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Since the end of the sixteenth century, the "putdng into discourse of sex,"
far from undergoing a process of restriction, on the contrary has been
subjected to a mechanism of increasing incitement, , , , The will to knowl-
edge has not come to a halt in the face of a taboo that must not be lifted, but
has persisted in consdtuting , , , a science of sexuality,
Michel Foucault (1978, 12)
\Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2014, vol, 39, no, 3]
2014 by The University of Chicago, All rights reserved. 0097-9740/2014/3903-0011$10,00
686 I Fernando
^ For an incisive reading of the marriage annulment case, see Surkis (2010).
* My account and subsequent analysis of the Demiad case is based on media reports and
interviews that I conducted with Horia Demiad in 2011. I have used pseudonyms for the
names of other nonpublic figures who were interlocutors during my fieldwork, conducted in
Paris between 2002 and 2004 and again more sporadically between 2006 and 2011.
SIGNS Spring 2014 I 687
' I do not take religion as antitlietical to the secular but rather formed within it. Proper
rehgionthat which is anchored by the centrahty of belief and manifests either in the pri-
vate sphere or in designated religious sites like the mosque or churchis already secular.
Thus, the secular Muslim subject can be either nonreligious (a "cultural Muslim") or properly
rehgious (she who practices religion in private). In opposition to the secular Muslim stands
"the fundamentalist" (she who actively flouts public/private boundaries) or the "traditional
Muslim" (she who has not yet learned to privatize her religious life).
' Ruth Mas (2006) also describes how the secular state compels the secular Muslim sub-
ject, though she uses the term "compulsion" as a synonym for subjectivation or interpellation
(i.e., subject formation within the constraint of norms). I am interested in the specific com-
pulsions to hide and to reveal, and I use this particular term purposeiUy to invoke its dual
sense of external force and deontic desire.
SIGNS Spring 2014 I 689
" Though she does not elaborate, Scott gestures to the way both normative sex and
normative religion hinge on a public/private distinction (2011, 96, 97).
' There is obviously a liistotical specificity to the nexus of sex/religion in the interpellation
of Muslims in contemporary Europe, but the secular state's competing imperatives to render
690 I Fernando
private and to surveil, and the contradictory incitement to hide and to reveal, have been central
to the regulation of other nonnormative religious and sexual communities as well, including
queers, Jews, and Mormons; see Hyman (1998), Warner (1999), and Gordon (2001),
SIGNS Spring 2014 I 691
' Though gang rape is no more common among immigrant-origin populations than
among the "native" French population, it is largely construed as an alien cultural phenomenon,
one that signals the aberrant sexual norms of immigrants and their ofSpring (Ticktin 2008).
694 I Fernando
2008, 866). The law also authorizes revoking the residence permit of any
nonnational who is arrested for passive soliciting, a clear indication of
this new law's locadon in a larger project of immigradon control, Ticktin
writes that the law was framed as a measure to protect both public order
and migrant women vicdms of human trafficking. Like Surkis, she astutely
reads these attempts at protecting public order and sexual freedom as ex-
ercises in state sovereignty. "Crucially," Tickdn contends, "die term 'pas-
sive soficidng' is defined in such a way that the pofice can act as sovereign:
they have the power to determine what behaviors consdtute 'solicidng'
since it is defined as 'passive,' not acdve" (867).
The exercise of sovereignty to which Tickdn and Surkis gesture, one
whose goal is to normafize migrant sex and make it repubfican and secular,
depends on penetrating into and surveilling the ostensibly private domain
of the bedroom and of individual desire. As I noted earfier. Asad (2006)
claims that one aspect of secular sovereignty is precisely the state's power
to determine what consdtutes both a religious sign and its meaning. He
argues that the state does not restrict itself to what is visible but also con-
fers upon itself the authority to decipher psychological processes like de-
sire and will. Asad's observadon applies not only to the domain of religion
but that of sexuality as well. The two mardage laws discussed above and the
2003 passive-solicitadon law call for public officials to determine the un-
stated intendons of the subjects under their watch. Civil officials must de-
termine whether die couple before them genuinely love one another (die
normative basis for companionate marriage) or whether their marriage is
a fraudthat is, not really founded on love. Not only must they read the
behavior of the couple for clues, but they must also ask quesdons that re-
veal the nature of whatever indmacy exists between partners. Similarly, po-
lice must determine whether a woman on the street intends to solicit sex
regardless of whether she actually does so; they must read her behavior and
her dress as external signs of an interior intendon to solicit. In both these
instances, public officials must render external and public tbat which is os-
tensibly internal and private and do so in the name of upholding a norma-
tive sexuality subtended by a strong distincdon between public and pri-
vate, external and internal, political and indmate. Put another way, the
reformation of immigrant subjects' sexual behavior so as to reproduce the
particular arrangement of public/pdvate on which secular-republican sex-
uality depends requires the constant trespass of that boundary.''
