Dilemma of French Muslims

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I really don't see the difference for Muslim between living under a aggressive secular state like France or living in other European states, with their official or semi-official religion. For a Muslim for who the issue means a lot, it's just as bad to live in either states.

That really doesn't follow. All those other countries don't have the same policies or cultures that France does. An officially Protestant country with tepid treatment of public expression of other religions is most certainly not just as bad as an officially secular country with hostile treatment of public expression of almost any religion, especially if said hostility is selectively deployed against religious minorities.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Banning something like the burqa....is not something anyone in a first world democracy should be worried about.  

Why not?

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Banning something like the burqa....is not something anyone in a first world democracy should be worried about. 

Why not?

A number of reasons, but chiefly two:

It's easily among the greatest and most sinister symbols of oppression in the modern world.

I'm not sure I'm willing to concede that that's a legitimate reason, mainly because I'm not sure whether or not I'm willing to concede that it's semiotically accurate.

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That is definitely a legitimate reason, and can be argued for.

It should however be remembered that a lot of the people clamoring for these bans want them to extend not only to burqas but to niqabs and in some cases even hijabs as well, banning which would be not only clearly anti-Muslim but also arguably anti-feminist.

In any case, what was being argued wasn't that this would be potentially good and reasonable policy--which, again, can be argued for--but that nobody should have any reason to be skeptical of it, which I think is ridiculous.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

The first thing to note about the hijab and niqab is that it often (not always, perhaps not even most of the time) genuinely is a personal choice to wear one, as opposed to the burqa, of which to the best of my knowledge that's (outside already extraordinarily conservative Muslim countries) very seldom the case. The second thing to note is that the reason why many women choose to do so--this is something that Muslim women I know have told me personally--is feminist, or at least proto-feminist since this rationale wasn't originally developed in cultures in which feminism was conceptually present, in that it's concerned with averting or deflecting the male gaze (whether this is the effect that it has is a separate question). This isn't a form of feminism for which I expect the sex-positive liberal feminists of Atlas Forum to have much sympathy, but it is a feminist idea nonetheless.

This isn't to say that wearing it is generally 'a feminist choice' (and yes, I do think that there are such things as feminist choices and non-feminist choices, which is why I didn't just end this post after the first sentence), but it is to say that prohibiting it would be removing what is a feminist choice for many people. Again, what's being discussed here isn't just discouraging certain types of dress, or opposing or lamenting their intrusion into cultural spheres in which they weren't previously present, it's banning them. Prohibiting them from being worn under penalty of law. In general I think that passing laws about how women can and cannot dress should be presumed anti-feminist. Which obviously means that requiring hijab or niqab is also anti-feminist, indeed much more obviously so.

Impeding communication especially for children and the hard-of-hearing is a genuinely good reason to consider wearing facial coverings a bad idea, but the idea that they're, in other ways, 'anti-human' would seem to rely on assumptions about what is and isn't characteristic of 'humanity' that it does not strike me as rational to expect everybody in a pluralistic society to share. Especially since there are also issues of post-colonial identity involved.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

NOTE TO POSTERS WHO ACCUSE ME OF 'WALKING BACK' THINGS I SAY: I AM GOING TO BE MODIFYING MY POSITION ON A POLITICAL ISSUE IN THIS POST BECAUSE OTHER POSTERS HAVE CONVINCED ME THAT AN ASPECT OR ASPECTS OF MY PREVIOUS POSITION WAS OR WERE BASED ON INCOMPLETE INFORMATION AND/OR FAULTY MORALS.

When grouping traditional Muslim female dress it should be burqa/niqab and hijab. The hijab is not destroying the individuality of the person in any way, whereas the two other clothings do. A woman wearing a hijab is still fully recognizable as an individual with facial expressions and mimc.

You're right, this is a much better distinction to draw. Although I should point out that the mental image of the garment that I had in mind when I was using the word 'niqab' in the above post was what's apparently called the 'half-niqab', which looks sort of like a one-hole ski mask, as opposed to the full niqab which covers just as much of the face as a burqa does.

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I agree with you--I find hijab more or less completely unobjectionable but full niqab uncanny and difficult to interpret as potentially 'feminist' no matter how hard I try--I'm just not willing to trust that aversion to the point of making public policy based on it. (Strong social and cultural discouragement, however, absolutely!) '[N]o matter how the women wearing it interpret it themselves' is...I guess in principle it shouldn't be hard for me to accept that, because I've made the same argument about other issues, but in this particular case I just have trouble being comfortable with it. Assuming that the source of that discomfort could be identified and alleviated, I guess I could be convinced to accept the bona fides of the laws about this sort of thing that have been passed in France and Belgium and the Netherlands (although they'd be blatantly unconstitutional in the United States, and although fining the women wearing the clothing strikes me as a weird enforcement mechanism if the rationale for the ban is liberal and feminist rather than discriminatory. Totally support fining people who force others to wear face coverings and throwing them in the slammer to cool their heels for a year, though), but I'd still find the laws that obtain in Turkey and apparently also used to obtain in Tunisia under Ben Ali, and those that were proposed in Quebec a couple of years ago, completely unacceptable and morally wrong.

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There were two things that I came up with in response to this and I can't decide which I'd rather say, so I'll just present them both.

