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Below is our third installment of the MQUP Top 5. Each month we ask an MQUP author to compile a list of five books that inspired, informed, or pair well with their most recent publication with us.
May’s MQUP Top 5 comes from Emily Laxer, author of Unveiling the Nation: The Politics of Secularism in France and Quebec. With the proposed legislation from the Coalition Avenir Québec government, commonly known as Bill 21, Emily has provided us a timely list offering insight into her book—as well as excellent further reading for those interested in the complexities of such legislation.
This book by Joan Scott should be required reading for anyone looking to comprehend the gendered politics of French secularism. Through the prism of the debate over Islamic veiling, Scott reveals the underlying tensions that have historically marked the feminist movement in France. Turning to the contemporary period, she demonstrates how a selective framing of women’s rights and equality has been mobilized to justify legislative restrictions on veiling in the public sphere.
At the heart of Scott’s analysis lies a powerful critique of scholarship that treats secularism as the driving force behind women’s equality in Western societies. The critique is further developed in her exciting forthcoming book, Sex & Secularism (Princeton: 2019).
In addition to its important gendered dimension, the debate over Islamic veiling taking place across Europe and beyond raises pressing questions around the nature of rights, freedoms, and the rule of law. In Religious Freedom at Risk, Adrian tackles this theme by critically analyzing the legal foundations of France’s headscarf ban in schools (2004) and its subsequent prohibition of facial coverings in public spaces (2010). Extending the analysis beyond the national level, she shows how, in adjudicating matters of religious freedom, the European Court of Human Rights has given significant leeway to national governments, bolstering the validity of their subjective interpretations of secularism in the process. Religious Freedom at Risk is thus a critical text for comprehending the legal dimension of the Islamic veiling debate.
What relationship – if any – exists between contemporary debates over Islamic veiling and the rise of ultra-right populism? I address this question head-on in my book and, in doing so, draw significantly from Berezin’s insights on European populist movements in Illiberal Politics in Neoliberal Times. Based on evidence from France and Italy, the study uncovers the complex structural, strategic and narrative dimensions behind the rise in popularity of ultra-right parties in 1980s-1990s Europe. While impossible to predict a priori, Berezin emphasizes that the realignment of politics around an ultra-right political threat in many European countries has hinged on the capacity of charismatic leaders to draw a causal link between economic crisis and migration. Among other things, the book speaks to the significance of party politics in redefining the discursive landscape around immigration, diversity, and belonging.
So, how exactly do parties shape the discursive contours of the Islamic veiling debate? This edited volume by De Leon, Desai, and Tugal provides some very useful insights. Rather than merely reflect pre-existing social cleavages, the authors argue that parties actually constitute those cleavages in order to mobilize them for political gain. Using the notion of ‘political articulation’ to capture these processes, De Leon, Desai, and Tugal emphasize how parties assemble, disassemble, and reassemble disparate constituencies into politically salient voting ‘blocs’. While it does not directly address the themes of secularism or Islamic veiling, this book provides an essential framework for thinking about the discursive ‘work’ that parties do in organizing public opinion around these issues.
The discursive ‘work’ that parties perform does not take place in a vacuum. Indeed, nation-specific institutional and cultural histories play a key role. In Beheading the Saint, Zubrzycki uses cutting-edge methods to trace the material, narrative, and symbolic processes that defined the secularization of Québécois society during and after the 1960s Quiet Revolution. In particular, she demonstrates that the rapid decline in religious affiliation and practice that took place during this period was manifested in a series of “aesthetic revolts,” in which a new generation of Québécois publicly repudiated iconic Catholic symbols – including Jean-Baptiste the Saint – as defining elements of the province’s visual and material culture. And yet, many such symbols – including the cross atop Mount-Royal and the crucifix in Québec’s National Assembly – remain visibly imprinted on the province’s cultural, political, and architectural landscape. In mapping these developments, Beheading the Saint reveals that contemporary articulations of secularism are wrought with tensions and contradictions. I argue that those tensions and contradictions are critical to understanding the contemporary debates over Islamic veiling in Québec and France.
Read more on Emily Laxer’s Unveiling the Nation: The Politics of Secularism in France and Quebec >
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