Following the recent tragic violence in Nice, France, Cannes has instituted a ban on burkinis, swimsuits designed as “sporting garments suitable for Muslim women.” Fines have been issued for wearers of burkinis for not wearing “an outfit respecting good morals and secularism” and photographs of four armed policemen in Cannes forcing a woman to disrobe (above), have gone viral.  11&more discussed:

Sexism + Xenophobia =

Sophie: I’m with the designer of the burkini, who said that she made them to make women feel free.

However, they are becoming a symbol of the threat of repression – as in, wearing one could provoke some French police to fine you and to force you to take it off.

The policemen who were photographed enforcing this law appeared as symbols of violence against women, gender violence, sexism, xenophobia all in one.

Nwando: I absolutely agree. There is something so sinister about those images of the men forcing a sleeping woman to disrobe.

Joy: In this case, using force to mandate that women display their bodies in a way they’re not comfortable with is just as bad as mandating that women cover up their bodies in a way they’re not comfortable with.

Nikki: Anyone else find it ironic in the eye-rolling kind of way that these women are getting punished for the actions of men?

Let’s face it. The overwhelming majority of terrorists of any flavor are men.

This is not about safety or protection. This is another way to control women and our bodies.

Joy: Really, if you want to decrease terrorism and radicalization stop alienating people domestically and bombing their families abroad. War on Terror, I’m looking at you.

Shruti: And it is strange that they would go after Muslim womens’ dressing choices in a supposed retaliation against attacks carried out by French Muslim men.

Whose right to see and be seen…or not?

Joy: Although, if I’m going to be entirely honest, niqabs or burkas that obscure the face make me a little uncomfortable, because I feel like so much communication happens through the face. It makes me uneasy to feel like I can’t really communicate with someone because I can’t see anything but their eyes, if that. Reminds me of horror films when people wear ski masks to hide their features.

Nikki: It would definitely not be my cup of tea but as long as the woman is choosing it, I really don’t care.

Joy: That’s exactly it: I feel like it obscures communication, but if someone doesn’t want to communicate with me, that’s entirely their prerogative. Opposition to the hijab or the burkini, however, is entirely political. They don’t obscure your face, and aren’t substantively different from a hat (or, in this case, a swimming cap). People who are opposed to hijabs, in my understanding, do it for entirely political/Islamophobic reasons.

Monica: This article talks about that issue of concealment and, I think, says it well:

“[A]nxieties about clothing tend to be about what is being concealed, rather than shown. From the burkini on the beach to the banning of hoodies in shopping centres, our fear now is what lurks beneath.

Mostly, it is just a woman taking her kids to the seaside, or a teenage boy out to meet his mates in baggy hip-hop clothing, and nothing more. It may not feel that way, but we are safer than we have ever been as we go about our daily lives, and appalling though every act of terrorism is – and, indeed, every violent crime – the odds of any of us experiencing either is very low. But we feel scared. And we feel powerless. So we blame the EU, refugees, the burkini. And we look back to what now seems a safer, happier time, when all we had to worry about was hemlines.“

Jia Jia: Sometimes ignorance is bliss. If we didn’t have so much media at our disposal, all motivated by the commercial prerogative to grab our attention (which is much easier to do with fear than anything else), we wouldn’t constantly be reading or chatting about all the “dangers” in our world.

What constitutes freedom or repression?

Nwando:

Although I totally think that the ban is absolute bullshit, that article’s narrative of hijabs or burkhas being a feminist choice because they are ‘modest’ is always worrying to me. It suggests that anybody not wearing them is not ‘modest’.

So what? They are asking for attention? And the irony is that there seems to be a lot of pride (for example for the writer of the Guardian op piece) in their ‘modesty’.

Jia Jia: I actually find the Guardian article to be irrelevant at best, harmful at worst because it distracts from bigger issues. It reviews the history of Western female dress and tries to argue that society’s fear of what women reveal has now evolved into fear of what people conceal—and that fear rides on an undercurrent of racism, gender issues etc. (all the themes that are fashionable to liberal rhetoric basically).

First of all, I don’t actually see the burkini ban as a continuation of the oppression of women/autonomy in the West. It’s a separate thing.

It’s about the fear of Muslims (ultimately what’s different), France’s tendency to rigidly adhere to “universal” principles with little consideration for what’s practically effective, and frankly the ugly human trait of bullying an easy target.

So I don’t buy the article’s premise; instead it feels to me that the author was trying to find an ‘interesting’ angle that would attract eyeballs and advertising revenue. Because, presumably, a deeper discussion of the situation of Muslim women in Europe just isn’t interesting enough.

Secondly, I’m kind of amazed that the article managed to turn the bullying of Muslim women into an article about Western culture. Even though it’s critical about Western culture, it still feels narcissistic to me. My culture is bullying you? Lemme navel gaze about the history of my culture’s repression of its own people and come up with zero deeper understanding of what you and your people are going through.

Nwando: This blogpost is really good – it picks the whole thing apart.

We have to remember that the covering up of women in some Muslim cultures is coercive, forceful, and backed with threats of extreme violence, criminalization and ostracization from their families. The idea of ‘choice’ within that kind of setting is laughable.

Shruti: Very interesting blog post. While for some women the choice of modesty is empowering, it doesn’t take away from the many instances when modesty is used as an excuse to police women’s bodies.

Nwando: Really, I think the whole affair is all a bit of a smokescreen – like a bit of silly season international news. Those images of the men in France forcing that woman to disrobe were shocking. But not really shocking like an image of a woman being stoned to death for being immodest.

Shruti: Either ways I see the burkini ban as simply the French equivalent of how a burka has been used in many countries for decades now.

Which should tell policy-makers and politicians riding the wave of cheap fear-driven rhetoric, how easy it is to become that which we hate and fight against when we make policies based in sentiments of fear, divisiveness and retaliation.

Illustration: Contemporary Bart, 2016

Update: The ban has since been overturned.

Tags:  burkini feminism gender inequality Islamophobia politics race religion women's rights