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The Niqab in France: Between Piety and Subversion

Online ISBN:
9781531507626
Print ISBN:
9781531504632
Publisher:
Fordham University Press
Book

The Niqab in France: Between Piety and Subversion

Published online:
19 September 2024
Published in print:
6 February 2024
Online ISBN:
9781531507626
Print ISBN:
9781531504632
Publisher:
Fordham University Press

Abstract

Agnès De Féo’s The Niqab in France: Between Piety and Subversion is a surprising and intimate study of a topic that has been the object of fierce controversy in France for decades: a garment—the niqab, or full-face veil—and the women who choose to wear it. This book, the result of ten years of research by sociologist and documentary filmmaker Agnès De Féo, includes both a researched sociological study of the phenomenon of niqab wearing in France and a series of first-person accounts from French and Francophone women who wear or have worn the niqab in France’s Salafi communities. With the backdrop of the French government’s 2010 ban on full facial veiling in public spaces, which itself has shaped the phenomenon, De Féo draws on her subject’s words to show their agency, working against the clichés that often underlie public views of the niqab that it is purely the result of masculine pressure, for example, or extreme religiosity or nationalism, or the submissive desire to disappear. Instead, she shows, the niqab is multivalent: women wear it for reasons that range from religious piety to the desire to rebel against mainstream society, family, or the rule of law. These reasons may be complex, overdetermined, contradictory, or even inconsistent, but they are these women’s own.

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