Content area
Full Text
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)
Bronwyn Winter engages and analyzes a very timely and controversial topic: the French headscarf debate, which was brought to national attention by three teenage girls who were expelled from school in Creil in 1989 because they refused to remove their hijabs. The controversy remains atop the political agenda in France to this day. Much has been said and written about this debate from the political left and right, by feminists, multiculturalists, secularists, Catholics, Islamists, men and women. However, what is particularly remarkable about this debate, in France and elsewhere, is the framing of the headscarf itself. It has been designated as both an instrument of the oppression of women by an archaic faith (Islam) and conversely a symbol of the empowerment of women in the public space. Subsequently, both sides of the debate have labeled one another as Western-centrists, cultural imperialists, or cultural relativists. This has led to an unfortunate polarization and oversimplification of the issues at hand: women's rights, religion, and secularism in France.
Winter's approach to the French headscarf debate is refreshingly balanced. She is highly critical of the black-and-white polemic, which has been used to describe an issue that, for the most part, remains in a grey zone. In her introduction, she identifies the polarization of opinions between so-called Western-centrists and cultural relativists. She also points to the different views of the Anglo-American versus the European, and specifically the French, academic and political communities. "Many of my feminist friends and colleagues in the English-speaking world write France off as monoculturally 'assimilationist' and imperialistically 'universalist' [...]. For many of my French feminist friends and colleagues, however [...] the Western English-speaking world is monolithically 'cultural relativist'"...