" This project of normalizing Arab-Muslim sexualit)', and the concomitant trespass of the
public/private boundary being instituted, has colonial antecedents; see, e,g,, Alloula (1986),
Clancy-Smith (1998), and Surkis (2010),
696 I Fernando
^^ For other readings of Ni Putes Ni Soumises, see Fernando (2009), Kemp (2009), and
Winter (2009).
SIGNS Spring 2014 I 697
'' For Mas, secular Muslims subvert the conditions of their emergence by bringing to-
gether two terms, secular and Muslim, that reappropriate the categories of Islam and Muslim
from their status as inherently violent. I disagree, since these secular Muslims rework Islam
according to the terms o{ laicite. Indeed, as I contend elsewhere (Fernando 2009), French
republicanism has long split the Muslim into commensurable and incommensurable forms
698 I Fernando
of difference. Moreover, as I argue in that essay, the term "secular Muslim" continues to
reinscribe the essential difference of Muslims, who cannot simply be secular. Rather than
subvert the conditions of their emergence, these self-declared secular Muslims reiterate the
very terms of secularism and Islamophobia in France.
S I G N S Spring 2014 I 699
'* I want to make clear that the following discussion refers to a particular strand of re-
publican feminism that is nevertheless dominant in France. There exist, of course, other forms
of French feminism, including feminist critiques of the 2004 ban on headscarves and feminist
defenses of veiling. For more on this, see Delphy (2008), Kemp (2010), and Ali (2012).
'^ At the lyce (high school) where I worked between 2002 and 2004, teachers would
often ask veiled students to pull their headscarves down in order to show a littie hair. Simi-
larly, in 2003 the Lyce Henri-Wallon, site of the final headscarf affair before the 2004 law,
asked Alma and Lila Levy to don "a less severe version of their headscarves" that "showed
their necks, ear lobes and the beginnings of their hairline" as a "final compromise proposal"
(Winter 2008, 253).
700 I Fernando
ftilly coded performance of dtilladon. From this point of view, the hijab is
a hypersexualizing marker par excellence" (2008, 26). Turning to the "par-
adoxical nature of the French hijab," Winter approvingly quotes Moroccan
feminist Maria Bahnini, interviewed for Liberation: "If one refers to the
spidt of the Qur'an, the veil's objecdve is that women do not attract atten-
don, are not stared at. Young French women who wear the veil are not,
however, doing so to become invisible but on the contrary to become vis-
ible. . . . The veil does not protect them, it exposes them. There is an odd
mix of rebellion, rehgion and Star Academy" (in Winter 2008, 250)."^
Drawing on Bahnini's asserdona widely shared opinion among secular
republicans and hberals alike^Winter seeks to underscore the ostensibly
contradictory nature of the headscarf: though it attempts to hide "the fact
that one is a woman," it ends up revealing it in excess of the normal pro-
tocols of female sexuality. Interestingly, the veiled woman and the whore
are once again juxtaposed here, though this time as analogous figures of
hypersexualizadon (the musulmane voile hecovats et pute et soumise, both
whore and doormat). Whether the veil reveals too much or too little, or
both too much and too little. Winter's reference to strippers, sex workers,
and veiled women invokes the ni/ni logic of secular-republican sexuality
in which women must reveal something of their sexed body but not too
much. Getting that alignment rightrevealing neither too much nor too
httle, being ni pute ni soumiseconsdtutes the basis of secular-republican
sexual normadvity.
Bahnini's earher juxtaposidonthe headscarf as "an odd mix" of reli-
gion and Star Academyis also telling. The mix is odd because religion is
supposed to be private, not performed in public. Within the conventional
Protestant-qua-secular definition of religion, religion concerns the tran-
scendental or otherworldly and manifests in ascedc pracdces, if it mani-
fests at all. Within this secular definition of religion, "a concern with
adornment is incompadble with religious expressions" (Asad 2006, 523).
As a result, "what is asserted to be mandatory Islamic behavior cannot
be authendc if it is at the same time combined with 'capitalist signs' "
(523). Nor can it be combined with signs of female sexuality.'^ The no-
don that religion does not mix with sexuality or femininity underpins the
widespread sense among many republicans and liberals that weadng a head-
scarf with makeup and fashionable clothes is somehow contradictory. The
internadonally renowned Eg^'ptian feminist Nawal El-Saadawi exemplifies
this reaction. Writing about young French women protesting the 2004
law banning religious signs, El-Saadawi (2004) dismissively notes that the
young women "wearing the veil were often clothed in tight-fitting jeans,
their faces covered witii layers of make-up, tiieir lips painted bright red,
the lashes around their eyes thickened black or blue with heavy mascara."
