Sexual Emancipation

This chapter explores the complex uses of feminism and appeals to “sexual democracy” in the new discourse of secularism. The story is anything but straightforward and involves the insistence on sex as a public matter, and on women's sexuality (and by extension, nonnormative sexualities) as a right of individual self-determination. The emphasis on individualism is a part of neoliberalism's “rationality;” it is not the same as its nineteenth-century antecedent. At the same time, the difference of sex and its heteronormative claims has not disappeared, confusing woman's status as a desiring subject with her status as an object of (male) desire. The contemporary discourse of secularism, with its insistence on the importance of “uncovered” women's bodies equates public visibility with emancipation, as if that visibility were the only way to confirm women as sexually autonomous beings (exercising the same rights in this domain as men). The contrast with “covered” Muslim women not only perpetuates the confusion between Western women as subjects and objects of desire, it also distracts attention from (or flatly ignores) persisting racialized gender inequalities in markets, politics, jobs, and law within each side.

Political Emancipation

This chapter considers the contradictions of women's emancipation in light of the American (1776) and the French (1789) revolutions. It shows how the resistance to women's citizenship had less to do with the necessarily slow but inevitable progress of liberal democratic ideas than it did with a contradiction at the very heart of the political thinking that articulated them—a political thinking integral to the discourse of secularism. Liberal political theory postulated the sameness of all individuals as the key to their formal equality—abstracted from their circumstances there was no discernable difference among them, they stood as equals before the law. At the same time there were differences that were thought to refuse abstraction. These were people in a state of dependency, such as propertyless peasants, wage laborers, women, children, slaves. Therefore, they could not be counted as autonomous individuals—autonomy, after all, was at the heart of the very definition of individuality.

From the Cold War to the Clash of Civilizations

This chapter argues that, in the second half of the twentieth century, the old public/private distinction was dissolved in the realms of both religion and sexuality. This put into place concepts that prepared a new discourse of secularism in Western Europe and the Anglo-American world—one in which Islam took the place of Soviet communism as a threat to social order. Secularism as a political discourse was eclipsed by the Cold War, although its traces and effects were not. The relationship of the state to religion was reformulated as the Soviet Union came to represent, not the embodiment of secularism as it had been defined in the nineteenth-century anticlerical campaigns but the home of what was derided as godless atheism. In this new discourse, the secular and the Christian were increasingly considered synonymous, and women's sexual emancipation became the primary indicator of gender equality.

Women and Religion

This chapter looks at the ways by which women in Western Europe, Britain, and the United States were associated with religion. It addresses the fact that the discourse of secularism, despite its promise of universal equality, made women's difference the ground for their exclusion from citizenship and public life more generally. However, the chapter suggests that it was not because religious ideas about women were left in place. Instead, the apostles of secularism, in France and elsewhere, offered what they took to be entirely new explanations for women's difference from men, rooting them in human nature and biology rather than divine law. Gender difference was inscribed in a schematic description of the world as divided into separate spheres, public and private, male and female. In fact, in this context the association of women with religion was not a relic of past practice but an invention of the discourse of secularism itself.

Reproductive Futurism

This chapter shows how, in the discourse of secularism, the existence of separate spheres for women and men was no longer attributed to God, it was taken as a natural fact. The insistence on nature's mandate was a distinctive aspect of nineteenth-century secularism. Human biology was the ultimate source of the unequal and distinctive roles for women and men. These roles designated women's bodies as the agents of reproduction—as guarantor of the future of the family and, by extension, the race and the nation—and men as embodied labor power, whether manual or intellectual. In the discourse of secularism, the sexual division of labor also had an evolutionary dimension that linked the progress of civilization, and so of the white race, to specialized functions for each sex.

The Discourse of Secularism

This introductory chapter treats the discourse of secularism as a discursive operation of power whose generative effects need to be examined critically in their historical contexts. Following Michel Foucault, this chapter's approach is “genealogical,” as it analyzes the ways in which the term has been variously deployed, and with what effects. This approach does not deny the reality of the institutions and practices said to embody secularism, however. But instead of assuming that we know in advance what secularism means, or that it has a fixed and unchanging definition, this chapter interrogates its meaning as it was articulated and implemented differently in different contexts at different times. After all, the word “secularism” is not new, but compared to the much older secular, it is surprisingly modern.