Sexual Violence as the Language of Border Control: Protecting exceptional difference

Abstract

This paper addresses the focus on sexualviolence that occurs in immigrant communities in France and demonstrates how sexual violence has become a site for the management of these communities. The unprecedented focus on sexuality and sexual violence since 2001 must be seen in the larger context of debates about immigration,national security, and a growing European wide form of Islamophobia, and as such can be explained by the fact it has become the discourse of bordercontrol, the way borders are policed – it takes the place of a political languageof immigration. The paper traces two highly charged public debates that revolvearound issues of sexuality and immigration: the debate on prostitution which includes the 2003 ban on racolage passif or passive soliciting; and the 2004 ban on the headscarf. While these bans are presented in some sense as promoting the emancipation of women, I contrast them to another set of legal provisions – the bilateral accords with Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia which protect personal status laws based on Shari’a in France. The treatment of sexual violence reveals not only the condition of immigrants, but the nature of the postcolonial French state, and the way it deals with difference: an analysis of sexual violence exposes contemporary French republican universalism as a practice that can only accommodate difference in an exceptional, discretionary manner – one that takes place at the expense of its avowed politics of universal equality.