Questions today addressed under the label of intersectionality are not new to feminist theory or feminist praxis.5 While the concept of intersectionality has contributed in unique ways to make visible structural relations of power, es-pecially within feminist movements, its predecessors— terms such as “triple oppression” or “double jeopardy,” also coined by feminists of color— similarly highlighted differences, inequalities, and oppression within women’s movements. These terms challenged white privilege, racism, misrepresen-tation of racialized women’s identities and interests,6 and false universalism within the women’s movements, and they also fostered a sense of identity and specific ways to organize and to think feminist praxis among women of color, postcolonial / Third World women, and migrant women.7 In that perspective, questions now raised thanks to the concept of intersectionality are intrinsic and inherent to feminist theory, and certainly not new or mar-ginal.8 However, each historical, social, and political context raises new in-tersectional issues and questions— and old issues in new ways— for feminist movements. Identifying what is new and what is not, and what are the spe-cific configurations that intersectional issues and struggles take at a certain moment in time in a certain context, helps us understand how dynamics of inclusion and exclusion evolve within feminist movements, and how feminist activists frame and respond to these processes. It also matters for the study of social movements, which is only beginning to explore how intersectionality shapes social movement dynamics of identity, separatism, and coalition.9
In this vein, I use in this chapter an intersectional approach to analyze how structures of power have shaped the dominant framings of policy debates on race, migration, and religion as well as the positions taken by a diversity of feminist organizations in these public controversies, in two contexts, France and Quebec, since the beginning of the 2000s. Muslim
and racialized women have occupied center stage in the debates about sec-ularism and Islam, the accommodation of religious differences linked to Islam, and the “integration” of immigrants and their children into national hegemonic cultural values. Indeed, in the past two decades a distinctive nexus articulating immigration, ethnicity, religion, and class has formed in many European countries. The racialization of Muslim religious identities, which overlaps with the racialization of migrants and their children,10 has occurred in part through a series of public debates on Muslim and immi-grant women: veiling, arranged and forced marriages, and female genital mutilations have been discussed in the European public spheres,11 with policy or judicial outcomes detrimental to migrant/ Muslim women’s rights and concrete lives.12 In these two contexts, dominant framings of the public debates on veiling and religious accommodation have invisibilized and mar-ginalized racialized women, especially Muslim women, as political and fem-inist subjects, while hypervisibilizing them as objects of public policies— a process typical of the contemporary intersectional politics targeting women of color in Europe.13 The ways in which gender, race, ethnicity, religion, and nationality intersect varies depending on each national context, but at the European level, these debates on Islamic veils have contributed to a shared perception by many nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and polit-ical actors of the European public sphere that there is an incompatibility between gender and diversity, which demands either the abandonment of diversity or the end of gender equality claims.14
Islam in Europe today is a cultural product intimately shaped by postcolonialism, racism, restrictive migratory policies, the “civic” turn in immigrant integration policy,15 right- wing populist nationalism, and what Fatima El- Tayeb has named the “European narrative of racelessness.”16 It is therefore tightly articulated with processes of racialization and the politics of race in Europe. This is evident in the cross- fertilization of policy debates on immigrant integration, the regulation of Islam, citizenship and racial dis-crimination, and the multiple slippages in legal discourses from one domain to the next. However, it is also important to underline that religion cannot completely be subsumed under race as an analytical category and as a source of discrimination and social marginalization.
How are we to make sense of the specific religious dimension of these debates in an intersectional framework of analysis? Indeed, the focalization on religious beliefs and behaviors, especially those of Muslim women, can lend itself to a form of culturalism17 that invisibilizes how race, class and
Race, Religion, and Gender 49 migration status shape the politics of secularism and religion. Hence it is im-portant to specify how the politics of religious difference is both different from and articulated by the politics of race and migration.
Critical scholarship on secularism has pointed to the association of sec-ularism with Western modernity and sexual freedom, and its intimate link with colonial discourses on Muslim men.18 Hence the configuration of secu-larism, Islam, and gender politics is a historical formation specific to Western and European contexts that provides legitimate tropes in the public space.
In particular, the discourse of secularism provides specific legal tools to reg-ulate behavior deemed improper. With these legal tools— banning forms of Islamic veiling and religious practices— secularism can destabilize human rights discourses and erode antiracist and anti- Islamophobia efforts. In par-ticular, it can divide traditional antiracist movements by operating a dis-tinction between racism based on illegitimate racial categorizations, and secularism, what sociologist Nacira Guénif- Souilamas has termed a “vir-tuous racism,”19 which supposedly fosters the integration of religious minor-ities. The political will to regulate Islam and its perceived “difference” thus leads to new discourses about secularism20 that allow a continuing mar-ginalization of racialized groups from migrant descent despite their formal belonging to the nation- state.
The historical connection of secularism with nation- building also allows for the expansion of femonationalism by associating gender equality not only with the West and modernity, but also with national identity. Indeed, secu-larism is historically closely linked with the state and organizes the bound-aries of citizenship and inclusion in the national community. It is therefore no surprise that religion, especially the religion of colonial and postcolo-nial subjects in the case of France, should activate discourses and policies that enact the policing of national identity boundaries,21 and that headscarf debates perform the exclusion of veiled Muslim women from European na-tional imaginaries.22 The legislations banning Islamic religious symbols in several European countries have operated a resignification of secularism that excludes European Muslims from citizenship, at the cost of bending and curtailing fundamental rights and the existing legal framework organizing the regulation of religious beliefs and practices.23 This is especially true in France, admittedly the liberal democracy that has gone the furthest in the attempt to restrict the public expression of Islamic faith, equating state neu-trality with the invisibility of religion (especially Islam), and thus organizing its disappearance from public spaces. In that sense, race and Muslimness
are categories of difference that are, in contemporary Europe, heavily coconstructed, but which do not totally overlap.
