L’Arbre qui cache la forêt: on the sexualization of the term beurette, Gilles Kepel’s travel writing, and the French mission civilisatrice

ABSTRACT

In June 2020, the hasthtag #TF1raciste began trending on French Twitter after the synopsis of a TV series broadcast on France’s first television channel described a female character of Maghrebi descent as a beurette. As the term was being debated on many a media outlet, sociologists explained that beurette is embedded in a colonial rhetoric that fetishizes Oriental women and noted that its contemporary usage is mostly associated with the pornographic industry, suggesting a discriminatory if niche representation of Arab women in France. Through an analysis of the travel writing of Gilles Kepel, France’s leading expert on Islamism, this article argues that this representation is not restricted to the marginal production of adult content but that it is instead found in a public representation of Islam that, behind its denunciation of Islamism, hides a French yearning for the colonial mission civilisatrice.

RÉSUMÉ

En juin 2020, le hashtag #TF1raciste est devenu populaire sur Twitter en France après que le synopsis d’une série télévisée diffusée sur la première chaine du pays a qualifié de «beurette» un personnage féminin d’origine maghrébine. Alors que le terme était débattu dans les médias, des sociologues ont expliqué que «beurette» appartenait à une rhétorique coloniale qui fétichise les femmes orientales, et noté que son usage contemporain est principalement associé à l’industrie pornographique, suggérant une représentation discriminatoire bien que niche des femmes arabes en France. À travers l’analyse des récits de voyages de Gilles Kepel, l’expert numéro un de l’islamisme en France, cet article suggère que cette représentation n’est pas limitée à la production marginale de contenu adulte mais qu’elle appartient en fait à un discours public qui, sous couvert de dénoncer l’islamisme, cache une nostalgie de la «mission civilisatrice» de la colonization.

Acknowledgments

My thanks go to Prof Gino Raymond and Dr Siobhán Shilton for their comments and suggestions on the sections of my PhD thesis on which this article is based.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Much to part of the general public’s dismay, CNews hired polemicist Éric Zemmour in 2019 only weeks after the Cour de cassation confirmed his 2017 sentence for incitement to racial hatred.

2. Whereas this public representation of Islam has increasingly essentialised Muslims, it must be noted that other public policies over the same period, with which this article does not engage, have sought to include Muslims on an institutional level, from the creation of the Conseil français du culte musulman in 2005 to the more recent Charte des imams drafted amongst the nonetheless essentialising debates surrounding the upcoming law against Islamist separatism.

3. For instance, a substantial part of his previous book Quatre-vingt-treize (2012) scrutinizes the ‘omnipresence’ of halal food places in Paris’s suburbs.

4. Writing at the time of the 2002 war in Afghanistan, Abu Lughod says that the Western sense of duty to ‘save’ Muslim women under the banner of human rights was inherited from 19th century Christian missionaries (Abu-Lughod 2002, 789). Joseph Massad pushes this analogy further in Islam and Liberalism, insofar as he does not merely point to a certain genealogy but instead straightforwardly speaks of ‘missionizing democracy’ (Massad 2015, 13).

5. On the great hopes placed in French state schools, including to serve as ‘the only space allowing each individual to live in total freedom of conscience’, see Bowen (2007, 163). On the same topic, see also Jane Freedman (2004, 131).

6. In September 2003, two teenage sisters were permanently excluded from their school in Aubervilliers, a suburb north of Paris, after receiving several warnings for refusing to take off their headscarves in class. Officially, they were expelled for troubling public order by taking part in a student demonstration contesting a prior provisional exclusion. As a news story, the ‘Lévy sisters’ case was a curiosity that attracted a lot of media attention because it challenged the expected narrative of Muslim women being oppressed by Muslim men; the sisters were recent converts to Islam whose father, who self-defined as a ‘Jewish atheist,’ disapproved of their choice to cover their heads but advocated their right to do so.