Negotiating submission. Pedagogies of coloniality in the everyday of veiled Muslim women in France and Switzerland

ABSTRACT

Muslim women wearing simple headscarves (hijab) have been at the center of intense public scrutiny for several decades in many European countries, and they experience widespread ordinary forms of gendered and racialized discrimination. Our study of veiled Muslim women’s reported experiences of stigmatization in France and Switzerland identifies types of interactions that we conceptualize as pedagogies of coloniality. These interactions follow similar scripts in which interlocutors, who are members of the majority group, ask hijabi women to unveil or to veil differently even though it is not legally required in the context of the interaction. Our concept aims at analyzing more precisely how Islamophobia works at the intersection of race, religion, gender and age in everyday interactions aimed at disciplining visibly Muslim women. By identifying essentialization, scrutiny and mimicry as pedagogies of coloniality, we show that Islamophobia is a form of racism deeply shaped by coloniality.

KEYWORDS:

• Islamophobia
• coloniality
• intersectionality
• gender
• Islamic veil
• race

Introduction

Muslim women wearing simple headscarves (hijab) have been at the center of intense public scrutiny for several decades in France, Switzerland and many other European countries (Andreassen and Lettinga 2012; Fernando 2010; Fredette 2014; Karimi 2023; Kılıç, Saharso, and Sauer 2008; Korteweg and Yurdakul 2014; Rosenberger and Sauer 2012; Scott 2007; Selby 2014). In Europe, veiled Muslim women experience ordinary forms of gendered and racialized discrimination: they are deemed foreigners rather than nationals, and they experience heightened discrimination in employment and harassment on the streets (Allen 2014; Beauchemin, Hamel, and Simon 2016; CCIF 2018; Esposito and Kalin 2011; Gianni, Giugni, and Michel 2015; Mason-Bish and Zempi 2019; Strabac et al. 2016; Tisserant, Bourguignon, and Bourhis 2014; Van de Graaf 2021; Weichselbaumer 2016). Veiled Muslim women – hijabis – are also stereotyped as submissive to patriarchy and excessively religious, identity features which suggest they are unfit to belong to European nations as they supposedly don’t adhere to these nations’ declared norms of gender equality and secularism (Bendixsen 2013; Farris 2017; Gustavsson, van der Noll, and Sundberg 2016; Helbling 2014; Karimi 2023; Sarrasin, Fasel, and Green 2019; Simon 2021; Van Raemdonck 2024).

Given this widespread discrimination and stigmatization of veiled Muslim women, a growing literature focuses on how they experience, navigate, challenge, resist or submit to the processes of gendered racism targeting them (Afshar 2008; Ajbli 2016; Bendixsen 2013; Bracke 2011; Fernando 2014a; Jouili 2011; Karimi 2021; 2023; Laxer, Reitz, and Stallone 2023; Selby, Barras, and Beaman 2018; Simon 2021; Tabassum 2006). We situate our reflection in this literature on ordinary gendered racism (Essed 1991) which focuses on the subjective experiences of members of the racialized group as they are confronted with interactions laced with racism and sexism in their daily lives. Drawing on this approach, we propose to study veiled Muslim women’s reported experiences of stigmatization so as to analyze how hierarchies of race, religion, and gender are maintained in the everyday. While narratives of discrimination inform us about strategies mobilized by minoritized groups to “get respect” (Lamont et al. 2018), they also give us valuable insights about how power is wielded against them. In particular, we aim to identify types of interactions that we conceptualize as pedagogies of coloniality. These interactions follow similar scripts in which interlocutors, who are members of the majority group, ask hijabi women to unveil or to veil differently even though it is not legally required in the context of the interaction. By asking veiled Muslim women to yield to a demand that is neither socially appropriate nor lawful, their interlocutors negotiate the submission of veiled Muslim women to the social order that places them at the bottom of the social hierarchy.

Research has shown that Islamophobia is a multifaceted phenomenon with global and local dimensions, which operates through discourse, knowledge, policies, institutions and interactions (Grosfoguel 2012; Sayyid 2014). A strand in the literature has focused on understanding Islamophobia as a form of governmentality in order to emphasize its regulating and disciplining power over Muslims in Western contexts (Patel 2017; Sayyid 2014; Van Raemdonck 2024). For example, policies which target Muslims or frame relationships between state institutions and Muslim communities (Amir-Moazami 2011), as well as culturalist/orientalist discourses (Razack 2004) and securitization policies (Trein 2018) have been analyzed as fostering forms of governmentality that aim at disciplining Muslims in Western countries in various and gendered ways. Following this conceptualization of Islamophobia as a form of governmentality our focus on pedagogies of coloniality pursues two related objectives. First, we aim at explicating and identifying more precisely how Islamophobia works as a form of governmentality at the level of everyday interactions. Indeed, research in this vein has focused mainly on institutions and policies (Amir-Moazami 2011; Trein 2018; Van Raemdonck 2024). By identifying pedagogies of coloniality in everyday life we aim at documenting more precisely how specific daily interactions, forms of violence, and discriminations also discipline veiled Muslim women in certain ways, forcing them to engage in endless anticipations and negotiations over their appearance. Second, by characterizing these disciplining mechanisms as pedagogies of coloniality, we situate ourselves in the vein of the scholarship which considers Islamophobia as a form of racism deeply shaped by coloniality (Hafez 2018). Hence the concept of pedagogies of coloniality aims to identify patterns of interactions that produce veiled Muslim women as colonial subjects, that is subjects who are disciplined in specific ways.

