Religion and Gender, vol. 2, no.

1 (2012), 36-56
www.religionandgender.org
URN: NBN:NL:UI: 10-1-101590
ISSN: 1878-5417
Publisher: Igitur Publishing (Utrecht)
Copyright: this work is licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution License (3.0)

‘Is the Headscarf Oppressive or Emancipatory?’ Field

Notes from the Multicultural Debate
SARAH BRACKE AND NADIA FADIL

Abstract
This essay examines the discursive contours of the multicultural debate in Europe,
and the ways in which it is cast in gendered terms. It does so by investigating one
particular albeit highly contentious issue, notably the headscarf controversy. In
recent years, this sartorial practice has turned into an important object of debate
and controversy in various Western European countries, often structured around
the question ‘is the headscarf oppressive or emancipatory?’. Rather than engaging
substantially with this question, or with the various meanings or significations of
hijab as a sartorial practice, we seek to reflect upon the performative effects of
this question, and do so more specifically in the Belgian context. What kind of
imaginaries does the headscarf debate in general, and this question in particular,
limit or shape? And what kinds of speeches and actions does it enable or conceal?
We argue that the headscarf debate is functional to the constitution of a specific
idea of ‘neutrality’ on the one hand, and of an ‘emancipated gender identity’
(agency) on the other, which is primarily grasped in liberal and secular terms
(through the language of ‘rights’). More than simply tracing the performative
effects of this discussion, we also try to account for the possibilities of overcoming
these discursive conditionalities and the capacity of rendering other forms of
agency intelligible.
 ‘Is the Headscarf Oppressive or Emancipatory?’

Keywords
Discourse analysis, multiculturalism, hijab, Belgium, agency, rights

Author affiliation
Sarah Bracke is Assistant Professor in Sociology of Religion and Culture at the
Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium. Her work engages with questions of
modernity, religion and secularism, with particular attention to issues of
subjectivity, agency and gender.

Nadia Fadil is a postdoctoral scholar of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO)

at the Centre for Sociological Research of the Catholic University of Leuven,
Belgium. She works on questions of secularism, multiculturalism and Islam from a
critical and post-structuralist perspective.

Introduction
Since the end of the 1980s, Western Europe has witnessed the eruption of
public debates weaving together a myriad of topics such as migration,
integration, cultural identity, Islam and secularism. In the UK, the
publication of Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses in 1988, and the intense
discussions and demonstrations in its wake, are usually believed to have
inaugurated these debates. In France, this honour befell the first affaire du
foulard, which flared up when in 1989 three pupils in Creil were suspended
for refusing to remove their headscarves in class. In the Dutch context, Frits
Bolkestein declared the failure of Dutch ‘integration policies’ and the
incompatibility between Islam and Western liberal values in his famous
Luzern speech at the Congress of the Liberal International in 1991. These
public discussions have presented themselves as ways of ‘debating
diversity’1, and in many cases they became known as ‘the multicultural
debates’. From the outset of these public debates ‘the multicultural
society’ was problematized – to which the use of expressions like ‘the
multicultural drama’ by for instance the Dutch essayist Paul Scheffer
testifies –, although not only by those who sought to criticize it. In fact, also
the defence of multiculturalism often unfolded on shaky and conditional
grounds, which served to problematize certain understandings and
affirmations of identity and culture, while consolidating others.
Furthermore, more recently various voices within the European political

1
J. Blommaert and J. Verschueren, Debating diversity: Analysing the discourse of
tolerance, London: Routledge 1998.

37 Religion and Gender vol. 2, no. 1 (2012), 36-56

 ‘Is the Headscarf Oppressive or Emancipatory?’

elite have been heard firmly announcing ‘the end of multiculturalism’.2

‘Multicultural debates’, in other words, is all but a descriptive term. Rather,
it is a discourse which structures debates on identity and culture in
particular ways, and needs to be carefully situated and contextualized.
This essay seeks to examine more closely the vicious circles in which
certain conversations within the multicultural debate get caught, as
questions and topics are set up in ways that already structure how the
conversation will proceed and which range of answers is involved. More
specifically, we are looking at conversations at the intersection of
multiculturalism and gender, where many of the discussions are structured
around the question whether ‘multiculturalism is bad for women’ – to
paraphrase Susan Miller Okin’s well-known interrogation.3 This intersection
points at how questions and understandings of gender structure the ways
in which the multicultural debate is conceived, that is, the ways in which
‘multicultural society’ is imagined and discussed. It signals, in other words,
that gender operates as a critical terrain in the processes of constituting
cultural differences and constructing the national self and its others. A
central figure in this intersection between gender and multiculturalism,
and in debates about multiculturalism tout court, is the headscarf. While
many protagonists in these debates have declared veiling to be a sign of
women’s oppression, others have embarked on understanding the various
meanings of veiling, and serious scholarship has sought to demonstrate the
‘active agency’ of veiled women.4
Our investigation takes as a case-study a recurrent question about
veiling which became an important reference point throughout twenty
years of multicultural debate across Europe: Is the headscarf oppressive or
emancipatory? As we trace what happens when this question is being
posed, we reflect on our participation in debates structured by the
question whether the headscarf is either an oppressive practice or, on the
contrary, might emancipate women. In the past decade, we have both
been invited on various occasions to take part in such debates – mostly in

2
A. Lentin and G. Titley, The Crises of Multiculturalism. Racism in a Neoliberal Age,
London: Zed 2011.
3
J. Cohen, M. Howard and Marta C. Nussbaum (eds.), Is Multiculturalism Bad for
Women? Susan Moller Okin with respondents, Princeton: Princeton University Press
1999.
4
For good examples of such studies, see F. Khosrokhavar, L’Islam des jeunes, éd.
Flammarion Paris 1997 or S. Silvestri, Europe’s Muslim Women: Potential, Aspirations
and Challenges, Brussels: King Baudouin Foundation 2008.

38 Religion and Gender vol. 2, no. 1 (2012), 36-56

 ‘Is the Headscarf Oppressive or Emancipatory?’

