Extract
[...] Gutmann, M. (2023). Remarking the Unmarked: An Anthropology of Masculinity Redux. Annual Review of Anthropology. HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH. (2024, March 8). France: Ensure Muslim Women, Girls Can Play Sports. Retrieved from https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/03/08/france-ensure-muslim-women-girls-can-play-sports Khokhar, F. (2021). Reclaiming the narrative: gendered Islamophobia, its impacts and responses from Muslim women. [...]
[...] Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989(1), Article 8. Davids, N. (2013). Muslim Women and the Politics of Religious Identity in a (Post) Secular Society. Studies in Philosophy and Education 33 (3):303-313 . Edmunds, A. J. (2020). Precarious bodies: The securitization of the "veiled" woman in European human rights." DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/1468-4446.12806. [...]
[...] Davids (2014) and Bournissen et al. (2018) describe how sports federations reproduce exclusionary norms while retreating behind the defense of republican principles or a posture of neutrality. These institutions participate in a governmentality that produces acceptable subjects: sporty women but not claimants, visible but depoliticized, performing but dereligious. The Renard (2019) speaks of a 'conditional inclusion', where the visibility of minorities is tolerated as long as it does not challenge dominant norms. In mobilizing Foucault, and articulating it to critical sociology of expertise, we can then think of the hijab sportif as a power analyzer (Agamben, 2007), which reveals how female bodies are captured in tightly regulated regimes linked to national conceptions of citizenship and the manufacture of norms. [...]
[...] As Pouliot and Mérand (2013) point out, the sporting doxa - these shared but uninterrogated beliefs - rests here on the idea of a 'neutral' body that would be universal, whereas it is in reality socially, historically, and politically situated. This mechanism is exercised with all the more force in the regulations of international federations. Hamzeh (2017, p.12) theorizes a double hijabophobia : « The two forms of hijabophobia limit the fluid and complex expression of Muslim women's identity. In both cases, it becomes a disturbing element to eliminate, in the name of a supposedly apolitical bodily neutrality. [...]
[...] Rather than imposing a uniform norm, the state delegates to the federal entities, municipalities, schools, and sports federations the responsibility of interpreting and applying the principles of neutrality (Zemni, 2011; Torrekens & Jacobs, 2016). This pragmatic pluralism allows for reasonable accommodations with religious practices. As Torrekens and Jacobs explain, 'Belgium leaves room for contextual arrangements, sometimes contradictory, but also more adaptable to social realities' (2016, p.7). Some local structures tolerate the wearing of the hijab, while others prohibit it, thus producing a fragmented but potentially more open to negotiation regulation. [...]