In the first section we develop a conceptual framework to understand the coloniality of power experienced by hijabi women in their everyday lives. We explain our main concepts – negotiations of submission as pedagogies of coloniality – ­and our intersectional approach which considers the articulation of sexism and Islamophobia, as well as class and age, as necessary components enabling the negotiations of submission for veiled Muslim women. We also identify three distinctive features of the otherization and disciplining process experienced by our interviewees: essentialization, scrutiny, and mimicry. These features constitute the three main types of pedagogy of coloniality that we have identified in our interview data. Then we turn to our methods, presenting our qualitative methodology and our targeted interviewee sample, as well as our two national contexts, France and Switzerland, in which, despite vastly different legal regulations targeting the hijab, different colonial pasts and different histories of immigration, our interviewees experience similar forms of negotiations to unveil or to change their veiling style. In the following three sections we detail and illustrate our three main features of pedagogies of coloniality. First, the essentialization of religious belief and identify (sometimes referred to as the racialization of religion). Second, the intrusive questioning of motives veiled Muslim women are subjected to as they are compelled to explain and justify the veil they wear and their willfulness in refusing to unveil. Third, the promise of inclusion through mimicry, which characterizes coloniality (Bhabha 1994).

Negotiating submission and the coloniality of power: the making of colonial subjects

In this section we weave together our conceptual framework to account for the making of colonial subjects in everyday interactions. We draw on a Foucauldian perspective of power which identifies mechanisms of disciplining – that is, systems and techniques of surveillance, normalization, and regulation, which aim to shape and discipline the bodies and behaviors of individuals (Foucault 1975). This approach makes us attentive to the disciplining that is exercised in ordinary interactions. Asking someone to change her veiling style or to take off her veil conveys an attempt to discipline one’s (gendered) bodily appearance and behavior so as to conform to a majority norm. These interactions always take place against the backdrop of other forms of regulation, such as veiling bans or Islamophobic political discourses, that target Muslim women with the intent to pressure them to unveil. Hence, these interactions can best be understood as part of a continuum of governmentality targeting Muslims, limiting their life aspirations and choices (Van Raemdonck 2024), and undermining their ability to “project themselves into the future” (Sayyid 2014, 14). We propose to unpack how Islamophobia as governmentality shapes the everyday of veiled Muslim women by characterizing disciplining interactions to unveil or veil differently as pedagogies of coloniality. This unpacking allows us to explore what may be particular to these experiences of gendered Islamophobia in comparison with other processes of racial othering.

Pedagogies of coloniality

While the concept of pedagogy may carry positive meaning, we refer here to the Latin American anthropologist Rita Segato’s concept of pedagogies of cruelty, forged to describe the actions that teach us how to reify life, to transform it into a (dead) thing and to inflict death in a dehumanizing manner (Segato 2021). She identifies gendered violence as a prime site of pedagogies of cruelty. Her concept insists on the underlying intent that the learner, who witnesses or is subjected to this pedagogy, internalizes that some lives have no value. Her concept also underlines the expressive dimension of this form of violence: pedagogies of cruelty display violence to teach fear and dehumanize rather than to obtain resources or power. Finally, pedagogies of cruelty especially target women’s bodies through sexual violence, since publicized sexual violence against women fortifies men’s power. As such, the notion of pedagogy of cruelty allows for great insight into how societies perpetuate and normalize violence against women through social structures, cultural norms, and systems of power. Following these insights, we propose the concept of pedagogies of coloniality to describe how what is at stake in the interactions narrated by our interviewees is the internalization, learning and acceptance of a colonial status on their part. Hence, these interactions aim at more than disciplining behavior (taking off or changing the way hijabi women wear the veil), they also aim at instructing submission, forcing veiled Muslim women to display acceptance of a subordinate status and of the majority (secular) norm. While these pedagogies are not sexualized, they nonetheless target Muslim women’s bodies by imposing on them a specific regime of visibility. In return, by erasing the visible presence of Islam, the pedagogy of coloniality aims at fortifying the majority group’s power. It is precisely in relation to this specific regime of power that intends to strengthen hegemony through the otherization of Muslim women that we characterize this pedagogy as colonial.

