Politics of diversity : sexual and religious self-fashioning in contemporary and historical contexts

Abstract

Scott’s seminal book ‘Politics of the Veil’ (2007) offers a multifaceted analysis of the French headscarf debate since its emergence in 1989 and a critique of French republican universalism which constructs veiled women as ‘others’ who transgress the attempts to carve a unified imaginary of France. This work provided a fruitful ground to engage with questions of ‘difference’ and ‘belonging’ from a multidisciplinary and gendered perspective. Two broad interpretative approaches can be discerned in the following papers: a structural, perspective which seeks to examine the way ‘otherness’ is regulated and shaped; a postcolonial dimension of this discussion. The papers collected here thus provide a rich set of perspectives upon how ‘difference’ is shaped, contested and negotiated in a juridical, sociological and historical dimension The themes addressed trespass the sole question of the place of religion in the public sphere, or the question of ‘integration’ and cultural diversity, but they rather demonstrate how a semblance of homogeneity and coherence is shaped through this regulation of difference. It is this regulation of difference that lies at the heart of the current political conjuncture, as the question of Europe’s identity turns into a central societal and political preoccupation.