| Date | Time | Location |
|---|---|---|
| Friday, September 21, 2012 | 4:00PM - 6:00PM | Seminar Room 208N, Munk School of Global Affairs 1 Devonshire Place |
Heated discussion in the media, costly and laborious government commissions, and restrictive legal recommendations in France and Quebec, Canada have recently focused on the undesirability of face-covering veils (burqas and niqabs) in the public sphere. This talk charts how these sites have, at the same time, generated a contrasting idealized presentation of a desireable secular female body. This examination is grounded in recent secularism studies scholarship that argues that, like forms of religiosity, secularisms include a range of social and physical dispositions, or what Michael Warner calls “a framework of corporeal experience and struggle” (Warner 2008; see also, Calhoun et al. 2011; Mahmood 2009; Jakobsen and Pellegrini 2008; Asad 2003). Through consideration of two recent niqab-wearing women’s legal cases outside of Paris and in Montreal, and with reference to Michel Foucault theory of governmentality (1980, 1988) and Nilüfer Göle’s notion of sameness (2007), I examine the regulatory functions and normalizing delineations of female sexuality within restrictions against full-face hijabs.
Dr. Selby is assistant professor of Religious Studies and affiliate faculty of Gender Studies at Memorial University of Newfoundland. She is author of Questioning French Secularism: Islam and Gender Politics in a Parisian Suburb (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and co-editor of Debating Sharia: Islam, Gender Politics and Family Law Arbitration (with Anna Korteweg, University of Toronto Press, 2012). Recent articles have appeared in the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs and in Culture and Religion.
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