Belgium – and we have become fluent in speaking the language these

conversations require.5
The position from which we write is one of engaged intellectuals
who are regularly invited to take part in the discussions and conversations
of which the multicultural debate consists. While in our scholarly work we
have commented on and critiqued the multicultural debates6, we also
participate in political mobilizations, social movements and actions that
relate to questions of multiculturalism. The framework of the multicultural
debates, in other words, is one in which we have regularly operated, which
we have appropriated and learned to navigate in order to find ways to
articulate our critiques, which were often aimed at this framework itself.
This kind of positioning, oscillating between scholarly critique and
deconstruction on the one hand, and political participation and action on
the other, is all but comfortable. Yet it is potentially productive when
dis/connections and uneasy translations, along with the frustrations of how
discourses structure and limit speech and actions, can become part of our
understanding of how social reality comes into being and can be
transformed. In this essay we reflect on the performative effect of the
question: what does it reproduce, what kinds of discussions does it enable
and what kinds of imaginary, speech and action does it render impossible?
The essay is structured as follows. In the first part, we briefly sketch
our theoretical outlook on multiculturalism, as the larger frame in which
our case-study is embedded, discerning three analytically distinct but
related (and often overlapping) theoretical (and simultaneously
methodological) approaches. This section details what we have in mind
when we subscribe to the view that multiculturalism is all but a descriptive
term. In the second part we briefly rehearse the significance of gender to
the multicultural debate, in order to substantiate the argument that
gender effectively structures the multicultural debate. These brief
discussions provide the analytical grounds for our subsequent analysis of
what happens in public and scholarly debates structured by the recurring
question ‘Is the headscarf oppressive or emancipatory for women?’. Our

5
Already in the process of thinking and writing this article, we were invited twice to take
place in a discussion (one in the Belgian parliament, another in an academic
environment) organized around this question.
6
A. Karel, S. Bracke, B. Ceuppens, S. De Mul, N. Fadil, and M. Kanmaz, Een leeuw in een
kooi. De grenzen van het multiculturele Vlaanderen, Amsterdam: Meulenhoff/Manteau
2009.

39 Religion and Gender vol. 2, no. 1 (2012), 36-56

 ‘Is the Headscarf Oppressive or Emancipatory?’

analysis particularly considers the operations of hegemonic notions of

agency and rights, and relies on the seminal work of Saba Mahmood.7

Approaching multiculturalism critically

We understand multiculturalism not as a descriptive term which
supposedly characterizes a certain kind of society, or points at an increased
degree of ‘diversity’ within existing societies, but rather as a site of critical
inquiry. Multiculturalism, as David Theo Goldberg puts it, cannot simply be
reduced to a political doctrine nor to an intellectual paradigm, pedagogical
framework and academic rhetoric, nor to an institutionalized orthodoxy
and radical critique.8 Its meaning cannot be fixed in a way that does justice
to the various symbolic and material realities (or, in Goldberg’s words,
concerns and considerations, principles and practices, concepts and
categories) it might refer to. A critical inquiry of multiculturalism,
moreover, takes the historical context and geo-political location of
‘multicultural debates’ into account. For this reason we understand
contemporary discussions of multiculturalism in Europe, as they occur in
the context of a post-colonial world shaped simultaneously by neo-colonial
dynamics and the decentering of the West, increasing globalization and its
effects on the nation-state, and new flows of post-colonial migration, as
debates about transformations of national and cultural identities in and of
Europe. In other words, we recognize multiculturalism as a correlate of
nationalism, and believe that discussions about ‘cultural difference’ and
‘the other’ ought to be considered in tandem with discussions about ‘the
national self’.
In this vein, we can conceive of multiculturalism as an
epistemological field that is structured according to distinct exclusionary
mechanisms and fulfills a functional role in the constitution of the idea of a
‘nation’. In methodological terms, this means taking up the question of
‘multiculturalism’ as a dispositif that creates distinctive fields of
problematization (that is to say, the question of ‘integration’ turns into a
new object of study), identifies a particular set of actors (‘the immigrants’
or ‘Muslims’) and is accompanied by an institutional apparatus that seeks
to transform the non-integrated ‘other’ in order to include it into the social

7
And notably S. Mahmood, Politics of Piety. The Islamic Revival and the Feminist
Subject, Princeton: Princeton University Press 2005.
8
D. T. Goldberg (ed.), Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader, Cambridge, MA: Basil
Blackwell 1994.

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 ‘Is the Headscarf Oppressive or Emancipatory?’

body.9 Thus multiculturalism cannot be reduced to merely another social

topic, but rather has to be approached as a field of forces constructing and
shaping its own object of debate and regulating individuals according to
the very categories it creates (for example, the ‘integrated’ vs. the ‘non-
integrated’). Our critical analysis of the multicultural debate pursues three
distinct but connected lines of investigation, which effectively overlap in
the work of many scholars on the matter and rely on related (post-
structuralist and post-colonial) understandings of power. This distinction
draws attention to different dimensions of how power operates through
these debates.
Firstly, there is a general question of framing and the way these
debates are framed, and of how such frames regulate notions of cultural
and religious difference. Frames, as Judith Butler points out, are operations
of power that occur on an ontological, epistemological and ethical level.
They regulate the affective and ethical dispositions through which
phenomena are not only understood but also constituted. Frames matter
in terms of what is problematized and in what manner. Interventions in
hegemonic frames from minority positions are notably difficult, as such
questions, topics and concerns most often get reformulated in a
framework that sustains dominant power relations. Frames also matter on
the level of who and what gets recognized as a subject, as part of a broader
understanding of humanity, or as a life form worth protecting. The
question of the recognition of life which Butler elaborates begs the
question of norms and normativity: what norms operate in producing
certain subjects as ‘recognizable’ persons and make others more difficult to
recognize?10
The multicultural debates offer plenty of opportunities and an
abundance of material to carefully investigate the ways in which subjects
have been framed. A crucial argument about frames in the context of
multiculturalism is formulated by Blommaert and Verschueren, in their
sharp discourse analysis of the official multicultural discourse in Belgium.11
As they argue, these debates about cultural diversity in fact stage cultural
difference as intrinsically problematic. The debates presuppose the idea of
a homogeneous society (described by Blommaert and Verschueren as the
ideology of homogeneism), which is defined according to a particular – and
9
W. Schinkel, Denken in een tijd van sociale hypochondrie. Aanzet tot een theorie voorbij
de maatschappij, Kampen: Uitgeverij Klement 2008.
10
J. Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso 2009.
11
J. Blommaert and J. Verschueren, Debating diversity: Analysing the discourse of
tolerance. London: Routledge 1998.

