Jennifer A. Selby and Mayanthi L. Fernando in The Immanent Frame:
Introduced in Québec in March 2010, Bill 94 proposed requiring women to unveil their faces if they wanted to work in the public sector or access public services, including hospitals, universities, and public transportation. The bill was eventually tabled and was followed in November 2013 with Bill 60, which demanded in more generalist language the removal of conspicuous religious signs in order to dispense or use public services in the province. These Québécois bills—which have not passed—echo the logic of the April 2011 French law targeting the niqab (face veil) and banning the “dissimulation of the face” in public spaces. Both French and Québécois proponents of these laws cited gender equality and women’s emancipation—which they deemed foundational to French and Québécois values—as their primary goal. Despite Québec’s long insistence that it espouses a third path between Canadian multiculturalism and the French Jacobin model, Québec and France have increasingly converged to promote a model of secularism in which liberty and equality are articulated as sexual liberty and sexual equality. In fact, these niqab restrictions represent a broader secular-liberal discourse—what Joan W. Scott calls “sexularism”—that posits secularism as the best guarantor of women’s sexual freedom and sexual equality and, therefore, as that which distinguishes the West from the woman-oppressing rest, especially from Islam.
Much has been written on secularist reactions to veiling, some of it on this blog. Most of that scholarship focuses on the problems that the veil, and Islamic piety more generally, pose for political secularism. Here, we try to provide a somewhat different reading that follows recent work arguing that, like forms of religiosity, secularity too includes a range of ethical, social, and physical dispositions, hence the need to apprehend the secular via its sensorial and affective dimensions and not only its political ones.
More here.