott’s theory to the Québécois context, we can see how articulations of sexual difference are similarly unsettled through the visibility of full-face veils. According to the 2008 Bouchard Taylor Report, the province’s identity is encompassed by ill-defined gender equality and language rights (2008: 25). As in France, full-face veils are framed as disturbing the logic of women’s agency by making them politically and sexually inaccessible.
One useful way to consider this form of institutional and regulatory control that goes further than Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of habitus is by turning to what Foucault calls biopower, or the delineation of elements of power wielded over populations to regulate and control them. Foucault argues that much of this governance relates to the moralizing of sexuality as a means of population control (1992: 252). If a person or group does not behave or perform properly, they are excluded from the rights and freedoms granted to citizens. Biopower effectively aligns the moral positions of citizens with the maintenance of state power. The State has a clear interest in shaping “acceptable” sexuality across public and private spheres as a central component in the production of its citizens.
Nacira Guénif-Souilamas similarly explores the linkages between sexuality and citizenship in contemporary France, and shows how power politics shape acceptability:
A French citizen [un Français] cannot be a sexual deviant […] administrative documents destined for [citizenship] candidates and posted in police stations are unequivocal: France protects, professes and promotes equal rights between men and women and condemns all violence toward women. All those who fall short of this often shifting definition of the equality of the sexes are real or potential deviants. (2006: 19)
Guénif-Souilamas also finds that state institutions implicitly frame immigrant sexual deviancy as undesirable (see also, Fassin, 2010: 512, on how definitions of Frenchness today invoke references to sexual liberty and equality). The bon Français is assimilated into and reflects this form of “appropriate” sexual civility. In this way, Mme M. transgressed the valeurs essentielles (essential values) of Frenchness: in wearing a niqab, allegedly at the request of her husband, her outward expression of sexuality was normatively unacceptable. The French government has intervened in other cases related to outward expressions of Muslim family life and sexuality in virginity cases (see Fernando, 2013; Le Monde, 2008; Surkis, 2010), and polygamy (Selby, 2013), revealing a continued postcolonial concern for visible marriage practices in the Republic. This control of properly presented sexuality is articulated less forthrightly in Québec, but there are resonances in the way the PQ has fashioned Québécois heritage (Montgomery, 2012) in its proposed 2013 Charter of Québec Values, which includes specific formulations on dress.
In other words, related to Foucault’s and Guénif-Souilamas’ interpretations of governmentality, the pronounced exclusion of full-face veils in France and Québec affirms a compulsory visibility and ubiquity of women’s faces. These “naked” – while remaining socialized and cosmeticized – faces promote a seductivity that, in turn, ensures normative heterosexual relationships and citizens. In her examination of expressions of nationhood at France’s bicentennial anniversary, Joan Wallach Scott (2011: 118) astutely argues that French national identity has historically hinged on sexual gallantry. Far from benign romance, Scott shows how this celebration of seduction naturalizes and a-historicizes sexual inequalities in France so that gender-based conflict and coercion are suppressed. 27 Full-face veils problematically interrupt fostered female coquettishness, and more generally disqualify their wearers from Frenchness in mismanaging sexual difference (Scott, 2011: 138). Recall Rossinot’s testimony before the Gerin Commission, where he conveyed his dismay that the full-face veil impedes seduction. The heterosexist undercurrent to this rationale restricting full-face veils positions a woman’s body as necessarily visibly available for the seduction of a future husband. Her naked face confirms her marriageability and her full membership in the Republic (see Scott, 2007: 158, for discussion on similar rhetoric in the 2003 Stasi Commission Report). A woman’s body’s visibility signals her availability.