41 Religion and Gender vol. 2, no. 1 (2012), 36-56

 ‘Is the Headscarf Oppressive or Emancipatory?’

fictive – understanding of the norms and values that hold such a society
together, now challenged by the question of diversity. Framing the
presence of ethnic minorities in terms of the ‘diversity challenge’ hence
becomes not only a way to constitute these minorities as ‘other’ – and thus
to exclude them from the national imaginary – but also to construct and
enact a particular understanding of the national self.
This brings us to a second dimension of the critical investigation of
the multicultural debate: a focus on the intertwined constructions of self
and other. Clearly, debates about the other are rather revealing with
respect to the concerns and construction of the self. Analysing discourses
of multiculturalism provides a way to map crises and transformations of
the national self, by tracing how self and other get constructed in the
debates, and which mechanisms of representation sustain such
constructions. An investigation of official multiculturalist discourse along
these lines can be found in the work of Ghassan Hage. Looking at
multiculturalist discourse in Australia, Hage dissects how otherness
functions in the presentation of the national self, and elaborates this
functionality of ‘the other’ for the self in the following way.
Multiculturalism, he argues, figures as a central societal debate because it
acts as the solution to a problem of the dominant (white) society.
Multiculturalism is imagined as an object performing a function for the
national body, as a technology of the (national) body. The relation of
exteriority between self and other, however, needs to be carefully
examined in its complexity. On the one hand multiculturalism is perceived
to have an external relationship to the body – as ‘the other’ outside of the
national self – while at the same time it is an extension of that body, in
analogy with the way clothes relate to a human body. This implies that
multiculturalism operates as a tool in (and for) the presentation of the self,
while it is simultaneously part of the presented self.12
Thirdly, we can consider the multicultural debates as a form of
governmentality in the Foucauldian sense, that is, as ‘the conduct of
conduct’, or the ways in which governments try to produce ‘the citizen’ and
all the organized practices and techniques through which subjects are
governed. In this perspective, the multicultural debates can be analysed in
terms of the practices, mentalities, rationalities and techniques through
which ‘proper’ citizens of a multicultural society are produced. Such an
analysis offers insight into how cultural and religious differences are

12
G. Hage, White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in Multicultural Society, London:
Routledge 2000.

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 ‘Is the Headscarf Oppressive or Emancipatory?’

organized within a liberal modern capitalist democracy and renders the

institutional apparatus visible that ‘teaches’ others to become proper
citizens (here the civic integration tests recently introduced in various
European countries spring to mind), that is to say, how to integrate into the
social body.

The ‘Women’s Question’: From Bad to Vicious

In the previous section we have highlighted some of the ways in which
multiculturalism can be understood in terms of the regulation of self and
other in the realm of cultural identities. We subscribe to the view that the
problem of diversity cannot be simply posed in cultural terms but is
mediated by a set of transversal regulatory structures from the start,
among which is gender. As many commentators have pointed out, gender
matters as to how the multicultural debates are set up.13 On a concrete
level, we can observe that a substantial part of the multicultural debates
directly bear on women, questions of femininity and masculinity, and
sexuality. Debates about women’s oppression immediately come to mind,
most often discussions about religious practices and attire (most notably
the headscarf) and about violence (‘violence against women’, ‘criminality
and unsafe streets’, etcetera).
The most well-known account bringing gender to bear on
multiculturalism is arguably Susan Moller Okin’s essay ‘Is Multiculturalism
Bad for Women?’, which asserts that gender equality often clashes with
respect for minority cultures. The essay was not only influential in a
scholarly context (provoking a lively debate in the Boston Review in 1997,

13
For a brief selection of literature addressing the intersection of the question of gender
and multiculturalism, see G. Wekker and Rosi Braidotti (eds.), Praten in het donker:
Multicuturalisme en anti-racisme in feministisch perspectief, Amsterdam: Kok Agora
1996; J. Cohen, M. Howard and M. C. Nussbaum (eds.), Is Multiculturalism Bad for
Women? Susan Moller Okin with respondents, Princeton: Princeton University Press
1999; M. Botman, N. Jouwe and G. Wekker,(eds.), Caleidoscopische Visies. De zwarte,
migranten- en vluchtelingenvrouwen beweging in Nederland, Amsterdam: KIT
Publishers i.s.m. Expertisecentrum GEM en E-Quality 2001; G. Coene and C. Longman
(eds.), Eigen emancipatie eerst?: Over de rechten en representatie van vrouwen in een
multiculturele samenleving,Gent: Academia Press 2005; S. Bracke and S. De Mul, ‘In
naam van het feminisme. Beschaving, multiculturaliteit en vrouwenemancipatie’ in K.
Arnaut, S. Bracke, B. Ceuppens, S. De Mul, N. Fadil and M. Kanmaz, Een leeuw in een
kooi. De grenzen van het multiculturele Vlaanderen, Amsterdam: Meulenhof |
Manteau 2009; E. Midden, Feminism in Multicultural Societies. An analysis of Dutch
Multicultural and Postsecular Developments and their Implications for Feminist
Debates, University of Central Lancashire, unpublished PhD dissertation 2010.

