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Unravelling the discursive dynamics of sign making in the French Senate’s debates on the hijab and the burkini

Abstract

This contribution is concerned with the discourse on the hijab and the burkini within the French Senate. It explores the processes leading to the construction of these garments as socially meaningful signs and their implications for the discursive construction of “the Muslim woman.” For this purpose, a corpus containing 18 debates regarding legislation on wearing a hijab or a burkini, held in the French Sen- ate between 2018 and 2023, was compiled and analyzed, drawing from an intersectional approach that takes into consideration both gender and religious adherence. The analysis reveals that the hijab and the burkini are constructed as indexical signs of an affiliation to Islam in general, but also to a specific politico-religious ideology and as an instrument to impose this ideology. The depiction of alleged “Islamic” values – most notably gender inequality – standing in sharp contrast with “French” values suggests a need for France to defend “its” values against the perceived threat posed by Islam and/or Islamism (with the distinction between the two often being blurred), for which restrictions on wearing a hijab and a burkini seem to be the solution. From this, two images of hijab/burkini-wearing women are constructed: the oppressed woman suffering from (Muslim) patriarchy and unable to protect herself, and the militant woman refusing to take off the hijab or the burkini, thereby imposing her ideology on others. In the debates about the hijab, another image of the Muslim woman is drawn as a positive counterexample to and as a model for hijab-wearing women: the emancipated woman who has “freed” herself from the hijab. Both images of hijab/burkini-wearing women are depicted as deviating from Western norms or conventions of female behavior, either for not being emancipated or for not acting in a moderate way. Hence, Muslim women are othered, due to being both Muslim and female. In this reasoning, the only way to be accepted as French appears to be to remove the hijab/the burkini, that is, to fully assimilate and thus conform to Western conventions.