scholarly journals The French Veil Ban: A Transnational Legal Feminist Approach

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sital Kalantry
Keyword(s):  
Gender Equality ◽  
Prime Minister ◽  
Terrorist Attack ◽  
Muslim Women ◽  
The Body ◽  
Religious Clothing

After the gruesome terrorist attack that killed eighty-four people in Nice, many beach towns in France began to ban Muslim women from wearing the "burkini" on beaches. The burkini, which was created by an Australian designer, is modest swimwear that covers the body and hair. The Nice attack occurred on the heels of a series of attacks in France. The timing of the French burkini ban suggests it was targeting Muslims due to the anger over the attacks. The argument that burkinis are not hygienic is a fig leaf for other more pernicious justifications. Others argue that religious garb generally contravenes the French vision of secularism. Another line of attack against the burkini relates to gender equality. For example, the French Prime Minister argues that the burkini reinforces the "enslavement of women." In this article, I will focus on arguments that justify bans on Muslim women's religious clothing on the basis that they are oppressive to women.Published: The French Veil Ban: A Transnational Legal Feminist Approach, 46 University of Baltimore Law Review 201 (2017).

Is the Law Empowering or Patronizing Women? The Dilemma in the French Burqa Decision as the Tip of the Secular Law Iceberg

2011 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 315-333 ◽  
Author(s):  
Noemi Gal-Or
Keyword(s):  
Gender Equality ◽  
Gender Discrimination ◽  
Muslim Women ◽  
The Body ◽  
Critical Study ◽  
Entire Body ◽  
Religious Expression ◽  
Female Population ◽  
The Veil ◽  
Mainstream Society

The article analyses a French seminal legal award which served as a stepping stone in the recent French debate concerning the legislation banning women from wearing the Burqa headscarf in public. Under this wording—Burqa—a special style of the hijab—a scarf donned by Muslim women—is being targeted. It represents a more extreme form of covering: The Burqa is worn by the Pashtun women of Pakistan and in Afghanistan and covers the body from head to toes in a continuous piece of fabric, whereas the veil banned in France also includes the niqab which may or may not cover the entire body, and allows visibility of the eyes but not the entire face. In the relevant debate, gender equality has been the banner hoisted by court and parliamentarians purporting to protect women against the unsettling impact of the Burqa. This article represents a critical study of this claim. The article describes and analyses the ambivalent tenor of the Burqa Decision and arrives at two main conclusions. First, having distinguished two key values addressed (directly and indirectly) by the Conseil d’État—equality and freedom—the article concludes that although hailed as defying gender discrimination, the judgment must also be construed as contributing to inequality among women. The award remains just as unclear in regards to the protection of freedom of religious expression suggesting that women equality offers only one among other explanations for this ruling. Second, the article’s analysis applies several feminist approaches to the Burqa Decision and finds that the pluralist feminist discourse results in different and inconsistent potential resolutions to the case. The upshot is that the Burqa Decision, which was taken as a strong condemnation of a practise said to be symbolising the subjugation of the female to male domination, was confirming a view espoused largely by Western secular women. In doing so, and given the approval by France’s mainstream society, the award appears to have empowered this particular segment in the female population. At the same time however, the tribunal also stated the obvious namely, that gender equality has been serving as a powerful tool in the adjudicative struggle between secularism and religion. While women’s struggle for gender equality, especially in politics and the economy, has been protracted and not yet fully achieved, the comparatively brief and hurried commitment to gender equality at the intersection of religion and secularism, suggest that gender equality was not the only priority on the adjudicator’s mind, hence is not necessarily the ultimate winner of this award.

Pakistan in 2014

Asian Survey ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-59
Author(s):  
Aqil Shah ◽  
Bushra Asif
Keyword(s):  
Prime Minister ◽  
Terrorist Attack ◽  
Political Crisis

A year after assuming power, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s government faced a political crisis fomented by the pro-military opposition leader Imran Khan, who mobilized his supporters to protest alleged electoral rigging in the 2013 poll. Khan had to call off the protests after the Pakistani Taliban’s grisly terrorist attack on an army-run school in retaliation for the army’s offensive against them in North Waziristan.