43 Religion and Gender vol. 2, no. 1 (2012), 36-56

 ‘Is the Headscarf Oppressive or Emancipatory?’

in which a number of well-known scholars responded to Okin’s argument),

but also in circles of feminist and women’s groups. Here it circulated widely
and was often used to discuss questions of multiculturalism within the
women’s movement.14 Okin frames the relationship between feminist and
multicultural concerns, and subsequently the debate about the tensions
between them, through the following question: What should be done
when the claims of minority cultures or religions clash with the norm of
gender equality that is at least formally endorsed by liberal states? The
question needs to be understood as a feminist intervention within the field
of political theory: Okin’s argument is a critique of the concept of group
rights, grounded in her understanding of the social relations of gender.
Advocates of group rights, she argues, commonly treat cultural groups as
monolithic, while they pay little attention to the private sphere. This
renders them blind to the fact that the sphere of personal, sexual, and
reproductive life is the central focus of most cultures, and that most
cultures aim at men’s control over women. In other words, theories of
group rights remain blind to the fact that the organization of gender
relations lies at the heart of culture. Okin’s argument is further framed by
the following assertions: firstly, while all of the world’s cultures have
patriarchal pasts, some, mostly Western liberal cultures, have departed
further from them than others, and secondly, many cultural minorities
claiming group rights are more patriarchal than the surrounding ‘majority’
cultures. For this reason, Okin concludes, feminism stands in tension with
the cultural relativism of group rights multiculturalism.
Okin’s argument has been widely discussed and critiqued, notably
in the responses accompanying the publication of the original essay.15 The
critiques, often revolve around, firstly, the problematic notions of culture
and more specifically the ironic way in which Okin’s argument supports a
monolithic and unifying notion of culture.16 Secondly, they criticize that
culture in Okin’s argument tends to be ‘the stuff that sticks’ to minority
groups, whereas cultural and national formations within majority cultures
simply remain invisible.17 As a result of the way Okin’s argument is

14
See e.g. G. Coene and C. Longman (eds.), Eigen emancipatie eerst ?: Over de rechten en
representatie van vrouwen in een multiculturele samenleving, Gent: Academia Press
2005.
15
J. Cohen, M. Howard and M. C. Nussbaum (eds.), Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?
Susan Moller Okin with respondents, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1999.
16
E.g. Bhabha in Cohen, Howard and Nussbaum, Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?.
17
E.g. Honig and Al-Hibri in Cohen, Howard and Nussbaum, Is Multiculturalism Bad for
Women?.

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 ‘Is the Headscarf Oppressive or Emancipatory?’

organized, minority groups get ‘cultured’ in disproportionate ways, leaving

‘culture’ to signify the divergence from an invisible norm.
A central element, however, which emerges both throughout Okin’s
essay and the different critiques it provoked, is the need for a broader
understanding of how gender relations pertain to questions of culture and
of community and nation; an understanding in which the constitutive
dimension of gender relations within various kinds of social, political and
cultural formations is rendered visible. The challenge becomes then to
understand how particular cultural, political and economic regimes rely on
distinctive gender relations, and how a gendered/sexual division of labour
is integral to both liberal and non-liberal cultural and structural modes of
organization, including capitalist modes of production. Indeed, Okin’s line
of reasoning, focusing on gender relations in ‘other’ cultures, fails to
account for the way in which gender relations are central to the
constitution of national and cultural identities tout court, and to any form
of national boundary making. It also fails to account for how certain kinds
of concern with the position of Muslim women are functional to the
constitution of Western European national identities.
The work of Nira Yuval-Davis takes up some of these challenges,
and has begun to analyse more systematically the ways in which gender
matters to the nation – and, by extension, to an understanding of ‘culture’
or a cultural community we would add. Gender and Nation was written as a
critical intervention in classical theories about nations and nationalism
where gender appears irrelevant. Instead, Yuval-Davis argues, gender
relations are located at the heart of (the reproduction of) the nation –
which is commonly conceptualized as an extension of family and kinship
relations, most often understood as based on a ‘natural’ sexual division of
labour. Yuval-Davis proposes to trace this centrality of gender on the level
of biological, cultural and symbolical reproduction.18 In biological terms,
the demographic reproduction of the nation takes place through women,
in a context of bio-politics that seek to either encourage or discourage with
various degrees of pressure (certain groups of) women to bear children.19
In terms of cultural reproduction, in the mythical unity of the imagined
community, the divide between ‘us’ and ‘them’ is maintained and
reproduced by social constructions of manhood and womanhood and of

18
N. Yuval-Davis, Gender and Nation, London: Sage 1997.
19
For just one example of how the demographic argument figures in discussions about
culture, multiculturalism and civilization, see Huntington’s (in)famous ‘clash of
civilization’ thesis.

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 ‘Is the Headscarf Oppressive or Emancipatory?’

sexuality deemed appropriate to the nation. In this sense, women

structurally fulfill a ‘border guard’ function as they come to embody the
collectivity, which results in specific expectations regarding cultural codes
of style of dress and behaviour. This theoretical framework allows us, in
other words, to understand how gender relations matter to the formation
of all national and cultural entities: how gender comes into being in
relation to national and cultural formations, and vice versa.
This might give us a first indication of how the focus on Muslim
women (and the headscarf) in the current multicultural debates can be
understood. Gender relations, or the ascription of specific gender patterns,
operate as a demarcation line that is functional in the process of othering
of the concerned group, which, moreover, is consolidated as a group
precisely through this process of othering. By addressing the issue of the
headscarf, by ‘problematizing’ it, as Foucault would have it, the gendered
character of the nation is not only highlighted – along the lines of
appropriate vs. inappropriate ways of presenting female bodies in the
public sphere –, but the primary way in addressing and constructing the
other occurs through the same gendered register.20 More than providing
an account of Muslim women, the gendered dimension in the multicultural
debate figures as a re-enactment of the gendered and sexual boundaries of
the nation.

Is the headscarf emancipatory or oppressive?

