A Nation's Dilemma: Party Politics and the Production of Nationhood, Belonging and Citizenship in France's Face Veil Debate
[Thesis]
Emily Laxer
Korteweg, Anna C.
University of Toronto (Canada)
2016
211
Committee members: Boyd, Monica; Schneiderhan, Erik
Place of publication: United States, Ann Arbor; ISBN=978-1-339-93091-6
Ph.D.
Sociology
University of Toronto (Canada)
2016
In April 2011-following a two-year-long nationwide debate over Islamic veiling-the French government implemented a law that prohibits facial coverings in all public spaces. Prior research attributes this and other restrictive laws to France's republican secular tradition. This dissertation takes a different approach. Building on literature that sees electoral politics as a site for generating-rather than merely reflecting-societal meanings, it argues that the 2011 ban arose in significant part out of political parties' struggle to demarcate the boundaries of the electoral sphere in the face of an ultra-right electoral threat. Specifically, it shows that in seeking to prevent the ultra-right National Front party from monopolizing the religious signs issue, France's major right and left parties agreed to portray republicanism as requiring the exclusion of face veiling from public space. Because it was forged in conflict, however, the agreement thus generated is highly fractured and unstable. It also conceals ongoing conflict, both within political parties and in civil society, over the precise meaning of French republicanism. The findings thus underscore the relationship between boundary drawing in the political sphere and the process of demarcating the cultural and political boundaries of nationhood, belonging and citizenship in contexts of immigrant diversity.
Religion; Political science; Sociology
Philosophy, religion and theology;Social sciences;France;Gender;Islam;Nationalism;Politics;Veil