Gendered Secularization and the Body Policing of Muslim Women

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raissa Killoran
Keyword(s):  
Muslim Women ◽  
The State ◽  
The Body ◽  
Religious Expression ◽  
Women's Bodies ◽  
Cultural Symbols ◽  
Religious Symbols ◽  
Female Bodies ◽  
The Many ◽  
A Site

The many usages of the term ‘secularism’ have generated an ambiguity in the word; as a political guise, it may be used to engender anti-religious fervor. Particularly in regards to veiling among female Muslim adherents, the attainment of a secular state and touting of the necessity of dismantling religious symbols have functioned as linguistic shields. By calling a “burka ban” necessary or even egalitarian secularization, legislators employ ‘secularization’ as jargon for political ends, enacting a stance of supremacy under the semblance of progress. Secularization has come to function as a political tool - in the name of it, governments may prescribe which cultural symbols are normative and which are of ‘other’ cultures or religious origins. As such, the identification of some religious symbols as foreign and others as normative is a usage of secularization for normalization of dominant religious expression. In this, there is an implicit neocolonialism; by imposing standards of cultural normalcy which are definitively nonMuslim, such policies attempt to divorce Muslims from Islam.  Further, I intend to investigate the gendered aspect of secularization politics. By critiquing clothing and body policing of women, I will demonstrate how secularization projects use the female body and dress as a site for display. By rendering the female physically emblematic of the honor and virtue of an ‘other’ culture, those enacting secularization norms target women’s bodies to act as visual exhibitions of the dominant culture’s hegemony. Here, we see gendered secularization at work - female bodies become controlled by the antireligious zeal of the state, while the state carries out this control on the predicate that it is the religious group enacting unjust control. As such, the policing of female Muslim bodies is symbolic of the policing of Islam as a whole; it acts as an illustration of an imposed, gendered secularization project.

Peranan NGO Islam dalam Menangani Agenda Feminisme di Malaysia

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 96-112
Author(s):  
Norsaleha Mohd. Salleh
Keyword(s):  
Action Research ◽  
Gender Equality ◽  
Muslim Women

The aim of the study is to survey the roles of Wanita Ikatan Muslimin Malaysia (Wanita ISMA) (Women of Muslim Association of Malaysia – ISMA Women), an Islamic NGO which efforts are directly involved in repudiation of the feminist agenda in Malaysia. Feminism movement is among the agenda of the enemies of Islam aims to mutilate Muslim women’s personality and identity. It comes in the forms of intellectual invasion, call for freedom, gender equality and humanity. Such slogans successfully created deception and delusion in the eyes of Muslim women like an oasis in the desert till they are viewed as true and evident. The study used action research. ABSTRAK Kajian ini bertujuan meninjau peranan Wanita Ikatan Muslimin Malaysia (Wanita Isma), sebuah NGISMA, kesamarataan, Agenda, kebebasan, feminisme, kempenO Islam yang terlibat secara langsung dalam usaha menolak agenda feminisme di Malaysia. Gerakan feminisme merupakan antara agenda musuh bertujuan untuk merosakkan keperibadian dan jati diri wanita muslimah. Ia datang dalam bentuk serangan pemikiran, seruan kebebasan, kesamarataan gender dan kemanusiaan. Slogan ini berjaya menipu dan mengaburkan mata wanita muslimah sehingga dilihat benar dan nyata seumpama fatamorgana. Kajian ini menggunakan pendekatan kajian tindakan sebagai metodologi dengan menggunakan Model Kajian Tindakan Kemmis & McTaggart. Kajian ini dilakukan berdasarkan empat langkah tindakan iaitu mereflek, merancang, bertindak dan memerhati. Dapatan menunjukkan penolakan ini ditonjolkan melalui Kempen Selamatkan Ummah (KSU), Kempen Tolak Comango, Kempen Muliamu Wanita Kerana Islam, Usrah Wanita , Fiqh Wanita serta melalui seminar dan konvensyen yang diadakan dari semasa ke semasa. Usaha penolakan juga diketengahkan melalui penulisan buku dan kenyataan balas terhadap golongan feminist dalam laman web wanita ISMA, laman buka buku, media ISMAweb serta media liberal seperti MalaysiaKini, Malaysia Insider dan lain-lain. Usaha yang dilakukan ini bagi memberikan kesedaran kepada masyarakat Islam di Malaysia agar semakin peka dan sensitif bagi sama-sama mempertahankan jatidiri dan keperibadian wanita muslimah daripada terpengaruh dengan agenda golongan feminis.    

