Abstract
The ban of the burkini in the summer of 2016 in France is the latest stage in a long political history, where the French depreciation or fear of the veil, and of Islam, has come to play a more significant role since the end of the cold war. Unveiling female bodies at the beach in Nice expose conditioned values of the French republic. In this context, drawing black veils on public advertisements becomes a performative act commenting on consumerism, religion, secularity, and the imagined Muslim woman. In this article we discuss freedom and integration in “third spaces” via an analysis of “hijabisation” in street art and the official reactions against certain types of beachwear. In line with Talal Asad (2006) we want to raise the issue on how the secular state addresses the pain of people who are obliged to give up part of their religious identity to become acceptable. Race-thinking was once an explicit part of celebrated values like modernity, secularity, democracy and human rights. However, the fact that the idea of races has been erased from articulations of Western nations and international bodies does not mean that traces of race-thinking in the heritage from the enlightenment are gone. By following Princess Hijab and the “Burkini-gate” a nationalist fantasy intertwined with the idea of the secular state reveals itself and acts of un/dressing emerge as signs of integration revealing a challenged imperialist paradigm.
Highlights
The ban of the burkini in the summer of 2016 in France is the latest stage in a long political history, where the French depreciation or fear of the veil, and of Islam, has come to play a more significant role since the end of the cold war
Our primary material is media sources such as news papers, online archives, interviews, digital galleries, social media and blogs about Princess Hijab and what we label as “burkini-gate”, that we analyse as scholars grounded in postcolonial, queer, and gender theory (Spivak 1988; Trinh 1989; Anderson 1991; Butler 2015; Brown 2005), experienced in research on racism, gender politics and culture
Our examples unfold in France, where veiling has been highly debated for a long time, and where the most radical measures against it, in the European context, have been taken (Fernando 2014)
Summary
From 2006 and onwards a graffiti artist called Princess Hijab has been drawing black hijabs and niqabs on advertisements in the Paris Metro. Our primary material is media sources such as news papers, online archives, interviews, digital galleries, social media and blogs about Princess Hijab and what we label as “burkini-gate”, that we analyse as scholars grounded in postcolonial, queer, and gender theory (Spivak 1988; Trinh 1989; Anderson 1991; Butler 2015; Brown 2005), experienced in research on racism, gender politics and culture. These two different, yet connected, examples in a French context, both highlight a challenged secular condition in the post-colonial state. Through a short introduction of French state secularism and how the burkini became a loaded symbol, we unfold the material through two central themes safety and freedom, followed by a call for rethinking integration
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