Gendered Citizenship Seen Through French Legal Bans on Muslim Women’s Coverings

In the last decade, Muslim women’s sartorial practices such as covering the hair and face-veiling have become the subject of heated discussion across Europe, and several countries have envisaged or already implemented legal measures to regulate it. My paper will focus on the dilemmas involved in efforts to “regulate religion” through the law. I am interested in uncovering the productive ‘friction’ (Tsing 2005) generated in encounters between particular legal regimes, local/national histories of secularism, and the universalising rhetoric of religious rights. After a decade of heated debate, a ban on Muslim headscarves and other "ostentatious" religious symbols at state schools was introduced in France in 2004, and a further ban on face-veiling went into force in 2011. Taking the French case as a point of departure, the paper discusses how various religious and secular norms, sensibilities and affects related to “gender” and “sexuality”, manifest themselves in debates surrounding legal initiatives to regulate Muslim women’s sartorial practices. Analysing these debates, and how Muslim women embrace, resist or subvert legal efforts to regulate sartorial practices, helps us throw light on how ‘gendered citizenship’ is (re)shaped, debated and practiced in the contemporary French context.