Two Kinds of Citizens

2021 ◽  
pp. 79-85
Author(s):  
Ken R. Crane
Keyword(s):  
Terrorist Attack ◽  
Cumulative Effect ◽  
Muslim Women ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
San Bernardino ◽  
The Us ◽  
Iraqi Women ◽  
Religion And Gender ◽  
And Gender

The framing of Arabs and Muslims as potential threats, particularly in the aftermath of the terrorist attack in San Bernardino, increased the vulnerability of Iraqi Muslim women to violent and hostile reactions in public spaces. Orientalist discourses have painted Arabs and Muslims with the brush of incompatibility with US values, in which Arab and Muslim women are racialized as a nonwhite racial Other. The cumulative effect of this intersectionality of religion and gender and public harassment resulted in Muslim Iraqi women questioning their full belonging in the US, leading some to ask, “Are there two kinds of citizens?”

scholarly journals Gender, gestation and ectogenesis: self-determination for pregnant people ahead of artificial wombs

2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (11) ◽  
pp. 787-788
Author(s):  
Claire Horn
Keyword(s):  
Gender Equality ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
The Body ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Sex And Gender ◽  
Biological Approach ◽  
Political Perspective ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
And Gender

AbstractIn this short response, I agree with Cavaliere’s recent invitation to consider ectogenesis, the process of gestation occurring outside the body, as a political perspective and provocation to building a world in which reproductive and care labour are more justly distributed. But I argue that much of the literature Cavaliere addresses in which scholars argue that artificial wombs may produce greater gender equality has the limitation of taking a fixed, binary and biological approach to sex and gender. I argue that in taking steps toward the possibility of more just practices of caregiving and family making, we must look first not to artificial womb technologies but to addressing the ways that contemporary legal and social practices that enforce essentialising, binary ways of thinking about reproductive bodies inhibit this goal.

scholarly journals Influencing Elite Opinion on Gender Equality through Framing: A Survey Experiment of Elite Support for Corporate Board Gender Quotas

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Mari Teigen ◽  
Rune Karlsen
Keyword(s):  
Gender Equality ◽  
Framing Effects ◽  
The Body ◽  
Male Dominance ◽  
Gender Quotas ◽  
Corporate Boards ◽  
Corporate Board ◽  
Business Elite ◽  
Body Of Knowledge ◽  
Comprehensive Survey

AbstractThis article contributes to both the scholarly debates on the controversies over gender quotas and the body of knowledge on framing effects through an investigation of whether national elites, individuals in top positions across 10 sectors of Norwegian society, are susceptible to positive framing of corporate board gender quotas (CBQs). Elites are thought to be more resistant to framing, and their predispositions are found to be stronger and more consistent than those of the general public. However, few, if any, studies have empirically investigated framing effects on national elites. We report on an experiment embedded in a comprehensive survey of Norwegian national elites. The results clearly indicate that elites are susceptible to framing. When exposed to frames highlighting both male dominance among the business elite and the success of CBQs in achieving gender balance on corporate boards, elites were significantly more likely to support gender quotas. Framing effects were primarily found among men, not women, and contrary to expectation, effects were stronger among the business elite. Thus, we should direct our attention to how the framing of issues also influences key stakeholders, and policy makers should consider opposition to gender equality measures as something that has the propensity to change.

Secularism, Feminism and Race in Representations of Australianness

2007 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Holly Randell-Moon
Keyword(s):  
Gender Equality ◽  
Civil Law ◽  
Muslim Women ◽  
Individual Autonomy ◽  
Coalition Government ◽  
Liberal Democracies ◽  
Women's Autonomy ◽  
The Government ◽  
And Gender ◽  
John Howard

In 2005 and 2006 members of the John Howard led Coalition Government, including the Prime Minster and Federal Treasurer Peter Costello, questioned whether Muslim dress, such as the hijab, conformed with ‘mainstream’ Australian standards of secularism and gender equality. In doing so, Howard and Costello used a feminist-sounding language to critique aspects of Islam for purportedly restricting the freedom and autonomy of Muslim women. I argue that race is implicated in the construction of Islam as a “threat” to secularism and gender equality because an unnamed assumption of the Australian ‘mainstream’ as Anglo-Celtic and white informs the standards of normalcy the Government invokes and constructs Islam as a ‘foreign’ religion. Further, whilst the demand for Muslim women to conform with ‘mainstream’ norms potentially contradicts the Government’s commitment to women’s autonomy, such a contradiction is not peculiar to the Howard Government. Using the work of Jean-Luc Nancy and Stewart Motha, I place the ‘hijab debates’ within the tension in liberal democracies between fostering autonomy and requiring a universal civil law to guarantee (but exist above) individual autonomy.

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