Mapping Québécois Sexual Nationalism in Times of ‘Crisis of Reasonable Accommodations’

Abstract The language of gender equality and sexual emancipation has become increasingly pivotal to Western immigration and integration governmentality, giving rise to a new brand of nationalism in which women's rights and gay-and-lesbian rights are deemed core civilisational values of the West, while migrant communities, particularly Muslims, are cast as menacing them. Operating through a reconfigured Orientalism and the rhetoric and politics of ‘clash of civilisations’, these collusions come with serious national and international consequences and should be analysed not only as a new inflection of contemporary racism, in an era boisterously declared committed to diversity though anti-multiculturalist and post-racial, but also in their connections with neo-liberalism that links biopolitics to geopolitics and made marketable a range of social movements such as feminism and gay and lesbian activism. Expanding on a critical framework inspired by postcolonial feminist and queer anti-racist writings, this paper uncovers the ways in which gender and sexuality have become a key mode through which technologies of racialised governmentality come into existence via discourses of ‘feminism vs. multiculturalism’, ‘secularism’ and ‘human rights’, during the recent Québécois ‘reasonable accommodation crisis’, which was seemingly about the extent to which minority religious accommodation should be practiced, hence ‘not about race’. Keywords: Immigration/Integration GovernmentalityMinority Religious AccommodationNationalismNeo-liberalismQuebec, CanadaRacismSexual Politics Notes 1. In 2011, CSF recommended banning “clearly visible” signs of religious affiliation and religious practices like prayers in the workplace for all civil servants. 2. Foucault defines the exercise of power as “a ‘conduct of conducts’ and a management of possibles, […] a set of actions on possible actions”, and to govern as “to structure the possible field of action of others” (Citation2001 [1982]: 341). 3. ‘Reasonable accommodation’ is a juridical term referring to a legal obligation to accommodate (distinct from goodwill-dependent adjustments), created by the courts’ interpretation of the right to equality protected by the Canadian and the Quebec Charters of Rights and Freedoms, which ban direct and indirect discrimination (Woehrling Citation1998). During the “crisis”, the term has undergone a semantic shift and come to signify in media and public discourses only religious accommodation, excluding other prohibited grounds of discrimination like disability, pregnancy, etc. from its signification field (Bilge Citation2010). 4. These entail symbolic practices that racialise minority gender and family relations, their conceptions of femininity, masculinity, marriage and sexuality, as pathologically deviant (submissive, violent, promiscuous), and material practices such as racial/cultural profiling at work in immigration/integration governmentality. 5. A prolific postcolonial feminist literature tackles how women, gender and sexuality were instrumental both in Western colonial and imperial enterprise, and in its corollary, anti-colonial, anti-Western resistance and nation building. 6. By homonationalism (homonormative nationalism), Puar conceptualises a dialectic process by which “certain forms of gay and lesbian sexuality are folded into the national body as the Muslim/Arab Other is cast as perversely Queer” and problematises the co-occurrence of the rise and popular visibility of gay-and-lesbian legal rights, and increasingly xenophobic policies vis-à-vis minorities within the nation-state and those deemed menacing from the outside (Citation2011: 1, 4). 7. According to Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart (director of the World Values Survey), Huntington “was only half right”, for the “primary cultural fault line” dividing the West and the Muslim world, “core value clash”, is not about democracy but gender equality and sexual freedoms. “Muslims and their Western counterparts want democracy, yet they are worlds apart when it comes to attitudes towards divorce, abortion, gender equality and gay rights” (Citation2002: 63). 8. An infamous example of which is Laura Bush's warmongering toward Afghanistan by using Afghan women's right to wear nail polish. 9. I follow here Bottici and Challand (Citation2010) who treat the clash of civilisations thesis as political myth. 10. Corpus comprising 113 articles (news, op-eds) and 90 readers’ letters, published in Quebec's daily newspapers between March 2006 (Supreme Court's decision on Multani – kirpan) and December 2007 (the end of public auditions of the Bouchard–Taylor Commission, launched by the provincial government and headed by two renowned scholars, philosopher Charles Taylor and sociologist Gérard Bouchard), and invoking gender/sexuality while reporting or commenting on ‘reasonable accommodation’. For an analysis of these arguments, see Bilge (Citation2010). 11. See Roy (Citation2012). 12. Precisely, the 2011 (12th) edition of Semaine d'actions contre le racisme, whose theme was Breaking Down Barriers and Living Diversity. 