ABSTRACT
Since the 1990s, there has been an overwhelming and exceptional focus on the headscarf in French political culture. The difference between France and other countries, many observers say, is laïcité – the legal principle of secularism that carries an emphasis on state blindness to citizens’ religious identities. However, an exclusive focus on secularism misses the heart of the problem. French objections to Muslim modest dress are made primarily in terms of gender equality and appropriate male–female relations. In the 1990s and early decades of the 21st century, a novel articulation of French gender values emerged, focused on giving greater valence to the heterosocial interactions that the headscarf was understood to threaten. The value of mixité, or the normative principle of co-mingling between the sexes, rose in prominence in political discourse. This chapter shows how contemporary discourses of mixité draw on diverse and competing ideas about male–female relations, the place of the erotic in democracy, and consumer culture. It further shows how heterosociality underpins the emergent reconceptualization of public order. We also see how a range of feminist actors challenge these understandings of gender difference, and organize around ‘sartorial freedom’ and Muslim women’s rights.
