French secularism as a ‘guarantor’ of women's rights? Muslim women and gender politics in a Parisian<i>banlieue</i>
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper considers contemporary discourse in France that positions secularism (laïcité) as a guarantor of Muslim women's rights. In the first section I sketch a socio-historical genealogy of this discourse focusing on key shifts in its articulation. I suggest that the current identification between secularism and Muslim women's rights has its main expressions in recent public policy commissions and, as an example on the ground, in the positions taken by France's largest feminist organisation, Femmes Solidaires. Informed by one another, these commissions and this organisation (a) conceptualise Islam as overtly political and patriarchal and (b) define secularism as the primary way to ‘liberate’ Muslim women. The second section examines the impact of this discourse on Muslim communities in Petit Nanterre, a Parisian suburb where I conducted extensive anthropological fieldwork. Significantly, Muslim women in this suburb are uninterested in headscarf-related debates on secularism and more vividly engaged in the 2005 Pork Affair, a locally oriented controversy in a public school. I conclude that the religious concerns of the Muslim women positioned at the centre of the secular debate are expressed in certain forms of activism, efforts ignored by commissions and women's advocacy groups.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it