ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how niqab-wearing Muslim women “actualize” and reconstitute their spiritual ambitions when their embodiments of faith are regulated legally to the private sphere. Taking into account the history of Orientalism through the lens of “lived religion” and engaging with Connolly’s (2011) “world of becoming,” I explore two French legal cases to discuss “the body” as relational and a continuous process of ambitions and possibilities of becoming that are never separated from relations with the world (Ammerman 2007; Butler 1997; Deleuze 1993). I argue how the secular refashioning of the body (Asad 2011; Hirschkind 2011; Mahmood 2013) is less about upholding the ideals of secularism and more about new forms of gendering in the body.
