For the past few years, I’ve been researching Muslim communities in France.  As I looked this topic it became increasingly evident that most scholars in this field found that ‘Muslim’+’France’=Headscarf Debate.  Doing a quick subject search on the University of Toronto library website for ‘France Muslim’ brings up the following books in the top 10:

-“Muslim women on the move : Moroccan women and French women of Moroccan origin speak out”

-“Why the French don't like headscarves : Islam, the state, and public space “

-“North African women in France : gender, culture, and identity “

-“Breaking the silence : French women's voices from the ghetto”

-“Muslim girls and the other France : race, identity politics, & social exclusion”

 

There are also two other books on women written in French.  The predominance of women’s issues in the study of French Muslims in particular, and Muslims in general is striking, and brought to my attention two things I hadn’t considered before.  First, I know next to nothing about women’s studies and second, that women’s studies offers important insight into what was a male dominated field but does so with some risk.

 

It seems almost misogynistic to say that I haven’t been well versed in women’s or gender studies.   The subject was skipped entirely in my “studying religion” survey course and in the history department’s required methodology course.  I was warned by my peers not to take courses in the women’s studies department since they were hostile classes for a man to be in (a similar experience was shared by Andrew in class).  Finally, in fourth year, gender studies played a part in a ‘Contemporary Issues in Islam’ course, and in my medieval history seminar.  The first course was useful, but the second seemed to be under the belief that women’s studies was devoted entirely to dowries and widows.  Our last class showed that this experience was not atypical, and that many of us went through four years in the humanities without learning about the study of half the human race.  I do side with those in class that believed that a Woman’s Studies department simply compartmentalizes the discipline and allows for professors in history or religion to simply pass over its impact.  It may be a necessary risk, however, since as a previously marginalized field the study of women and gender may need time to foster and grow without outside interference.   I do think that a disservice is being done by not allowing undergrads in the ‘traditional’ fields such as history and philosophy the chance to learn about this important subject. 

 

“The task of including all expressions of religiosity in the purview of the history of religions, of course, is not easy.  The extent to which it has failed to do so has been made embarrassingly clear by women’s studies” (Kinsley, 3).  Kinsley succeeds in demonstrating just how embarrassingly clear women’s studies has shown the deficiencies of the history of religions to be.  For years, the fact that men and women experience religion differently, that the sources we read largely come from men, and that religious materials are gendered had been ignored. Women’s studies has done an untold amount of good, but it is not without problems, and these problems arise far too often in the study of Muslim women.  

Kinsley states that, “categorizing males as oppressors and women as victims can also lead to objectifying women as a category and blinding the historian of religions to women’s own voices, keeping him or her from hearing women as subjects” (Kinsley, 12).  This is no truer than with the issue of the hijab.  Of the many books on the headscarf, most look at it objectively and with an understanding of both sides of the debate.  The odd example, however, asserts that the hijab is a misogynistic symbol forced upon Muslim women, and that any woman that says otherwise is doing so simply out of fear.  This simply does not account for the many women who decide in their 20s to start wearing the hijab for pious reasons, or the professional women who protested against the headscarf ban in Turkey.  These authors see Muslim women as a holistic entity that has lagged behind the ‘Western’ feminist movements and who is everywhere oppressed.   This generalization validates Scott’s criticism that women’s studies can take away from the experience of the individual and that the only experience which matters is that of middle class white women (Clarke 227). This has dire political ramifications.  The headscarf debate in France has long been fueled by the belief that the hijab is a symbol of oppression, and it is a certitude that the fair and balanced studies on the hijab did not lead to this conclusion.  The eventual ban of the headscarf in schools may have prevented many girls from having the hijab forced upon them by their parents, but it also prevented others who chose to do it out of religious conviction.   Seeing the world as split between oppressor and oppressed seems to be largely a result of women’s studies roots in political feminism, but it is unfair to women everything to generalize based on the Western experience.

The Sex/Gender debate

This was another debate that I found interesting in class, and I’ll quickly close with some remarks on it.  Boyarin tells us of two different interpretations of the Genesis chapters 1 and 2.  Philo of Alexandria wrote that the man and woman created in chapter one was actually an androgynous, spiritual being and that man was only given sex in the second chapter.  The Rabbinic interpretation is that the being created in God’s image was hermaphroditic, containing both sexes.  I will have to agree with the Talmud on this, and say that “two sexes exist from the beginning”  (Boyarin 129).  Sex is biological, and I do not believe that it is produced by culture.  Various cultures have engendered various sexes, but male, female and hermaphrodite exist sui generis. We may choose to culturally accept only male and female, but in so doing we are just forcing a gender description onto the third category by making hermaphrodites conform to something more ‘acceptable’.  It is still a sex category.