13. Entitled Loving Your Children the Way they Are, the campaign is officially described as “geared toward Québec's ethnic communities by reaching out to, more specifically, the parents and other family members of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people from these communities”. See “Awareness Campaign Launch on LGBT Issues Geared toward Ethnic Communities”, 25 March 2011, http://www.homophobiaday.org/default.aspx?scheme=4096 14. In a 2010 Focus Canada survey, 66 per cent of Quebeckers expressed support for banning the Muslim headscarf in public space compared to 41.5 per cent in the rest of Canada (ROC) (Reitz Citation2011: 16). Accommodating religious minorities by providing prayer space or flexible working hours is also less welcomed in Quebec than in the ROC (ibid.). Moreover, unlike the ROC favouring a case-by-case approach, Quebec has a propensity to legislate on minority accommodation issues, as evidenced by the so-called “niqab ban” project (Bill-94). If adopted, the Bill would force all users of Quebec public services (e.g. health agencies, schools and universities, services from childcare to nursing homes) to uncover their faces and deny essential government services, public employment, educational opportunities and healthcare to women wearing face covers like niqab and burka (D. MacPherson, “Quebec's Niqab Bill is Unclear, Sloppy and Poorly Written”, Montreal Gazette, 4 April 2010). 15. See Courtois (Citation2010) for a typical example of this plotline. See Helly (Citation2010) for an incisive critique of this “transatlantic francophone body of opinion” shared by France and Quebec and characterised by its dogmatic anti-clericalism, fundamentalist secularism and populist opposition to the rule of law and the primacy of the Constitution over parliamentary power. 16. In its final report, the Bouchard–Taylor Commission consecrates “open secularism” as Quebec's historical path and the type of secular system best suited to Quebec society, for, unlike “restrictive secularism” à la française, it conceives the neutrality of the State to foster, not hinder, freedom of conscience and religion – one of the purposes of secularism (Bouchard and Taylor Citation2008: 46–47). 17. This frame owes much to the late liberal feminist philosopher, Susan Okin (Citation1999), whose interventions sparked academic and political interest for the supposed clash between cultural group rights and women's rights, and made common sense that the former undermines the latter (Fekete Citation2006). 18. Calling gender equality “the hallmark of Quebec's identity”, CSF's president, Christiane Pelchat, declared: “freedom of religion must be limited, intrinsically, by the right to equality between women and men”. “Ban Teachers from Religious Dress, Quebec Group Says”, National Post, 9 October 2007, http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=e34f88e3-8254-46ed-908c-a1339f350c22 19. R.S.Q. 1977, chapter C-12. 20. Assumptions about gender inequality among some immigrants were already traceable, though not widespread, in previous immigration/integration debates. 21. A socially mediated attribution, traumatic status is given to real or imagined phenomena that are believed to have abruptly and harmfully affected collective identity (Alexander Citation2003: 91–92). 22. Grande Noirceur refers to the reign of Maurice Duplessis, the Premier of Quebec between 1936–39 and 1944–59. Quebec society under his government is portrayed as backward, despotic and priest-ridden, which allows the 1960s to be cast as its complete opposite, a time of social progress and modernisation. 23. Nationalist ideology focusing on the survival of French-Canadians/Québécois as a distinct people with its language, customs and religion (or in its new inflections: secularism, modernity, etc.). 24. For Hage, worrying about the nation, unlike caring, entails a narcissistic investment in the nation induced by feelings of being threatened; basically, one worries about oneself. Caring, on the other hand, is not defensive and involves intersubjectivity, including others into one's perspective of care (2003: 3). 25. A case in point of academic endorsement of this stance, rather popular among a new generation of cultural nationalist scholars, is Courtois (Citation2010). 26. According to a 2006 Environics poll on public opinions toward Canadian Muslims, public support for multiculturalism shrinks when minority cultures are deemed “gender unequal” (Bilge Citation2008). Additional informationNotes on contributorsSirma Bilge Sirma Bilge is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Université de Montréal. Her work engages with intersecting politics of the nation and immigration/integration governmentality as they particularly articulate around regimes of gender and sexual normativities. Recent publications include: “Beyond Subordination vs. Resistance: An Intersectional Approach to the Agency of Veiled Muslim Women”, Journal of Intercultural Studies, 31 (1), 9–28 (2010); “Recent Feminist Outlooks on Intersectionality”, Diogenes, 225, 58–72 (2010)

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