Sisters in Disagreement: The Dispute Among French Feminists About the “Burqa Ban” and the Causes of Their Disunity

Abstract

The article deals with the debate among French feminists about the so-called “burqa ban” that came into effect in France in April 2011. While some feminists take the ban to be an important achievement in the struggle for women's rights, others oppose it as a violation of women's rights. The article pursues two aims. First, it gives an overview of the French feminist debate about the “burqa ban” and shows that the feminists come to contradicting conclusions about the ban despite the fact that they take human rights as a shared normative basis for argumentation. Second, the article offers a framework for analysis of the causes of the feminists’ disagreement. In this framework, four controversial issues relating to the public debate about the “burqa” and to questions of religious difference more generally are explored as possible explanatory factors for the disagreement: (1) the issue of the symbolic meaning of the “burqa”; (2) the issue of the most relevant current threat to the Republic's values; (3) the issue of liberal as against republican conceptions of secularism; and (4) the issue of the cross-cultural scope of the principle of gender equality. The article analyzes what role, if any, the controversies surrounding these aspects play in the feminists’ debate about the “burqa ban” and how they impinge on their opinion making.