Regulating Women’s Bodies
Faiza Silmi, a 32 year-old Moroccan woman married to a French national, was denied French citizenship this week on the grounds that the burqa she wears is incompatible with french values, specifically equality of the sexes.
Denied not because she can’t speak French, or doesn’t correctly understand the french code of secularism, but rather, due to the way she expresses her religious beliefs using her own body. What baffles me most, reading about this episode in Le Monde the reputable French daily, is the amount of journalistic negligence that seems to be permissible for Arab-interest stories when compared with the average fare. That day’s editorial only briefly suggested that French Muslims might find fault with the state judging their religious practice as a barometer of citizenship. The rest of the page described all the myriad ways in which this voiceless woman was indeed thoroughly oppressed, in submission to her husband and male relatives, and worst of all, so dominated that she could not even realize the fact of her submission. The classic false consciousness narrative that has existed as long as the white man’s burden. “How can one disagree with such a critique?”, read the last sentence.
Part of the problem with this woman being “voiceless” was the newspaper’s own fault: neither the editorial nor the accompanying news article contained a single quote attributed to her. For that, we had to wait for the New York Times article, where Faiza finally spoke in her own name. She repeated ad nauseam that the burqa was her own choice, and not in any way her husband’s. The female NYT journalist, who saw Faiza unveiled, took pains to suggest that the woman was not, to her understanding, oppressed, being instead of very sunny disposition, and in clear possession of her rational faculties. She even said, somewhat bizarrely, that Faiza had a happy, “moon-shaped” face. Her motivation for wearing the burqa, Faiza stressed, was modesty, to prevent men from leering at her.
To add insult to injury, the Le Monde article quotes only one “expert”, the very opinionated Olivier Roy, who seems present in the article only to concur that yes, this woman is clearly oppressed.
Of course, detail and nuance fade in importance when compared to the unspoken requirement of french citizenship, or rather, an outmoded French feminism: be girly, be sexy, show your skin, be like us, or leave. A civilizational test that has little to do with equality or justice and everything to do with cultural, and dare I say it, sexual anxiety.
The other story here is Fadela Amara, the Maghrebian female minister and Secrétaire d’état in charge of Politique de la Ville, or Urban Politics. She is one of the leaders of the group Ni Putes Ni Soumises (Neither Sluts nor Submissives) which lobbies for women’s rights in the underprivileged suburbs. The front page of their website carries a banner expressing “extreme relief” that Faiza was denied citizenship. Formerly, this group was instrumental on the public relations front in getting the veil ban passed. The French media and unfortunately also the New York Times have over-promoted her as a Muslim voice at the expense of all others, when in fact she declares herself a militant secularist. Not that there’s any contradiction there– many French citizens call themselves secular Muslims– but she is hardly an authority on Muslim affairs. Yet every single article about this case mentions that Fadela Amara, a practicing Muslim, approved of the citizenship denial, so there. This is like quoting Khalilzad for the opinion of ordinary Iraqis. Such is the lax journalism allowed when the subject is Muslim, about whom anything can be believed.
I don’t have an opinion on the burqa because it’s simply not my issue to judge, but I understand why it makes people uncomfortable, or is an obstacle in municipal affairs like photo IDs or security checks. This episode, however, goes beyond these petty technicalities and dangerously enters the terrain of regulating women’s bodies, in a way that feminists should be more alarmed about. I say this as someone with a foundation in queer politics, and an anti-sexist.