Secularism is at work in these demands to unveil and to conform to the majority norm (Asad 2003; Fernando 2014b) as we detail below, but we argue that coloniality is the adequate conceptual framework to capture what is at stake in these everyday interactions. Informed by the dominant approach in postcolonial studies, we refer to coloniality as enduring patterns of power and otherization that survive colonialism and display specific features such as mimicry (Bhabha 1994) or orientalism (Said 1979). Coloniality is generally understood as the pervasive use of racial categorizations (articulated with gender categories) to exercise power (Lugones 2007; Quijano 2000). In the case of France, the coloniality of veiling bans has also been understood as a form of historical continuity with the colonial battles over the veil (Bentouhami 2018; Fanon 1959; Karimi 2023). Here we understand coloniality, following Homi Bhabha, as a modality of discourse which articulates forms of differences with the aim/result of producing colonial subjects, i.e. subject peoples. In this vein, pedagogies of coloniality, we argue, do not aim at exclusion (from certain spaces such as schools, swimming pools, or workplaces) but rather at submission, that is the (appearance of) acceptance of a subordinate status. We note important similarities between what Bhabha describes as the working of colonial powers on the colonized (Bhabha 1994), and the interactions recounted by hijabi women. We identify and document three features of the pedagogy of coloniality in the everyday of Muslim women: essentialization, scrutiny and mimicry.

Essentialization, scrutiny and mimicry

Essentialization is at the heart of the racialization of religion and constitutes a central mechanism of Islamophobia (Meer and Modood 2012; Sayyid 2014). It is particularly relevant for veiled Muslim women. Indeed, the presence of the veil operates an intense process of racialization and essentialization as Juliette Galonnier’s work on white converts demonstrates (Galonnier 2021a; 2021b). The hijab constitutes such a strong “interactional hook” enabling racialization that white converts are not perceived as pertaining to the racial majority group by their interlocutors. We observe similar processes by which our interviewees’ religious identity is essentialized by their interlocutor, a process which opens the door to arbitrary demands and treatment.

Scrutinizing veiled Muslim women’s motives to wear the veil is a consistent element of the interactions we analyze. Indeed, Bhabha, following Fanon, notes that the colonized, the stereotyped other, inspires both phobia and fetishism on the part of the colonizer, that is an ambivalent reaction that translate into a scopic drive (Bhabha 1994). This ambiguous situation has also been captured by bell hooks as a desire to “eat the other” (hooks 1992). The metaphor is enlightening of the complexity of the colonial regime to which racialized women are submitted: they are supposed to remain an Other, but still conform to hegemonic desire. This ambivalent situation of rejection and proximity allows for the violation of their intimacy. Indeed, hijabi women are often subjected to intrusive scrutiny: their appearance (type of veiling or hairdo, type of dress or hat) is commented upon, and their inner motives are questioned. Submitted to a white script (Khan 2022), they are summoned to explain and justify their beliefs and religious practices. This scopic drive is all the more emboldened by the discourse on secularism that is weaponized against hijabi women. Indeed, Mayanthi Fernando analyzes what she calls “the cunning of secularism” (Fernando 2014b) by which the normative discourse of secularism compulsively enjoins hijabi women to “unveil” their motivations for their wearing of the veil. Fernando focuses on religion and sexuality, showing how the French secular framework makes it possible for non-Muslims to question veiled Muslim women about their sexuality and about their religious feelings, both topics which should, under secular rule, remain private. However, we observe in our fieldwork similar questioning of religious motives in Switzerland where the discourse of secularism is not enshrined in the legal framework or national identity as it is in France. Hence, we argue that coloniality shapes this scrutiny of hijabi women’s motives as much as secularism does.

Finally, central to pedagogies of coloniality is the promise of inclusion if one agrees to assimilate through mimicry. Bhabha famously insists on the process of mimicry as characterizing colonial discourse. Bhabha’s concept describes a form of cultural imitation that occurs when the colonized adopts and imitates the cultural practices and behaviors of their colonizers. This imitation is often seen as a survival strategy, a way for the colonized to navigate the dominant culture and acquire a measure of power and agency. However, the notion of colonial mimicry also refers to the will to anglicize colonial subjects in Bhabha’s analysis, which reveals the desire for a reformed, recognizable difference. It “is also the sign of the inappropriate, however, a difference or recalcitrance which coheres the dominant strategic function of colonial power, intensifies surveillance and poses an immanent threat to both ‘normalized’ knowledges and disciplinary power” (Bhabha 1994, 86). We identify instances of mimicry as hijabi women are asked to reform their appearance to make it more in line with the majority norms of femininity, while they are, simultaneously, assigned to a religious and racial difference presented as impossible to recognize or to normalize. The appearance of negotiations reveals the workings of the coloniality of power: asking the other to mimic and conform to the identity of the majority, while simultaneously denying this very possibility.