1: I understand why you'd say this, and I don't think it's an ipso facto racist argument, but it still makes me uncomfortable--call it American chauvinism, I guess.
2: That doesn't sound morally right, but I don't know enough about Europe to dispute it.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Madeleine, I'm generally in agreement with your position, but you lost me with this:

The second thing to note is that the reason why many women choose to do so--this is something that Muslim women I know have told me personally--is feminist, or at least proto-feminist since this rationale wasn't originally developed in cultures in which feminism was conceptually present, in that it's concerned with averting or deflecting the male gaze (whether this is the effect that it has is a separate question). This isn't a form of feminism for which I expect the sex-positive liberal feminists of Atlas Forum to have much sympathy, but it is a feminist idea nonetheless.

As a non-"sex-positive" feminist, I have just say that I honestly can't believe you're actually making that argument. Your knowledge of feminist theory probably surpasses mine, so please enlighten me if there's something I'm missing, but right now I'm really confused.

This isn't my own argument; I made a deliberate choice to uncritically parrot it from the Muslim feminist acquaintances I initially heard it from.

I'll try to defend it from my own feminist perspective, but since I'm actually pretty skeptical of it personally (the deciding factor in my own opinions on this is the religious liberty side of things, not the ostensibly-feminist side of things), I might not do the best job of it.

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The idea, as I understand it, is that consciously adopting it as an aversive or diversionary mechanism is a feminist choice relative to the most obvious or easiest perceived alternatives, not that it's a feminist choice in that it represents a positive movement towards a feminist society (essentially, that it prevents losses rather than making or solidifying gains). It's, yes, difficult to the point of absurdity to argue that much of anything that focuses on, essentially, employing smoke and mirrors to make the male gaze go somewhere else (see below for my take on the very unfortunate likely accidental outcome of this; it's the second of a list of three objections to the argument that I'm about to make next) could possibly constitute an actual amelioration of the real problem.

There's also--and I personally think this is a more convincing argument than what I outlined in the first sentence of the preceding paragraph, although it still has by my count three noteworthy flaws, the second of which in particular is really hard to get past--a certain aggressiveness inherent in consciously doing something to circumscribe one's being from public availability or availability to men. This could be understood as a form of separatist feminism, even. There's an entire genre of Japanese Buddhist anecdotes about women who become nuns (and thus shave their heads) or dress in offputting and outrageous manners or, in extreme cases, scar themselves in order to make themselves as unappealing to men as humanly possible.

The flaws in this argument are:

1. It might not actually succeed in making one less appealing to men.
2. If it does succeed, that male gaze is just going to go elsewhere, so this essentially becomes a form of the 'if he's going to rape somebody, make sure it's somebody else' sensibility, which is an unbelievably terrible outcome.
3. Most feminists who are also devout Muslims would probably not classify themselves as separatist feminists anyway.

It's not hard to imagine a way of applying this theory that avoids these problems, but since that way involves enormous numbers of people simultaneously deciding to adopt the dress code of a minority religion as an act of organized political defiance, it's probably best not to hold our breaths.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

In my view, a "feminist act" refers to an act that either constitutes a symbolic challenge to patriarchy (which implies active rejection of the patriarchal system rather than merely coping with it) or actively contributes to undermine patriarchy's material or ideological foundations.

I do have a lot of sympathy for the notion that the general principle of using sartorial choices to offend male sensibilities or male entitlement and to deflect or confuse the male gaze can, in fact, constitute just such a symbolic challenge. I'm just not sure that this is in fact a case of that for most people. (I know anecdotally that for at least a few women it is but the plural of anecdote is not et cetera.)

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

In my view, a "feminist act" refers to an act that either constitutes a symbolic challenge to patriarchy (which implies active rejection of the patriarchal system rather than merely coping with it) or actively contributes to undermine patriarchy's material or ideological foundations.

I do have a lot of sympathy for the notion that the general principle of using sartorial choices to offend male sensibilities or male entitlement and to deflect or confuse the male gaze can, in fact, constitute just such a symbolic challenge. I'm just not sure that this is in fact a case of that for most people. (I know anecdotally that for at least a few women it is but the plural of anecdote is not et cetera.)

What I dislike about that is that women are making as assumption that the man whose gaze they want to avoid has any interest in her, or indeed any woman at all. If you catch my drift Which is in itself nothing more than an extension of patriarchal thinking.

I think there was a discussion in some school of fiqh or another recently about whether or not gay or asexual men could be treated the same as relatives for these purposes. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall for that conversation.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

In my view, a "feminist act" refers to an act that either constitutes a symbolic challenge to patriarchy (which implies active rejection of the patriarchal system rather than merely coping with it) or actively contributes to undermine patriarchy's material or ideological foundations.

I do have a lot of sympathy for the notion that the general principle of using sartorial choices to offend male sensibilities or male entitlement and to deflect or confuse the male gaze can, in fact, constitute just such a symbolic challenge. I'm just not sure that this is in fact a case of that for most people. (I know anecdotally that for at least a few women it is but the plural of anecdote is not et cetera.)

That's an idea I personally have a hard time to swallow, considering my understanding of how patriarchy works. In my understanding, the objectification of women goes hand in hand with the obsession with "modesty", they are two sides of the same coin. On the one hand, there's the idea that women are sexual commodity for men to use, and on the opposite side, the idea that women should stay chaste and preserve themselves from men. I think that is roughly what is meant with the "madonna/whore complex". The genius of patriarchy, so to speak, is that it invented both a thesis and an antithesis, that it has framed the debate in such a way that i can draw strength from both sides of it. Adhering to one side of it to counter the other one strikes me as a futile attempt, at least at the symbolic and ideological level (again, I'm not claiming that it cannot work in certain practical situations).

I've been making a conscious effort to become more praxis-oriented in my understanding of feminism lately, so maybe that's where our difference of opinion on this comes from.