We, the readers, are left to infer the supposed contradiction between true
piety and this kind of feminine sexual adornment, one that signals the ap-
parent inauthenticity of these women's religiosity. Similarly, Winter (2008,
251) refers to what she calls "the 'Star Academy' syndrome identified by
Bahnini" to question the actual religiosity of veiled girls. "The hybridized
hijab has become truly hip," Winter wtites, "There is a definite media-
marketable 'coolness' about being a modem Muslim girl in trendy jeans
and a hijab" (251), Winter implies that Muslim girls take up the hijab not
because they have any interest in becoming more pious; rather, they just
want to be cool. Winter's reading of these girls' (unvoiced) intentions
Winter is apparentiy also in the business of reading inner intentions about
religiosity from outward signsrelies on the juxtaposition of trendy jeans
and the hijab., which in turn relies on the common assumption that religion,
real religion, does not have any truck with such markers of feminine sexu-
ality. Winter's critique reveals how much the secular imperative to define
proper religionand proper sexualityrelies on and reproduces an oppo-
sitional relationship between sex and religion. Religion and sexuahty are
brought together in this logic to demarcate what is properly religious (that
is which is not sexual) and what is properly sexual (that which is not re-
hgious).'** Secular government, then, does not simply entail the regulation
of sex and of religion; rather, secular religiosity and secular sexuality are
constituted and normalized together,
'* The opposidon between religion and sex condnues to drive the old trope of Islam as far
too concerned with sex to be a real religion, Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses, for example,
plays on this opposidon in its parody of the emergence of Islam. In addidon to being called
"the Businessman" because he constandy bargains wixk God and the archangel Gabriel
remember that real religion stands against moneymaking tooRushdie's Mohammed/Ma-
hound is a sexually ravenous clown who, after his first wife's death, sleeps with so many
women that his beard turns half white in a year. As Bhikhu Parekh notes, polygamy becomes
"God's own permission to fiick as many women as he [Mohammed/Mahound] liked," and
the Quran "a book 'spouting' rules" about sexual intercourse in which "only two sexual
posidons are legidmate, one of them being sodomy" (1990, 697). The essence of the joke
here, and the accompanying fi-isson of mockery, arise from Rushdie's juxtaposidon of sex
and religion: Mahound is a charlatan because he is so sexually debauched. Rushdie's novel
thereby plays on the sensefiindamental to Chrisdan and secular discourses about Islam
from the Crusades onwardthat Islam is not a real religion because it explicidy recognizes
sex as a site of pleasure.
702 I Fernando
' ' For other work that critically examines die expanding market for Muslim women's
autobiographies, see Mahmood (2008) and Kemp (2009).
Bellil (2003) notes in her autobiography that it was her therapist's idea to publish her
story, initially written as part of her therapy.
SIGNS Spring 2014 I 703
the secular-sexual norm. She fails the test. In fact, the test is set up to re-
cord women like Kadma and Saida Kada as failures of integradon, as sex-
ually and religiously abnormal. After all, it is precisely because, as veiled
women, they are always already suspected of being sexually and religiously
abnormal that they must prove otherwise. Yet the fact that they wear the
headscarf and therefore subscribe to a sexual ideology different from re-
publican sexuality as well as to a set of authodtadve norms different ftom
secular religiosity, makes passing the test impossible. On the one hand, as
Demiad found out, it is difiScult to remain silent when one is the subject of
so much public discourse. On the other hand, answering to the compulsion
to speak, to take the test, only renders one more suspicious, only confirms
one as a fundamentalist and a purveyor of doublespeak. Consistendy called
upon to make public and speak publicly about that which normally remains
pdvate (namely, their sexual and religious beliefs and pracdces), veiled Mus-
lim French women cannot but disqualify themselves as not normal, not sec-
ular, not French,
The cunning of secular power helps, then, to defer and displace the
fundamental tensions of secularism that emerge from its contradictory im-
peradves to separate and to regulate, to privadze and to surveil. As I have
argued, the public discourses and polidcal pracdces that attempt to regu-
late sex and religion have as their effect the contravention of the public/
private distinction that underpins normadve sexuality and normadve refi-
giosity. Secularism constandy trespasses the very boundary it seeks to erect.
The burden ofthat trespass, however, falls elsewhere. Secular power's cun-
ning fies in its double gesture: secular authorities incite Mushm French
women to reveal publicly the innermost details of their sexual and rehgious
lives, then take them to task for doing so, for exhibidng in pubfic that
which should be private. What I want to highlight, in conclusion, is how
that cunning serves to displace the burden of trespass onto Muslim French
women, who become responsible for the tensions and contradicdons of sec-
ular rule. Thus, in a masterfUl dissimuladon of the nature of its rule, it is
Muslim French women who are seen to undermine the boundary between
public and private, not secular power itself
Department of Anthropology
University of California, Santa Cruz
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