Negotiating submission

These three types of pedagogies of coloniality aim to negotiate the explicit submission of hijabi women to the dominant majority norm by the removal of their hijab or its replacement by a turban. Indeed, since Islamic veiling is not prohibited in the context of the interactions, the demand to unveil or veil differently is presented, alternatively, as a favor that is asked, a preference of the interlocutor, a sign of “respect” and, ultimately, a requisite to gain access (to a school, a job position etc.). In some cases, our interviewees yield to the pressure (and, sometimes, regret it afterwards), in others they refuse to yield, and pay the cost associated with nonconformity. Hence, defining these interactions as negotiations does not mean that both parties enjoy similar power in the interaction. Rather, it aims at emphasizing that members of the majority group cannot use the power of the law but wield the power of their social status to enforce an arbitrary demand. This demand is, we argue, one of submission. While some forms of othering of Muslim women are predicated on the idea that they don’t belong to the nation (such as when they are addressed as if they do not understand the national language) (Bendixsen 2013), pedagogies of coloniality occur principally when hijabi women are recognized as members of the national community, not as radically and racially others. We observe that in these instances, hijabis are asked to conform to norms of “proper” gendered emancipation and gender identity, to reform their appearance so that their difference is “authorized.” In that sense, negotiating submission is not so much about producing otherness/exclusion from the national boundaries but about producing gendered and raced hierarchies of feminine subjects by extorting a “compromise.” Indeed, what is asked of hijabi women is to compromise on their beliefs and subjectivity in order to access relatively more privileged positions in the racial and gendered social hierarchy, in ways reminiscent of the processes described by Bhabha about the colonized elite.

Methods

This research is based on qualitative semi-directive interviews with veiled Muslim women (N = 52) living in France and Switzerland. In France we interviewed women in Paris and its surroundings as well as in a middle-sized city in the southern part of France. In Switzerland we interviewed women in French-speaking cantons (Geneva and Vaud) as well as in a German-speaking canton (Zürich). The interviews were made between April 2021 and October 2023. Interviews lasted between one and three-and-a-half hours. They were coded with discourse analysis software (MaxQDA). Interviewees were selected as a targeted sampling (through non-profit organizations, Facebook networks, and snowball sampling) with the aim of prioritizing citizens (rather than permanent residents or work migrants) which means that the majority of the sample is less than 35 years old. While the vast majority were of migrant descent, or migrant themselves, their perceived race or ethnicity varied: former eastern Yugoslavia, North Africa, East Africa, West Africa, Middle-East and white converts. Consequently, their social class background was usually lower and middle class. However, a majority of interviewees had a higher education background or were currently university students, on the path of potential upward social mobility. This mobility was nonetheless clearly hampered by the wearing of the hijab. The interviewees who were not students were unemployed, self-employed and a minority were employed (e.g. lawyer, social worker, IT engineer, medical record clerk, etc.). Most of the interviewees were single and without children at the time of the interview. We used an inductive coding that focused on two main groups of questions: (1) how the interviewees experienced discrimination and (2) the resources they were able to mobilize or not to cope with it (legal recourse, leveraging community knowledge). Here we mainly used coding related to experiences of discrimination once they started wearing the veil, particularly focusing on entries concerning specific experiences in school and workplace settings.

France and Switzerland offer contrasting contexts in terms of the legal regulation of Islamic forms of veiling. Indeed, France has been at the forefront of forms of legal prohibition: first in 2004 with a legal ban on conspicuous religious signs in public schools, which targeted the hijab, then in 2010 a law banning the hiding of one’s face in public spaces, which targeted the niqab. These stringent laws, which followed several instances of judicial decisions, were complemented in 2016 by a law authorizing private businesses to forbid veiling by their employees, especially if the latter are in contact with clientele. Judicial interpretation of the 1905 law organizing the separation of State and Church and the related duty of state neutrality of civil servants has made it impossible for veiled Muslim women to be public servants, and in 2021, an additional law made it impossible for public services or public entities to contract with businesses which hire hijabi women (Hennette-Vauchez 2022). Hence, both the jurisprudence and the legislative framework prohibiting veiling have proliferated in France and have severely limited the schooling and job opportunities of hijabi girls and women. What is more, the color-blind French republican model has proved adversarial to efficient anti-discrimination policies, leaving veiled Muslim women without much recourse (Escafré-Dublet, Guiraudon, and Talpin 2023).

The situation in Switzerland is both remarkably similar and different. First, legally speaking, Switzerland was a front-runner in banning the hijab: in 1996, the ministry of education of the Canton of Geneva forbade a teacher in a public school, a White Swiss convert, to wear her hijab at work (on the school premises). Her appeal of the decision was dismissed by the Swiss Federal Administrative Court, and later, in 2001, by the European Court of Human Rights (in the case Dahlab v. Switzerland). In 2019 the Canton of Geneva adopted by referendum a law on secularism which forbids visible religious signs for civil servants and elected representatives, making the canton exceptional in comparison with the rest of Switzerland. In March 2021, the wearing of full Islamic veiling – or rather, as the popular initiative introduced by the extreme right-wing party UDC labelled it, the “hiding of one’s face” – was adopted by referendum with a slim majority (51.2 per cent). During the media campaign on this initiative, full-veiled Muslim women were portrayed as potential terrorists and as holding un-Swiss values. Hence, while there have been many fewer legal developments focusing on the hijab, Switzerland does display similar features of Islamophobia as France and other European countries (Lépinard, Sarrasin, and Gianettoni 2021) Importantly, there are no legal prohibitions on veiled Muslim women working (except in the Geneva canton’s public service), studying in school and at university, and swimming in public pools in Switzerland; however, this possibility is not a right enshrined in law – a crucial difference our Swiss interviewees were keenly aware of – and practically speaking, the weakness of the Swiss labor code and of its anti-discrimination provisions makes it very easy for employers to discriminate against Muslim women who veil.

