Les féminismes, le voile et la laïcité à la française

Abstract

The Islamic veil (hijab) has been prominent in the media and political discussion in France since 1989 and the first “veil affair”; this has intensified since 2003 and the law on wearing religious signs at school. As such it is a condensed version of political significations and reveals those tensions internal to feminism which are reticent to, or opposed to, the inclusion in their discourse and practice of any consideration relating to the close link between colonial history on one hand, and the struggles and definitions of feminism on the other. The veil has de facto been constructed as an anomaly within the Republic, a religious sign which more generally speaking comes up against the common sense of equality of the sexes and secularism as constitutive values of the West. This article does not dwell on the meaning of the veil—polysemous as it may well be (Mahmood, 2009; Bouyahia and Samia, 2013)—but on the aspects of public space, and in particular of feminism (Dot-Pouillard, 2007), revealed by the veil since 1989. In the first case the tensions revealed have heightened with the rise in the assertions of a feminism, described as “decolonial”, expressed by women from the ethnic and cultural minorities (women referred to as “racialised”) and who demand an off-centre model for liberation of women. In the second case, we witness the political opportunism revealed by the politicisation of the hijab and its constitution as an object conducive to the generation of phobias which acts as a new “social cement” (Antonio Gramsci quoted in Hall, 2008) for the working classes fragmented and weakened by the ending of models of national sovereignty and social and economic protectionism.

Keywords

• Islam
• feminisms
• secularism
• Afro-feminism
• decolonial feminism