Governance Feminism and its Challengers: Theorizing The Gendered Politics of Religious Diversity in France and Québec

• In Event: 173 - Section on Political Sociology Paper Session. Politics and Gender

Abstract

This article compares feminists’ role in the French and Québécois secularism debates to investigate how competing feminist discourses intersect with state efforts to restrict religious signs in the public sphere. Drawing on textual and interview data that capture feminists’ participation in the public deliberations around France’s 2010 burqa ban and Québec’s proposed (but since rejected) Charter of Values in 2013, I argue that while they gained state power in France, pro-restriction feminists remained marginal in Québec, where anti-restriction voices dominated the feminist landscape even as they opposed the governing party’s initiative. The findings advance the theorizing of feminism and feminist politics in two ways. First, they provide concrete evidence of the role that governing feminists can play in legitimating states’ exclusionary policies. Second, by broadening the scope of research to analyze the participation of feminists outside the ‘precincts of power’, this article captures the tensions that arise among feminists as they struggle to reconcile diverse conceptions of women’s equality, agency, and emancipation.

Author

• Emily J. Laxer, University of Toronto