In both contexts, hijabi women narrate in interviews their constant anticipation of discrimination and careful planning of encounters with potential employers or public authorities, at least as much as the relative legal uncertainty allows them to do. For example, all our interviewees applying on the job market chose to put their picture on their CV, as a warning to future employers that they wear the veil. These strategies aim to prevent situations during recruitment where they would be asked intrusive questions about their religious practices and their beliefs.

Essentializing religious belief

The process of racialization of Islam has been carefully documented and conceptualized in different national contexts (Choudhury 2022; El-Tayeb 2011; Garner and Selod 2015; Razack 2008; Selod and Embrick 2013). Part of this process is the essentialization of Islam whereby a religious identity and belief is constituted as a transmissible, and immutable individual characteristic, and whereby selected traits (excessive religiosity, dangerousness, patriarchy …) are defined, by the dominant/majority group, as characterizing the group as a whole (Said 1979). Converts who visibly show their Islamic faith, in particular women through veiling, experience a similar essentialization of their religious identity (Galonnier 2021b). Interviewees recount episodes that illustrate essentialization when their bodies are marked as inherently Muslim and religious. This becomes apparent when they don’t wear the hijab, but another non-religious garment (a winter hat, an African turban hairdo, a long coat) is considered a religious attire. The knowledge, or suspicion, that they are Muslim contaminates their entire attire, which is perceived through the prism of religion. Their interlocutors interpret these non-religious attires as religiously saturated because they are worn by Muslim women. On Muslim women’s bodies, any garment thus becomes a religious signifier, which signification however is not theirs to decide. The controversy and prohibition on the wearing of the abaya (a long coat) in French public school in fall 2023 illustrates this process of essentialization by which only young girls previously identified as Muslim are prohibited to enter the school premises on the grounds that their attire is religious, when the same attire, worn by a white student, it is not considered religious.¹ In this process, Muslim women are deprived of the possibility to self-define the meaning of what they wear, and are essentialized as Muslims.

We trace this process with two examples. First, that of Zine² and her struggle to assert her own definition of the meaning of her turban. Zine is in her early twenties, she was born in Switzerland to black Egyptian parents and she wore her veil during high school without encountering problems. She studies literature at university and during her studies she applied to become a temporary auxiliary in public primary schools in the Canton of Geneva. While the Canton forbids the wearing of the headscarf for teachers in a permanent position, auxiliary personnel are not employed through public servant work contracts. What is more, Zine was careful to wear a turban and not a hijab. She sent her CV, including a picture of herself wearing her turban, followed the 2-day training session without experiencing problems, and then started her 2-day internship in a primary school to validate her training. After a day-and-a-half of the internship, she was summoned by the head of the school who asked her to remove her turban. Her refusal to conform led to her firing and made it impossible for her to validate her training and work in any further primary schools as temporary personnel. After this incident, she made a discrimination claim to the local Ombudsman. During our interview she recalled her quite violent argument with the head of school:

She told me “if you are Muslim and you wear that hairdo, it is not ok.” I answered that to wear an African hairdo does not necessitate being Muslim, and that would mean that she would only accept this hairdo for atheists, for example.

Later during the processing of her claim with the Ombudsman, Zine was accused by the head of the school of cunning, of hiding her religious identity and therefore the true meaning of her hairdo. The essentialization here proceeds via the reduction of Zine’s identities and personality to a supposed fixed attribute: her Muslimness. One of the first features of the negotiation of submission is therefore about the power to define the meaning of one’s appearance, and the meaning of Muslimness.

The second example is the story of Elena. Elena is a 45-year-old white woman who converted to Islam in her thirties. She is the elementary school teacher in the Canton of Geneva whose case spurred the first judicial decision on the hijab in Switzerland. She started to wear the veil in the early 1990s and did not encounter any problems with her colleagues at the school or with the parents. In 1995, following the filming of a news report at her school where she appeared with her veil, a controversy broke out concerning her supposed infringement upon secularism, which resulted in her notification that she must remove her veil if she wanted to continue working as a teacher in the public schools of the canton. Elena filed an administrative complaint, lost her case (appealed and lost at the Federal Administrative Court), and was forced to remove her veil while performing her work. A few years later, she was once again questioned by the head of the cantonal public school system, following an anonymous report for nonconformity with her obligation to unveil while in school.

Once, I was summoned [by her superior] because I was wearing my scarf as a headband, but all my hair was visible. They told me “no, but your hair is not visible enough.” I am not allowed to wear any head covering that hides my hair. They said that for me, a cap or a hat does not have the same meaning as for someone else. For me, it’s a tool to hide my hair while for someone else, it may be a fashion accessory.

