ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on Michel Houellebecq’s 2015 novel Soumission and its 2017 theatre adaptation. The chapter focuses upon the way in which the novel and theatre play construct understandings of the Islamic State and Muslims, secular modernity, and femininity and masculinity. First, it looks at how the novel responds to, and is part and parcel of, discussions and anxiety about the place of religion in contemporary public life, as well as the place of postcolonial religious-racialised subjects in France. Second, it investigates the way in which the theatre play symbolically stages conversion. That is, it explores the notion of conversion as submission to the Islamic State, not just of the individual male character, but of Western secular modernity at large. Third, it analyses the film Hadewijch (2009) by Bruno Dumont in order to bring in an analysis of an individual female character’s mystic Catholic/Islamic religious conversion. The chapter ends with a personal reflection on secular feelings. As such, the chapter further contributes to rethinking the intersections of constructions of religion/secularity, gender and race in Western Europe.