The headscarf debate figures as one of the central points around which our
interventions in the multicultural debates have been organized. Not unlike
what happened in several other Western European countries, in Belgium
the religious practice of hijab has become one of the chief symbols of what
is perceived as a growing visibility of Islam in the public sphere. The debate
in Belgium closely follows the rhythms of that of its southern neighbour,
France. While the first episode of the French headscarf debate, between
1989 and 1992, mostly affected the Francophone audience in Belgium, at
the turn of the 21st century this debate reached a broader, national scope
implicating both Francophone and Flemish protagonists.21 These different

20
J. W. Scott, The Politics of the Veil, Princeton: Princeton University Press 2007.
21
For an overview of the Belgian headscarf debate see C. Longman, ‘Over our Heads?
Muslim Women as Symbols and Agents in the Headscarf Debate in Flanders, Belgium’
in Social Justice. Anthropology, Peace and Human Rights 4:3-4 (2003), 300-332; N.
Fadil, ‘Het hoofddoekendebat. Meer dan een debat over een stukje stof?’ in Ethische
Perspectieven/Ethical Perspectives 14:4 (2004), 373-386.

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 ‘Is the Headscarf Oppressive or Emancipatory?’

episodes were structured according to two broad interrogations: firstly, the

question of women’s emancipation and hijab as a potential site of
oppression and, secondly, hijab’s compatibility with the neutrality of the
public sphere. The first question has been critical to the issue of hijab in
schools and to the justification of bans comparable to the ones imposed in
France. While Belgium has not adopted a general (national) regulation with
regard to the hijab, an overwhelming majority of public and private schools
do prohibit this practice22 – often justifying this measure on the grounds of
social pressure (to veil) endured by young Muslim women, or of cases of
forced veiling.23 Another important argument that recurs throughout this
discussion is the neutrality of the public sphere. While this argument has
not consistently been used in relation to students, it has figured as a
ground to justify the prohibition of headscarves in the case of public
officials and teachers.
At several occasions we were invited, or invited ourselves, to
intervene in this polemic setting. The positions we have upheld in these
contexts were often defensive. To the allegations that veiled women are
‘victims of social coercion (or tradition)’ or suffer forms of ‘false
consciousness’ (in thinking they ‘choose’ to veil),24 we would retort that
their agency is complex and pointed at several stories of strong,
emancipated women who consciously chose to wear the veil. And to
depictions of veiled Muslim women as ‘fundamentalist’ or ‘culprits’ we
would, both in our scholarly and public interventions, point out that these
women were often the source of new forms of feminism in which Islam
and feminist commitments converge and account for new forms of
subjectivity.25 Yet after almost a decade of debating ‘the headscarf’ and

22
Forty per cent of schools in Belgium are directly organized and funded by public
authorities while 60 per cent are initiated by local communities (mostly Catholic
churches and organizations) and publicly funded.
23
This argument has been central to the decision of the board of education of the
Flemish public schools to adopt a general ban, after a similar ban that was adopted by
the Royal Atheneum of Antwerp in June 2009 had been largely contested. For an
account of the ‘headscarf ban’ in the Flemish public school see N. Fadil, ‘On not-
/unveiling as an Ethical Practice’ in Feminist Review vol. 98 (2011), 83-109.
24
For an illustration of this type of argumentation, see G. Van Istendael, ‘Het masker van
de dwang’, De Standaard, 23/08/08.
25
S. Bracke, ‘Feminisme en islam: intersecties’ in I. Arteel, H. Müller, M. De Metsenaere
And S. Bossaert (eds.) Vrouw(on)vriendelijk? Islam feministisch bekeken, Brussel: VUB-
Press 2007, 13-38; S. Bracke, ‘Subjects of debate: secular and sexual exceptionalism,
and Muslim women in the Netherlands’ in Feminist Review 98 (2011), 28-46; N. Fadil,
‘Witte Mannen tegen de hoofddoek’, De Morgen, 9/09/08.

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 ‘Is the Headscarf Oppressive or Emancipatory?’

‘veiled women’ we have come to a point of intellectual and political

exhaustion. It is the kind of exhaustion that comes not only from repeating
the same arguments over and again in a context in which hegemonic
notions about woman and Islam continue to be shaped by racism. It also
emerges from our increasing awareness of the paradoxical role we play as
scholars, attempting to defend the voices of the women who are too often
singled out as a problem, and sustaining the very conditions and terms
through which such an interpellation of ‘veiled women’ occurs.
A first problem lies in the way our interventions willingly or
unwillingly contribute to the problematization of the headscarf and veiled
women. By using this term we refer to the Foucauldian approach of
examining how at a specific moment of history certain practices are turned
into a matter of concern and debate. Rather than pointing at the existence
of a particular problem, problematization announces the establishment of
a set of scientific and non-scientific discourses and institutional practices
that seek to regulate a distinctive conduct singled out as an object of
concern.26 This also means that the eruption of societal controversies is not
considered to be a result of the mere manifestation of specific social
phenomena or practices. Rather, social controversies are the very process
through which certain practices are turned into ‘social problems’ and thus
become subjected to a set of biopolitical regulations.27 In Foucault’s view,
this construction of a specific phenomenon into a ‘social problem’ is not a
neutral enterprise, but closely tied with the establishment of specific
regulatory ideals or a regime of truth. Applied to our case, this means that
the question no longer revolves around the issue of whether the headscarf
does or does not obstruct either the principle of neutrality or the principle
of women’s emancipation. According to this perspective, the hijab in itself
is void of social meaning, and veiling only becomes constituted as a
meaningful act by a distinctive discursive apparatus. The question then
becomes: how to account for the very notion of neutrality and
emancipation that is constructed by singling out veiled women and turning
them into an object of debate? The critical task that awaits us, in other
words, is to understand how the headscarf debate is functional to the
constitution of (a specific idea of) ‘neutrality’ on the one hand, and that of
an ‘emancipated gender identity’ on the other hand, together with the
26
M. Foucault The History of Sexuality 1: The Will to Knowledge, Translated by Robert
Hurley, London: Penguin Books, 1998 [1976].
27
Although Foucault does not necessarily link the issue of problematization with
biopolitical regulations, a term he restricts to a very specific form of power located
historically in the 18th century, we here adopt a position which links both questions.