Elena was from then on forbidden to wear a hat on the school premises, an exceptional administrative rule, whose legality is highly suspect, and which again further extends the reach of the prohibition imposed on her to remove her veil at work. An exceptional rule is imposed on Elena because her faith defines her essentially and totally, in a way that contaminates everything she wears. The term “submission” also seems relevant to qualify here the relationship between the public authorities and Elena. What is permissible for others becomes forbidden for her. Indeed, if Elena was initially prohibited from wearing a veil, nothing stipulated that she could not wear a head covering. This second prohibition was invented when the authorities suspected that Elena had not totally yielded to the prohibition and that, like Zine, she was using a headband to bypass the prohibition on veiling. Elena was suspected of cunning, much like Zine. Her Muslim faith is understood and constructed by the administration as an immutable characteristic, the meaning of which is not Elena’s to decide but is ascribed to her. The scopic drive of the authorities of the school performs an ambivalent disciplining of Elena’s body: it scans her appearance to make sure she conforms to the injunction to make undetectable her religious identity, while at the same time it interprets non-religious attire as potentially loaded with Muslimness and hence unacceptable. Hence Elena’s conformity is never totally established, her appearance is always suspicious and the negotiation to submit can always be re-initiated by the school authorities.

Scrutinizing motives

A second pattern which emerged from our interviews is the intrusive scrutiny to which veiled Muslim women are subjected by their interlocutors. Their motivations to veil are surveilled, their appearance is scanned and assessed, their other potential religious practices are scrutinized as well. Mayanthi Fernando has aptly described how secularism itself is what allows members of the majority group to question veiled Muslim women about their religious practices (Fernando 2014b). We find a similar impulse to surveil and patrol appearances in order to enforce conformity in the colonial scopic drive described by Homi Bhabha (Bhabha 1994). The scopic drive manifests itself in the looks our interviewees get in public spaces and public transportation (Bendixsen 2013). Hafsa, a Swiss national whose parents immigrated from Tunisia, and a teacher in a private secondary school, is in her late twenties. She recalls her experience encountering inquisitive looks when she started to wear a turban:

Sometimes people look at me a lot. A lot in the bus, in the tram. I take a lot of public transportation; they stare at me. I avoid wearing black turbans. I avoid everything black, I know it scares people so I avoid it, but still, sometimes they look fixedly. Or sometimes I would go to a place where you don’t see my kind of person, and people would stare. I would go to bars, would order a sparkling water. And yes, people would stare.

If the scopic drive is limited to unusual ogling in the anonymity of the public space, in other settings – job interviews, interviews for higher education programs, professional meetings – it can morph into inquisitive questioning about veiling and intimacy. Aïcha, a PR manager for a Paris-based community organization in her late twenties who also started her own business in North African arts and crafts, remembers her interview with the director of the master’s program in international relations where she had been successfully admitted:

So, even though I was admitted he asked me during the interview “and so what do you plan on doing with your veil afterwards?” […] I answered, “I don’t understand your question,” so he said “well, when we select a cohort we need a high rate of employment after the master’s, and between you and me, with your veil you will not go very far.” So that’s what he said on my veil, and then, he told me, almost gentlemanly, that for him, well the color of the veil matched my cheeks, so he said, “well yours at least it’s relatively cute.”

Hence, during a formal interview, the head of the master’s program surveys Aïcha’s appearance: he asks Aïcha personal questions about her attire and her plans for how she will dress in the future, and he makes remarks on the respectability of her femininity as he comments on the color of her veil and on her veiling style in a most sexist way. He poses himself as the judge of Aïcha’s adequate appearance and her conformity with norms of femininity. Interestingly, here the argued motive for this inquisitive questioning is the reputation of the master’s program rather than secularism, as pointed to by Fernando (2014b). This rationale illustrates both the very gendered nature of the impulse to scrutinize veiled Muslim women’s femininity, and its pliability depending on the context: when secularism can be used, it is, but other arguments can work just as well to bolster authority claims over veiled Muslim women’s privacy. Moreover, age also plays an important role in the infantilization inflicted upon Aïcha during this interaction, through presumed benevolence and advice (“between you and me”).

Scrutiny can also go beyond inquisitive questioning and remarks about one’s appearance, extending to intrusive questioning about inner religious beliefs, practices and motivations to veil. Taïz is a 20-year-old woman with Yemeni parents who immigrated first to the USA and then to Switzerland. At the time of the interview she was studying for a bachelor’s degree in social work in order to work as an auxiliary caregiver in preschool, and she needed to do an internship to validate her diploma. There is no legal prohibition on veiling in the Vaud canton where she works. During her first interview with the director of the preschool, Taïz asked her if her veil wouldn’t “cause any trouble” with the administration and received a positive answer. She could wear her veil during her two days of probationary period. While other candidates for this position are usually only interviewed once, Taïz was called back for a second and third interview once she had already started working, during which she was asked intimate questions about her practice of Islam:

She [the HR manager] asked me if it [the veil] had any religious significance for me. I said, “Well, yeah, it does” and didn’t say anything else. And then she asked me, “Do you have any other religious practices?” I didn’t know what she meant. I said “no, well, nothing special.” I was confused, I was standing there, I didn’t understand what she wanted me to say. […] After that, I received an email, in the evening, where she asked me if I could come to her office the next morning. I went to her office and then she said “So, as you can probably imagine, I called you to talk to you about the veil.” And then she said, “I’d like you to tell me why you wear it. What made you decide to wear it? What does it mean for you?” etc.

