Swimming pools, Islamic dress and colonial differentiation: the cleansing role of law in ‘the republic [that] lives through an uncovered face’

ABSTRACT

On 23 June 2019, seven Muslim women staged a protest at a swimming pool in Grenoble, France in defiance of rules prohibiting burkinis in swimming pools. French law 2010–1192 criminalizes the bodies of visibly Muslim women by prohibiting full-face coverings in French public space. This creates precarious bodies through law and facilitates an institutional Islamophobia, which I argue circulates in French society through a logic of hygiene. This logic of hygiene refers not merely to cleanliness but to the racial purity of the French republic. Law performs a dual cleansing role: it cleanses public space(s) of the presence of colonial markers and acts to displace colonial memory in France. This article traces the emergence of pro-ban feminist arguments supporting the criminalization of Islamic dress in France to a historical foundation of humiliation and cleanliness in post-WWII shavings of the hair of dissident French women. The article draws parallels with the forced uncovering of the hair of Muslim women in historical colonialism and in contemporary France to conceptualize hair as the patriarchal symbol of the French republic. Muslim women are made precarious through law's complicity with the hygiene and sterilization agendas of French coloniality and post-war capitalist modernization. The conclusion is that Muslim women are the site of the racial and gender differentiation necessary for the maintenance of the French republic.

KEYWORDS:

• Islamic dress
• colonial differentiation
• hair
• hygiene
• law

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Davina Cooper, Ali Kassem, Yvette Russell, and the journal’s anonymous reviewers for comments and suggestions on previous versions of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Chambers Dictionary: https://chambers.co.uk/search/?query=hygiene&title=21st.

2. Loi no 2010-1192 du 11 octobre 2010 interdisant la dissimulation du visage dans l'espace public (1):  https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/loda/id/JORFTEXT000022911670

3. Conseil d’Etat, decision du 26 Septembre 2016 no 403578.

4. See for example the judgment: Conseil d'Etat, CE ordonnance du 26 août 2016, nos. 402742, 402777

5. https://www.laurorethinktank.fr/.

6. Conseil d’Etat, decision du 7 October 2010 no 2010613. at <http://www.conseil constitutionnel.fr/conseil-constitutionnel/francais/les-decisions/acces-par-date/ decisions-depuis-1959/2010/2010-613-dc/decision-n-2010-613-dc-du-07-octobre2010.49711.html>.

7. Translation and mistakes my own.

8. Antigone is the protagonist of Sophocles’ Tragedy Antigone written 442 B.C.

9. This folding of Aïcha into the western myth of Antigone is not unproblematic. For example, Ost does not specify if Aïcha refers explicitly to the third wife of the prophet Mohammad, although the spelling is inconsistent with the generally accepted Aisha. This centring of Aïcha at the heart of a western narrative could itself be considered an act of colonial assimilation. Within Islam, Aisha is an overwhelmingly Sunni figure; Aisha as a historical figure is considered to have betrayed the Shia Imams for example.

10. Veiled Antigone.

11. SAS v. France (2015) 60 E.H.R.R. 11.

12. Interview with Badinter: ‘Banaliser l’image de la femme voilée, c’est l’ériger en norme’, Le Monde, 28 March 2013.

13. ni putes ni soumises, Translated as: Neither Whores Nor Submissive < http://www.npns.fr/>; Élisabeth Badinter and Sihem Habchi president of ni putes ni soumises, ‘Interdire le voile integral au nom de la dignité de la personne’, Liberation, 9 September 2009 <www.liberation.fr/societe/0101589842-interdire-le-voile-integral-au-nom-de-la-dignite-de-lapersonne>; the Collectif nationale des droits des femmes adopt a pro-ban position rejecting veiled women and stopping them participating in International Women’s Day in 2004/2005 https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/womens-blog/2015/jul/20/france-feminism-hijab-ban-muslim-women.

14. SAS v France para. 117.

15. UN Human Rights Committee, CCPR/C/123/DR/2807/2016 and CCPR/C/123/D/2747/2016, 22 October 2018.

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Kimberley Brayson

Kimberley Brayson is Associate Professor in Law at Leicester Law School, University of Leicester, where she is also Director of Learning and Teaching. Prior to this Kimberley was Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Sussex and Co-Director of the Sussex Centre for Gender Studies. She completed her PhD at Queen Mary, University of London, holds a bilingual LLM Masters in Legal Theory from the European Academy of Legal Theory, Brussels and an LLB in English Law and German Law from the University of Kent with a year spent in Germany. She has held an EU-funded Research Fellowship, Juristras and was an EU-funded Legal Researcher at the College of Europe.