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 ‘Is the Headscarf Oppressive or Emancipatory?’

extent to which both are seen to be implicating each other. Several

analyses have shown how addressing the question of hijab redefines the
contours of the nation and emancipation in exclusionary terms.28 The mere
act of addressing the headscarf, either in its affirmation or negation,
contributes to the way this sartorial practice becomes singled out from
other practices, to be attributed a status of exceptionality.29 Within this
kind of discursive regime, non-veiled women’s bodies are attributed a
status of ontological neutrality, as Fadil argues elsewhere, while veiling is
seen to obstruct the homogeneity of that space – both in terms of forging a
‘neutral’ public space as well as of what counts as an emancipated female
body.30
A second problem lies in the framing of this practice. While
advocates of the headscarf ban have often done so on the grounds that
hijab acts as a (religious or political) symbol that breaches the principle of
neutrality, opponents of the ban – as we are – have tended to question
these claims by underlining the religious character of this practice and thus
claiming its constitutional guarantee. Our reliance on the juridical language
of fundamental rights – including that of religious freedom – reflects the
epistemic weight that is attributed to this discourse in not only advocating
certain claims, but also in rendering them intelligible. The idea that all
individuals are ‘free’ to choose and practice their religiosity is often viewed
as an essential corner stone of liberal democracy, enabling the articulation
of a distinctive set of claims that are under its auspices. By taking a case
against what we present as ‘forced unveiling’, the same liberal taxonomy is
used to defend veiled women. Yet this reliance on the liberal language of
rights confronts us with a number of dilemmas linked to the performative
effects of framing the headscarf primarily as a religious right.31
Firstly, throughout these debates, the practice of veiling is fixed in
its meaning – either as a symbol or as a religious practice –, obscuring the

28
See for instance J. W. Scott, The Politics of the Veil, Princeton: Princeton University
Press 2007 and A. Moors, ‘The Dutch and the face-veil: The politics of discomfort’ in
Social Anthropology 17:4 (2009), 393-408.
29
We borrow this understanding of exceptionality from Mayanti Fernando. See M. L.
Fernando, ‘Exceptional citizens: Secular Muslim women and the politics of difference
in France’ in Social Anthropology 17:4 (2009), 379-392.
30
N. Fadil, ‘On not/unveiling as an ethical practice’ in Feminist Review 98 (2011), 83-109.
31
We draw here on the work of scholars who have pointed at the way the Human Rights
discourse not only enables individual agency, but equally functions as the vehicle
through which state power operates. See for instance W. Brown, “The most we can
hope for...’ Human rights and the politics of fatalism’ in The South Atlantic Quarterly
103:2/3 (2004), 451-463.

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 ‘Is the Headscarf Oppressive or Emancipatory?’

variety of significations it may carry. Various studies have shown that the
headscarf can indeed mean a variety of things. While it does figure as part
of an economy of pious conduct,32 it can simultaneously be part of a
stronger affirmation of one’s Muslim identity, or a sartorial practice that
enables the expression of a modern Muslim identity.33 Moreover, in
addressing the headscarf primarily as a religious practice that is considered
to be crucial for Muslim identity, we unwillingly contribute to the
attribution of this practice to Muslim identity – a move that authorizes
claims of ‘authenticity’. There is a long legacy, both in social sciences and in
women’s movements and feminism, of critically considering the colonial
legacies of the ways in which the hijab (or other practices) has been
constructed as an essential attribute of Muslim identity, and investigating
how the colonial marking of Muslims as ‘religious other’ has been pivotal in
this process.34 Addressing the hijab in terms of a religious practice that is
primarily tied with the affirmation of a Muslim identity risks to fixate its
signification, and contributes to the continued colonial framing of Islam
and the ways in which this framing is structured by gender, as we have
been able to observe throughout the multicultural debates.
Defending the hijab as a ‘religious right’ or as ‘religious freedom’,
furthermore, not only frames the hijab in a specific vocabulary, but these
very terms also imply a particular understanding of agency which fails to
fully capture the ethical and political locations of the women concerned. A
central argument in many of our interventions has been to undo the often

32
See for instance the work of S. Amir-Moazami, Politisierte Religion. Der Kopftuchstreit
in Deutschland und Frankreich, Bielefeld: transcript 2007; V. Amiraux, ‘Discours Voilés
Sur Les Musulmanes En Europe: Comment Les Musulmans Sont-ils Devenus Des
Musulmanes?’ in Social Compass 50:1 (2003), 85-96; J. Jouili, and S. Amir-Moazami,
‘Knowledge, Empowerment and Religious Authority Among Pious Muslim Women in
France and Germany’ in Muslim World 96 (2006), 617-642.
33
See for instance the work of Y. Navaro-Yashin, ‘The Market for Identities: Secularism,
Islamism, Commodities’ in D. Kandiyoti and A. Saktanber (eds.), Fragments of Culture:
The Everyday of Modern Turkey, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press 2002, 1-53,
or the work of E. Tarlo, ‘Islamic Cosmopolitanism: The Sartorial Biographies of Three
Muslim Women in London’ in Fashion Theory: The Journal of Dress, Body and Culture
11:2&3 (2007),143-172.
34
See in these cases Leila Ahmed’s seminal historical account of the way the hijab has
been constructed as a religious practice that is essentially tied to Muslim identity
throughout modernizing and colonial discourses, cf. L. Ahmed, Women and Gender in
Islam. Historical Roots of a Modern Debate, Yale University Press: New Haven 1991.
For a similar argument albeit with a different case (i. c. that of sati – widow burning –
in India) see L. Mani, Contentious Tradition. The Debate on Sati in Colonial India,
Berkeley: University of California Press 1989

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 ‘Is the Headscarf Oppressive or Emancipatory?’