What is at stake in these interactions is the intimate meaning Taïz gives to the veil, rather than the veil itself. Not only does the HR manager want to know how Taïz practices her faith, she also feels entitled to ask about the deep and private meaning of Taïz’s faith. This attempt to measure Taïz’s level of religiosity is presented as a prerequisite to evaluate if Taïz is fit for her job, which she has already started to accomplish, and if she is compatible with a majority norm of proper behavior. We may infer from the dialogue that the veil needs to matter to Taïz, as the questioning suggests, so that asking her to take it off becomes a way to negotiate her submission. The pedagogical dimension of these negotiations to submit becomes apparent in both cases: Aïcha and Taiz are questioned, and they feel like they don’t know the proper, expected answer to satisfy their interlocutor. They are placed in a position of ignorance because no answer will be deemed correct.

Similarly to Taïz, as Zine’s story unfolds further, she is also the object of intrusive questioning about her private life. The head of the school scrutinizes Zine’s motives for wearing the turban because Zine, who is black and is aware that hijabs are banned for public servants and especially for teachers in public schools in the Geneva canton, has chosen to wear a turban and to present it as an African hairdo rather than as religious attire. In a letter she wrote as a complaint to the Ombudsman, Zine narrates precisely the incident:

She [the head of school] continued to say that headwear is forbidden. I told her my turban was not headwear but an African hairdo. She changed her tone and suddenly asked to see my hair and started asking more and more personal questions, asking if I had capillary problems. I did not answer those private questions. She was more and more aggressive and high pitched […] when I asked her to talk to me politely, she said I was arrogant.

The head of the school feels entitled to ask Zine about potential capillary problems and even to ask her to make her hair visible, to become available for the scopic drive. Zine’s motives to wear a hairdo are called into question, regarded as inappropriate and she is subjected to an intense interrogation. What is more, when she attempts to assert the boundaries of her privacy, by remaining silent about her personal motives and asking her interlocutor to return to a proper mode of polite communication, she is deemed arrogant. This characterization conveys the power relation at stake as Zine is portrayed as out of line and out of her supposed place as she tries to get respect. Zine’s resistance to the intrusive scrutiny of the head of the school, and the anger and reproach it triggers, illustrates that compliance to scrutiny is expected as part of the negotiation to submit to the majority’s will.

Mimicry: submitting to the majority norm

The third feature of negotiating submission is that of mimicry. The demand to mimic the majority can take different forms. It can take the form of literal mimicry – asking the other to look like the majority by changing her appearance – or behavioral mimicry – asking the other to show compliance in behavior. Mimicry is a request to abandon one’s identity features and beliefs that are marked by an improper difference, in order to give the appearance of conformity with the majority norm. What is asked for is conformity, at the price of an effort or a sacrifice, the renouncing of one’s right (to wear the veil). Indeed, as stated before, these negotiations occur in the absence of legal rules prohibiting veiling. Mimicry is therefore a demand that hijabi women renounce their individual rights in order to show loyalty to the majority, to the nation and its supposed core values, like secularism.

As Zine’s interaction unfolds, the injunction to colonial mimicry takes a concrete meaning:

[The head of the school] told me I should adopt a hairdo like hers, showing me her blond straight hair. I answered, to confront her with the impertinence of what she had just said, if she meant she preferred I adopt a white woman hairdo to an African woman hairdo, and what was her problem with Africa.

Zine is asked to demonstrate her willingness to whiten her appearance by adopting the same standards of self-presentation as the white head of the school. Her refusal to submit to the negotiation casts her for her white interlocutor as arrogant, as she is unwilling to make her appearance conform to an appropriate difference in the eye of the power holder. Here we are reminded of Bhabha’s analysis of mimicry as “a complex strategy of reform, regulation and discipline which ‘appropriates’ the Other as it visualizes power” (Bhabha 1994, 86). Taïz was also ultimately asked to change her appearance. The negotiation between the head of the pre-school and Taïz continued in the following way:

The same day around 5 pm, she [the director of the preschool] told me “Here at the school, the way you wear your veil, it doesn’t work for us. If you want to stay, you have to wear it as a turban.” She explained to me that there was another girl who wore it that way in the nursery and that it didn’t cause any trouble. She said, “we are a laïque [secular] nursery, we don’t want to shock the parents,” while I knew that none of the parents had complained about it. Then she explained to me that, in summer, I might be hot because of the way I wear my veil. At that moment, I wanted to laugh, I couldn’t believe it. […]. And then she explained to me that I could wear a turtleneck with the turban […]

The deployment of a multitude of arguments that have no link with each other (secularism and hot weather) show a common objective of negotiating Taïz’s conformity to a certain appearance, that she mimic a “recognizable Other, as a subject of a difference that is almost the same, but not quite” to borrow Bhabha’s words (1994, 86). The negotiation to remove the veil, as in the case of Aïcha mentioned earlier, involves apparent benevolence or advice given for Taïz’s well-being, a posture predicated on the age difference between the two protagonists. Here again age interacts with gender to amplify and enforce a hierarchy.

