ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author tries to make sense of such conversations by situating them within recent controversies around bans on the face veil across Europe. The author views in the conference room in Heidelberg mirrored the recurrent navigations between the legality of veiling and the legality of bans through interventions into codified individual freedoms. He argues about two things: first, a set of regulative practices, closely tied to the institutions and practices of a nation state, which guide the borders between the religious and the secular in public and thereby necessarily also in private, which form and shape citizens and second, a more tacit and often unmarked set of secular affects prevalent in the social practices of secular societies on various levels. The author call these "secular embodiments" and argues that controversies around the face veil in Europe revealingly bring together these two dimensions in a more tangible manner than those on other forms of veiling, like the headscarf.
