As the final installment of the series “Sex, secularism, and ‘femonationalism,’” Sara Farris, author of In the Name of Women’s Rights,…
Sex, secularism, and “femonationalism”
In their important new books, Sara Farris and Joan Wallach Scott examine how and why gender equality has become the basis for claims that Europe and North America are distinct from—and superior to—the rest of the world, and especially the Islamic world.
In In the Name of Women’s Rights (Duke University Press, 2017), Farris situates European right-wing parties’ embrace of women’s rights within their anti-immigration and anti-Muslim policies. She argues that the surprising intersection among nationalists, feminists, and neoliberals emerges from a very specific reconfiguration of the labor market and migration patterns produced by neoliberal globalization. This intersection, which she calls “femonationalism,” therefore needs to “be deciphered by disclosing its very concrete political-economic modes of operation.”
Scott, in Sex and Secularism (Princeton University Press, 2017), deals with the way that secularism, now championed by the Left and Right alike, has come to stand for sexual freedom and sexual democracy above all else, even as sexual difference remains an intractable problem. Gender inequality, she argues, “is not simply the by-product of the emergence of modern Western nations, characterized by the separation between the public and the private, the political and the religious; rather, that inequality is at its very heart. And secularism is the discourse that has served to account for this fact.”
With contributions from historians, anthropologists, literary scholars, sociologists, and scholars of religion, this forum takes these two books as sparks for a broader conversation about sex, gender, religion, nationalism, secularism, neoliberalism, and the public sphere.
Thank you to editorial board member Mayanthi Fernando for guest curating this discussion.
Sex and secularism after Trump
Together, Sex and Secularism and In the Name of Women’s Rights considerably deepen and extend the conversation into which I…
A secular species
While the cultural manifestations of sexual difference have shifted since the late nineteenth century, the logic that sustains them remains…
“Strange bedfellows” and the reproduction of civilization
While the theoretical engagements and arguments both books provide are not limited to the question of women’s rights and feminism…
Trafficking as terror
The “war on terror” and the “war on trafficking,” two seemingly separate discourses, have become interwoven in recent years, castigating…
The “woman question” as symptomatic of imperialism
I want to bring the arguments of Farris and Scott into conversation with two other recent publications in order to…
Taming the Muslim woman
The Muslim woman figures as one of the central anchor points of the “Muslim question.” Integrated into a discourse of…
Volatile signs: Feminism, secularism, political economy
What, then, does a feminist critique of secularism and its imperial geopolitics look like? What are the terms in which…
On Sex and Secularism
Overall, the book aims to do two things: First, to offer a history that documents the ways in which gender…
On In the Name of Women’s Rights
Femonationalism is the term I introduce to describe both how nationalist right-wing parties exploit feminist ideas within Islamophobic campaigns, and…