The intent to force hijabi women to demonstrate allegiance to the majority norm (often termed as respecting secularism) is clearly expressed by some of their interlocutors. Bakhta is a French 18-year-old woman whose parents immigrated from Algeria to France. Due to an illness, she had to miss several years of high school before finally re-enrolling. The stakes are high, as she is over the compulsory school age, and it is therefore up to the school to choose whether to accept her. In her interview, she recalled her meeting with a school director about her potential enrollment. Bakhta is aware of the law that allows her to enter the building with her headscarf as long as she is not enrolled as a high school student and presents herself with a headscarf for the interview.

When I arrived, the woman [the principal], who was a little bit old, welcomed me. And when I was about to enter her office, she said to me: “Oh yes, but the veil, on the other hand, you will have to remove it” [to enter her office]. I asked why, I was shocked, I said “Why?” She said, “It’s out of respect … .” And I was so scared. I was so afraid of not finding a school. (…) I took it off, and I then cried in the corridor. Then she welcomed me back, and she had this big smile, great. […] I felt so bad. And after that I tried to talk to her [to ask her why], I said to myself, at least I can get something [from her]. She said to me, “No, but you understand, afterwards the other students will wonder why.” She was giving me totally incoherent examples.

The director herself is aware that the veil is allowed in this type of situation but imposes a moral argument without justifying it. “Out of respect”: this terse explanation conveys a pedagogical intent. Bakhta is taught that she must accept authority, even when it does not have legal legitimacy. Far from elaborating a justification, the director does not explain for what or for whom respect is warranted. Rather, what is demanded is unconditional acceptance of the arbitrary nature of the demand and loyalty to the authority and to the secular rule. Bakhta must outwardly express adherence to the majority norm, she must outwardly mimic the norm and erase her difference, making it palatable for the majority, and she must renounce her rights.

Conclusion

We have proposed to analyze instances of discrimination experienced by veiled women in France and Switzerland as negotiations of submission. We have argued that during these negotiations, pedagogies of coloniality are deployed to pressure veiled Muslim women to submit to altering their appearance and displaying adhesion to the majority norms. These pedagogies exhibit three distinct features, which may manifest together or separately, but which all serve to objectify veiled Muslim women as the “Other”: the essentialization of religion; the intrusion of scrutiny into the intimate lives of Muslim women, and the deliberate efforts to coerce them into outwardly adhering to – mimicking – dominant norms of appearance and behavior. Hence, these pedagogies of coloniality represent a tangible collection of practices designed to negotiate the submission of veiled Muslim women when no legal rule forces them to unveil. It is crucial to note, however, that the decision to conform or resist often reveals the strategies for survival employed by Muslim women, rather than an internalization of these pedagogies. What is asked is expressive or outward conformity, a demand that produces otherization. All the Muslim women we interviewed expressed a sense of unfair treatment about the way they were subjected to these dynamics.

To conclude, we note that interestingly, while France and Switzerland don’t have similar legal regulations for the Islamic veil, we collected similar stories in both countries about the lack of clear rights protecting veiled Muslim women when applying for jobs or when embarking on specific undergraduate training which necessitates internships, etc. What is more, while both countries do not share similar colonial histories, the striking similarities in the pedagogies of coloniality used in both contexts to coerce veiled Muslim women into taking off their veils suggest transnational productions and travels of coloniality and of Islamophobia. In all these cases, and in these different legal settings, we can also identify gender, age and social status, as transversal and crucial dimensions of negotiating submission.

Detailing these negotiations of submission, we hope to contribute to a more precise understanding of ordinary Islamophobia and its coloniality, as everyday interactions become sites to harness the power of public discourse against veiling, of Islamophobia, of secularism, of national belonging, and of gender emancipation against hijabi women, in order to maintain their place at the bottom of social hierarchies.

Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) through a grant (project LEGALVEIL n° 100017_192229) that made the research upon which this article is based possible. We also acknowledge the contribution of Maroua Sbyea to fieldwork and coding of the data for this article. We deeply thank for generous discussions and feedback Graziella Moraes Silva, Hanane Karimi, Hourya Bentouhami, Marylène Lieber, Amélie Barras and Roshan Jahangeer. Finally, we thank Marwan Mohammed as well as the Geneva-based Intermigra seminar for providing opportunities to present earlier versions of this article.

Ethic approval

The collection and archiving of data were given approval by the SNSF. Informed consent for the interview was obtained through a written form, specifying the aims of the research, archiving modalities, strict anonymity and confidentiality, and the possibility to withdraw at any time from the research. Transcripts were fully anonymized and the file containing personal data (first names and contacts) is secured with the PI of the research and will be kept for 5 years, after which it will be destroyed.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Swiss National Science Foundation [Grant Number n°100017_192229].

Notes

1 Anti-racist and feminist organizations have denounced the racial profiling inherent to the identification of pupils who wear abayas, see for example the Grenoble Feminist Collective, https://cric-grenoble.info/infos-locales/article/contre-l-interdiction-de-la-abaya-pour-l-auto-determination-de-toustes-3159 or the Muslim women’s organization Lallab, https://www.lallab.org/communique-lallab-denonce-la-chasse-aux-abayas-du-gouvernement/.

2 All the interviews are fully anonymized, using fictional names.