Paper short abstract:

In the paper ‘headscarf affairs’, public controversies about Muslim women wearing the veil in public places, are assessed as contentious episodes where notions of nationhood, public performativity, femininity and religiosity are negotiated, rearticulated, and reconstituted.

Paper long abstract:

Today, the Islamic veil is a powerful trope in the Western European liberal imaginary. The veil is situated at the symbolic centre of the perceived opposition between religion and women's emancipation. 'Headscarf affairs' is the rather degrading term denoting public controversies about Muslim women wearing the veil in public places such as schools, official buildings, courts etc. The direct cause for these controversies, it has been argued, is the ever growing number of Muslims demanding ever more religious rights. As a result of the general trend of reislamization among Muslims in Europe, Muslims women increasingly cover their heads. Other, less alarmist reactions, see 'headscarf affairs' as temporal cases of cultural adaptation of an immigrant population.

In the paper I will question these lines of reasoning. Although veiled women are not a novelty in Western-European, 'headscarf affairs' are a relatively recent phenomenon, and must be understood as the result of a continuous shift in the meaning and the discursive location of the veil. The fact that veils become the cause of 'affairs' has to do with these discursive shifts and with specific features of the public sphere. The actors involved in these 'affairs' challenge (or defend for that matter), or even disrupt the dominant historically emerged political discourse on religion and society. As such principal actors in these 'headscarf affairs' do not only reflect political culture, they must be considered as 'agents' that either defend and reproduce, or (more importantly) challenge, change, constitute, and elaborate political culture. Veiled women perform signs of difference and by doing so transgress the boundaries of established assumptions about the character of the nation, secularity and femininity. 'Headscarf affairs' are contentious episodes where notions of nationhood, public performativity, femininity and religiosity are negotiated, recombined, rearticulated, and reconstituted. It should thus be clear that donning the veil in such specific circumstances is as much a comment on the secular character of the public sphere, as to the established notions of Islamic religiosity.