What is more, for a majority of white, nonimmigrant feminists, and also for some racialized feminists in both France and beyond in Europe and in Quebec, religion, contrary to race, raises the issue of faith— that is, a form of submission to a religious authority— and therefore also the issue of women’s agency and emancipation in potent ways.24 Religion, contrary to race, therefore lends itself to moral discourses and boundary work that police the frontiers of good and bad feminist subjects, emancipated agents and oppressed women. This boundary work does not neatly follow the lines of racial categorizations. French Muslim women and girls from migration descent who adhere to secularism and modernity discourses may receive benefits from their conformity to majority norms.25 More largely, debates over Islamic religious symbols raise the question of the relationship be-tween the state and organized religions, and therefore, in countries such as France and in Quebec with a long history of struggle between the state and the Catholic Church for social hegemony, the question of who should emancipate/ protect individuals from religious influence.26 This history of virtuous feminist struggle against the Catholic Church bolsters feminists’
moral claims and righteousness in their opposition to Islamic religious practice.27
If there is a denial of racism in many corners of white women’s movements in many contexts both in the United States and elsewhere, there is also a his-toric commitment by most white feminist movements to fight against racism, and there is historical evidence of coalitions to support immigrant women’s rights in the 1980s and 1990s in many countries (more on this below). Hence, race does not elicit from white (and racialized) feminists the exact public emotions and political responses as religion does. Of course, reactions to re-ligious Islamic practices are heavily shaped by racism and, in Europe at least, by colonial history and discourses. However, I argue that we must also be at-tentive to these other factors, such as feminists’ understanding of emancipa-tion and religious agency, which have contributed to frame specific debates and political responses within feminist organizations on both sides of the Atlantic. In order to grasp how racialized Muslim women’s voices, identities, and interests were silenced and misrepresented, or on the contrary reclaimed and championed, by a variety of white and nonwhite feminists in these debates, I thus argue that we must take seriously the fact that these debates are shaped by racism and Islamophobia and by secularism, understood as a
Race, Religion, and Gender 51 set of political and moral discourses defining oppressed and emancipated fe-male subjects, and tied to exclusionary visions of national identity.
My aim in the next sections is not to expose in detail the various sexularism debates that have occurred since the beginning of the twenty- first century in France and Quebec. Many scholars have told most of these stories, explored the different framings mobilized by various sets of actors, and showed how historical racial and postcolonial formations pervaded the debates (despite the “neutral” focus on religion) and how the boundaries of secularism and of the national community have been contracted through a constant recourse to the value of sex equality, now culturally assigned to the liberal (Christian and white) West and opposed to barbaric orientalized others.28 For instance, scholars have focused on the legal and political meaning of secularism,29 and of national models of integration30 in the two countries, with different interpretations of fundamental rights,31 and different relationships between national and supranational courts.32 France and Quebec also differ in the local spread of right- wing populism and its electoral effects on other political parties, and in the relative powerlessness of antidiscrimination agencies— to cite just a few other important elements determining the policy outcomes of these debates. Furthermore, these two national contexts display different
“immigrant integration models”: that is, distinct politics of race and dif-ferent regulations to accommodate cultural and religious difference.33 While Quebec remains in the ambit of Canadian multiculturalism and therefore promotes the visibility of ethnic and immigrant communities through public policy tools, France has sustained a color- blind approach to public policies34 and a “civic” approach to immigrant integration. Nor do France and Quebec have similar histories of colonization. Quebec was founded on colonial set-tlement, which seized indigenous lands and oppressed indigenous peoples living where Quebec established its territory.35 At the same time, its fran-cophone population was also dominated culturally until the 1970s by their Anglophone compatriots, intimidating them into “speaking white,” that is, English. Hence, the burst of debates on Islamic religious practices and the de-velopment of Islamophobia in the two contexts do not have similar historical roots, even if the French discourse on secularism has found profound echoes in the Quebecois public sphere.36
The goal of this chapter is not to survey all the factors that explain how these debates have unfolded differently for feminists in the two contexts.
Rather, it is, more modestly, to chart the terrain of intersectionality politics, discursive and political, that women’s rights organizations in France and
Quebec have had to navigate, and to the formation of which they have also contributed in important ways. These two countries have feminist traditions that share important commonalities and ties, but very different histories of institutionalization and coalitions among the various strands of the move-ment. Here I identify actors, arguments, and chronologies that have altered the landscape of women’s rights activism since the 2000s, fueling or resisting the rise of femonationalism in both countries. As I explore in more depth the factors that have led to contrasting strategies and alliances of major feminist players in response to these sexularism policy initiatives in both contexts—
that is, a profound division within French feminist national coalitions, and a protracted but still workable coalition in Quebec despite important tensions— we gain insights into how feminists have articulated the moral and political issues that legislating veiling practices has triggered for them. This is the background against which the feminist political subjectivations that I ex-plore in the next chapters must be contextualized and understood.