posited claim that veiled women do not willingly or consciously subject

themselves to this sartorial practice. Such a claim usually relies on either a
notion of ‘coercion’ (forced veiling) or of ‘false consciousness’, both
pointing to the power relations in which veiling is embedded and which are
too often denied by its apologists or by covered women themselves.35
While these argumentations turn out to be problematic for how questions
of power and regulation only seem to be implicated in the case of veiling
(and subsequently are considered to be absent in the cases of not-veiling
or unveiling, which are taken to be the reflection of an immanent and
autonomous will), they often do confront us with a discursive terrain in
which there is not much left but to argue and empirically demonstrate that
Muslim women who veil are ‘active agents’ of their destiny. It is this last
position that we wish to critically address, because it reiterates a
naturalized (humanist) understanding of the agent, or ‘autonomous will’,
that exists outside any power structure, and, concomitantly, participates in
keeping those other voices unintelligible, which do not align comfortably
with the liberal and secular grammar undergirding our prevailing
conception of agency.
By arguing that Muslim women are donning the veil as a result of
their own will, we reproduce the same agency model on which problematic
allegations of ‘false consciousness’ or ‘coercion’ rest, that is, one which
opposes the question of individual choices to that of power structures.36
Such an understanding of agency has seriously been challenged by more
complex, post-Althusserian understandings of the relationship of the
subject to ideology and power.37 In this perspective, any relationship to the
self is conceived as mediated by norms and power structure.38 This means
that all ‘choices’ or bodily practices are considered as emanations of
prevailing normative ideals or regulative structures. Furthermore, by

35
A recent example of such a critique can be found in M. Lazreg, Questioning the Veil:
Open Letters to Muslim Women, Princeton: Princeton University Press 2009.
36
S. Mahmood, Politics of Piety. The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, Princeton:
Princeton University Press 2005; S. Bracke, ‘Conjugating the Modern/Religious,
Conceptualizing Female Religious Agency: Contours of a ‘Post-secular’ Conjuncture’ in
Theory Culture & Society 25:6 (2008), 51-67.
37
See notably the reflection of Foucault on the question of ideology and his critique on
the way this concept presupposes a pre-existing immanent substance or conscious
subject who remains unaffected by normative structures, in M. Foucault,
Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, New York:
Pantheon Books 1980.
38
J. Butler, Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York:
Routledge 1990.

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 ‘Is the Headscarf Oppressive or Emancipatory?’

emphasizing the ‘autonomous will’ of the women involved, we very much

rely on a liberal normative framework that takes a number of concepts
(such as the emancipation of women, the separation of church and state,
and freedom of speech) as the kernel of what counts as ‘modern’ or
‘European’. At the same time, it also takes for granted that the meaning of
these concepts is already known, and hence arrests their on-going
unfolding and puts a definite claim on their signification. The challenge
becomes then to put veiled women and the headscarf to the test of that
liberal framework in order to deliberate over their integration in the space
of citizens. While the defenders of the headscarf ban adopt a position
which views the hijab as intrinsically incompatible with this liberal
apparatus, advocates of the ‘right to veil’ will go at length to show why
veiled women in fact conform with these liberal requirements and can
perfectly integrate into the public space which is defined according to
these liberal terms.
At the heart of the matter, however, lies a critical question about
whether other trajectories, which do not necessarily fit the hegemonic
liberal grammar, can be rendered intelligible. While we have repeatedly
made strong arguments against the position that equals the headscarf to
women’s oppression, we have both felt uncomfortable adopting a liberal
vocabulary compelling us to argue that the headscarf is emancipatory. In
the first place, and almost evidently, even if the self-evidence of this point
repeatedly gets lost in the so-called headscarf debate, we subscribe to the
argument that a piece of clothing cannot in itself be oppressive or
emancipatory.39 The significance of the headscarf is always a matter of
context, and the context consists of interpretative frameworks, including
the frameworks of the agent herself as well as material conditions, and
their complex interplay. A more important contention, however, is that this
dominant framework does not enable us to address nor render intelligible
the various voices and trajectories that do not comply with such liberal
registers. For many of the women we have encountered during our studies,
wearing the hijab was not simply a matter of choice but in many cases also
framed as a ‘duty’ that was part of the virtuous dispositions they cultivated
in order to ‘please God’.40 The question at stake is how to account for

39
T. Asad, ‘Trying to Understand French Secularism’ in H. de Vries (ed.), Political
Theologies. New York: Fordham University Press 2006.
40
N. Fadil, Submitting to God, submitting to the Self. Secular and religious trajectories of
second-generation Maghrebi in Belgium, K.U. Leuven: Unpublished Dissertation 2008,
S. Bracke, ‘Conjugating the Modern/Religious, Conceptualizing Female Religious

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 ‘Is the Headscarf Oppressive or Emancipatory?’

these voices in ways that do not disavow the narratives of ‘subjection’ as

merely an authorizing discourse masking the presence of ‘real agency’,41 or
that take them as evidence for an absence of agency. We are confronted,
in other words, with the question of how to render those voices intelligible
according to their specific terms.
The seminal work of Saba Mahmood has offered a powerful critique
of how commonsensical understandings of agency suffer from the
teleology of liberal understandings of emancipation, as it seeks to locate
the political and moral autonomy of the subject in the face of power. 42
Despite the important insights it has enabled, Mahmood argues, this model
of agency also limits our ability to understand the lives of certain subjects,
in particular of women whose subjectivity has been shaped by nonliberal
traditions. The conceptual problem, to be more precise, lies in the
articulation of agency as ‘resistance to power’. In other words, if women’s
decision to wear the hijab should be seen as the exercise of their agency,
the evocation of women’s agency – in its feminist understanding – in the
same breath would suggest that such a decision should be conceived as
‘resistance to power’ and ‘emancipation’. The ‘is it oppressive or
emancipatory?’ question would then be settled in favour of emancipation.
Yet it is precisely this chain of associations that is problematic and urges us
to rethink the notion of agency.
Mahmood’s work takes up this theoretical challenge, and
reconceptualizes agency in terms of a capacity for action that historically
specific relations of subordination enable and even create. Agency
understood in this way puts in relief the capacities and skills required to
undertake particular kinds of acts (among which resistance) as well as the
recognition that modalities of acting are bound up with the historically and
culturally specific disciplines by which a subject is formed.43 For this reason
the question ‘is the headscarf oppressive or emancipatory?’ rests on a
problematic notion of agency. The question itself seems to suggest that if a
woman is oppressed, she lacks agency; if her agency is recognized,
however, it situates her on the side of emancipation. The question

Agency: Contours of a ‘Postsecular’ Conjuncture’ in Theory Culture & Society 25:6

(2008), 51-67.
41
A. Hollywood, ‘Gender, Agency, and the Divine in religious Historiography’ in The
Journal of Religion 84:4 (2004), 514-528.
42
S. Mahmood, Politics of Piety. The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, Princeton:
Princeton University Press 2005.
43
S. Mahmood, ‘Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent: Some Reflections
on the Egyptian Islamic Revival’ in Cultural Anthropology 6:2 (2001), 202-236.