The Québécois discussions surrounding the proposed Bill 94 are not as emphatic, and there has been no explicit concern about a loss of seductiveness. Nevertheless, full-face veils are similarly depicted as denying women’s equality – not only by concealing their faces, but also because there is a correlation with the impediment of women’s rights to vote, to divorce, and to seek an abortion. 28 Bill 94 is therefore an expression of biopower in that it seeks to obstruct niqab wearers from accessing public services, and in so doing, symbolically excludes them from full social citizenship. In the Conseil du Statut de la Femme Report, full-face veils are framed as symbols of a menacing (and historically familiar) patriarchal religious imposition. Unlike other nation states that treat full-face veils solely as reflecting political Islam (like Catalunya, Spain), or as security breaches in shielding the identities of wearers (like Italy and the Netherlands), these French and Québécois documents carefully promote a version of secularism that details surprisingly programmatic information about the appropriate presentation of women’s bodies in the public sphere.
Conclusions
In this paper I have suggested that by seeking to remove clothing that is deemed an impediment to women’s expressions of self and of sexual liberty, these recent regulations and explanations act as latent prescriptions of women’s sexuality. French and Québécois governments have expended a great deal of time, energy, and public funds to rationalize the removal of these garments from the public sphere. Reports estimate that there may be up to 1,900 women wearing full-face-covering veils in France (another reliable report suggested 347, see Le Figaro, 2009; Tissot, 2011: 40) and 24–90 women in Québec (Patriquin and Gillis, 2010). Given their quantitative insignificance, we must ask: Why? Although there has been more dissent within the Québécois legislature about the legitimacy of these constraints, and even if a negligible number of women wear these garments, niqabs and burqas are almost universally vilified and most citizens agree that some form of restriction is warranted. In conclusion, it may be helpful to ask a different question: Beyond the public debates, commissions, and legal recommendations, what else has this powerful rhetoric of necessary feminized sexual visibility accomplished in France and Québec?
An asymmetrical discourse sharply delineating undesirable bodies allows French and Québécois governments to easily position themselves as defenders of women’s rights. This legislation bolsters their progressiveness and liberalness without addressing the more systematic issues that affect women, like poverty, violence, wage parity, and so on. In contrast to Mme M. and Naima Atef Ahmed, unveiled women are “liberated.” This essentializing is noteworthy, as is the racialization of the discourse. Mme M. and Atef Ahmed were extrapolated in government discussions to represent all women who cover their faces, reinforcing what Chandra Mohanty calls the sexually constrained “third-world woman” who is often uniformly produced in Western (feminist) texts (1988: 65; see a similar point made by Zine, 2012: 12).
This activism against niqab use tends to solely stress sexism among racialized men: their wives and sisters are the victims of this form of sexism, and niqab-wearers reflect the most ostentatious expression of this domination. 29 Statistics that reveal domestic violence across socio-economic and ethnic groups are rarely mentioned (see Tissot, 2011: 41; Beaman, 2012b), nor are social issues like financial crises and the rising unemployment rate that disproportionately affects Muslims (Collectif Contre l’Islamophobie en France, 2010: 4). In France (no corresponding data are available for Québec), the Minister of the Interior estimated that one-quarter of the 1,900 women who wear full-face veils are converts (Gerin Commission Report, 2010: 24–29). Anecdotally, the three women I met in the Parisian suburb where I have conducted fieldwork since 2004 are Caucasian French-born converts. Yet, France- and Québec-born women are typically not included in attempts to ensure secularism. When Eric Besson, then French minister of immigration, integration, and national identity, argued before the Gerin Commission that the voile intégral is “proof of insufficient integration into French society, which creates an obstacle toward the attainment of French nationality” (Gerin Commission Report, 2010: 166, 621), he assumed that most of its wearers are immigrants.
The power relations undergirding these prohibitions should give us pause to consider what is unsaid. Unveiling is underpinned by essentialisms and racism, which arguably are equally worthy of investigation. Relying on paternalistic neo-Orientalist tropes offers an expedient means to represent “Muslim” sexuality as unnatural and oppressive, while successfully dismissing the latent sexualization of French and Québécois women through these discourses. Public opinion has not expressed concern about how these commissions and laws have overtly sexualized women in pushing to “protect” them. The social and physical dispositions that are inherently linked to these restrictions should be better clarified in these commissions and reports: must women have a-religious bodies that wear skirts, are non-virgins, and are seductive, to be granted full civic membership?