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 ‘Is the Headscarf Oppressive or Emancipatory?’

excludes the possibility of recognizing her agency, and yet acknowledging

that emancipation is significantly different from agency. Nevertheless,
when shunning or questioning this liberal conception of emancipation, the
arguments get drawn in the direction of ‘oppression’ − which already
reflects the hegemonic position on the matter, as the suggested symmetry
of the question indeed does not reflect a real symmetry in prevalent
opinions, and once more denies the agency of covered Muslim women.
However, defending the emancipatory nature of the headscarf as a tactic
for countering the prevalence of the oppression arguments ultimately fails,
precisely because of the tensions played out in the notion of agency. The
understanding of agency which informs this concept of emancipation is
already premised on the understanding that the subject needs to shed her
‘particular’ (cultural, religious, and so forth) attachments.

Conclusion
This essay has sought to examine the gendered contours of the
multicultural debate through an analysis of a specific case which has turned
into one of the main objects of contention in various Western European
countries: the headscarf. The purpose of this investigation has not been to
analyse the different arguments mobilized in these various debates, but
rather to offer a critical account of the frames organizing these debates,
and their epistemic effects on our understanding of the hijab as well as our
role as scholars and public intellectuals. We have examined how these
debates on the headscarf contribute to the delineation and articulation of
a secular understanding of the public space, by which the question of
secularism becomes redefined according to very distinctive and
exclusionary terms.44 The headscarf controversies do not simply figure as a
means to account for the lived realities of veiled Muslim women, nor do
they simply address the practical concerns that may arise from this practice
– rather, they are discursive moments through which the national
imaginary is constructed, through excluding this specific sartorial practice,
and its subjects. Secondly, our investigation has also brought us to question
the dominant frames through which the voices of veiled Muslim women
can be rendered intelligible, and especially the central position of the
language of rights. While not disputing the agency such frames enable, we

44
See also in this context S. Bracke & N. Fadil, ‘Tussen Dogma en Realiteit. Secularisme,
multiculturalisme en nationalisme in Vlaanderen’ in A. Karel. S. Bracke, B. Ceuppens, S.
De Mul, N. Fadil and M. Kanmaz, (eds.) Een leeuw in een kooi. De grenzen van het
multiculturele Vlaanderen, Meulenhoff | Manteau 2009, 93-110.

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 ‘Is the Headscarf Oppressive or Emancipatory?’

have questioned its limiting capacities both in the semiotic fixation of the
hijab as well as in the particular model of agency undergirding this
language of rights.45 The work of Mahmood convincingly questions the
ways in which an understanding of resistance, and by extension
emancipation, informs the prevalent concept of agency, and notably the
usage of it in feminist scholarship. In fact, a reference to emancipation
undermines the argument of the headscarf as emancipatory from the
outset, given that the prevalent notion of emancipation is premised on an
understanding that the subject needs to shed her ‘particular’ attachments,
which includes, until further notice, the headscarf.
These observations, consequently, bring us once again to Spivak’s
interrogation of the subaltern’s capacity to speak – or to be more precise:
to make its voice heard. In considering the hegemonic structure of the
liberal grammar, the question remains how we may render those voices
intelligible within a discursive structure that not only defines what counts
as emancipation in liberal terms, but conceptualizes the very idea of a
‘willful subject’ through those terms. Rather than giving definite answers to
this weighty interrogation, we wish to conclude by a set of rhetorical
questions that make us reflect upon the various elements this interrogation
encompasses. A first concern is the process of ‘translation’ that seeks to
render those voices intelligible. What occurs in this process? What gets lost
and how are specific practices resignified? Which voices are observed and
why? How can we situate the liberal grammar in its specificity (as well as in
its potentiality) and the ways in which it becomes mobilized in exclusionary
terms, yet without ignoring the ways in which all forms of live are marked
by it? How can we avoid the essentializing trap of addressing and relating
to those non-recognized voices in idealized terms? Finally, what is the role
of critique, and how can we articulate a critique that refuses the trap of
new essentialisms or identity discourses, but provides a powerful tool for
the interrogation of the hegemonic structures of the liberal-secular
grammar?
The premise of these questions, and indeed of this essay, is that
framing matters a great deal to how social reality comes into being. Our
participation in public debates has taught us time and again that this is not
a popular line of argumentation – it does not easily fit into an appropriate
45
This observation parallels Saba Mahmood’s analysis of the performative effects of the
usage of the juridical language of anti-discrimination in the mobilization of Muslims
against offensive images during the Danish cartoon riots in 2005. For a fuller account
see S. Mahmood, ‘Religious Reason and Secular Affect. An incommensurable divide?’
in Critical Inquiry 35, (2009), 836-862.

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sound bite nor is the point readily understood. Yet in the light of the ever
more nationalist, racist and exclusionary dynamics throughout the
European societies we are familiar with, we are increasingly convinced it is
one of the crucial critical tasks awaiting us. And to those who then ask for
alternatives – ‘what questions should we be discussing if it is not whether
headscarfs are oppressive or emancipatory?’ – we answer that this must be
a matter of collective conversation in which excluded and marginalized
perspectives are highlighted. This point of departure of course raises many
other questions – such as how such conversations are already structured
by power relations because of the way they are arranged and the notions
of speech they depend on. Yet these are the very questions and
conversations with which we believe it is important to engage.

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