Visible Faith, Institutional Boundaries: Hijab, Secular Governance, and the Gendered Ordering of Muslim Visibility in France

Abstract

This article examines how young Muslim women in contemporary France live, negotiate, and recalibrate the hijab within a differentiated secular order that distributes the conditions of public visibility unequally across institutional sites. Rather than treating the headscarf as a legal controversy or as a symbolic test of the compatibility of Islam with republican secularism, the analysis asks how visible Muslim femininity is rendered institutionally legible, conditionally tolerable, or professionally problematic across the ordinary spaces of school, work, leisure, and public life, and how women respond when the continuity between faith, body, and public presence is repeatedly subjected to regulation. Drawing on a reflexive thematic analysis of seven in-depth interviews with young Muslim-background women in Paris, the article shows that hijab emerges in the core narratives as an ethical form of composure, governed self-presence, and dignity; that schools, workplaces, and recreational sites act as visibility filters that classify which forms of Muslim femininity can appear as acceptable, neutral, and professionally credible; and that these pressures are negotiated aesthetically through ongoing acts of bodily calibration and respectable self-presentation. To capture this practical labor, the article develops the concept of embodied boundary-work and situates it explicitly in dialogue with Foucauldian accounts of disciplinary normalization and feminist scholarship on the ambivalence of agency under norm-governed conditions. The argument is that the French hijab question is most productively understood through the gendered management of Muslim visibility enacted through institutional norms of fit, neutrality, and appearance, whereby the female body becomes the site where secular governance, moral selfhood, professional sorting, and public belonging concretely intersect.

1. Introduction

In contemporary France, the hijab worn by young Muslim women marks one of the most revealing sites at which secular governance, gendered embodiment, and contested forms of public belonging are negotiated through the differential regulation of visible Muslim femininity. Public debate, legal scholarship, and parts of the social-scientific literature have repeatedly approached the headscarf either as a sign of religious difference to be regulated or as a symbolic test of the compatibility of Islam with republican secularism (Bowen 2007; Scott 2007; Hauksson-Tresch 2024). These framings have been indispensable, but they do not sufficiently illuminate how hijab is actually lived, negotiated, and recalibrated across the ordinary institutional spaces in which Muslim women move—schools, universities, internships, workplaces, transport, leisure sites, and the wider public sphere. From the perspective of lived experience, what comes into view is neither a simple binary of permission and prohibition nor a generic clash between religion and the secular state, but a granular process through which visible Muslim femininity is sorted, interpreted, and rendered more or less legitimate depending on the institutional setting in which it appears (Almeida 2023; Najib and Hopkins 2020).

The French case sharpens this question in distinctive ways. Recent scholarship on the regulation of Muslim religiosity in France has shown that laïcité is not a single doctrine but a layered field of legal, administrative, and aesthetic norms that have been progressively extended from the public school into adjacent domains: the workplace, the swimming pool, the beach, the sports field, and—most recently—the international sporting arena (Frégosi 2025; Pandey 2025; Amnesty International 2024). The law of 15 March 2004, codified in article L. 141-5-1 of the Education Code, prohibited in public schools the conspicuous manifestation of religious affiliation through signs or dress, with the Islamic veil among the prohibited items (France 2004; Circulaire 2004; Ministère de l’Éducation nationale 2024). The 2010 statute banning face concealment in public space (loi n° 2010-1192; France 2010), the 2016 municipal burkini disputes on the Mediterranean coast (Hancock 2017; Almeida 2023), the Baby Loup litigation that extended neutrality logics into mission-driven private settings (Hunter-Henin 2015), the 2023 ban on the abaya in state schools, and the 2024 Olympic ban prohibiting French national athletes from wearing the headscarf (Amnesty International 2024; Hauksson-Tresch 2024) together compose a spatially expanding regime through which the conditions of public Muslim femininity are progressively renegotiated.

Yet what this expanding legal architecture renders most consequential, from the standpoint of women’s lived experience, is not any single prohibition but the differentiated way in which their bodies are read, classified, regulated, and accommodated across distinct institutional thresholds (Almeida 2023; Najib 2021). This article therefore begins from a shift in analytical scale. Rather than asking whether hijab is “compatible” with laïcité, it asks how Muslim-background young women themselves encounter the French secular order as a set of institutional boundary practices that regulate visibility across education, employment, and public space. More precisely, the article asks two connected questions: how is visible Muslim femininity made institutionally legible, conditionally tolerable, or professionally problematic across the ordinary sites of everyday life; and how do women respond when the continuity between faith, body, and public presence is repeatedly subjected to such regulation? Framed this way, the problem is not whether religion is allowed to appear in public, but how a differentiated institutional order distributes the terms under which Muslim women can appear as ordinary, respectable, competent, and socially intelligible (Koenig 2023; Galonnier 2021; Kebaïli and Lépinard 2024).

The existing literature has established several indispensable points that the present study takes as its empirical and conceptual baseline. Abdelgadir and Fouka (2020) demonstrated that the 2004 headscarf ban reduced the educational attainment of Muslim girls and shaped later labor-market outcomes, partly through heightened perceptions of discrimination, even as it strengthened both national and religious identifications. Naseem and Adnan (2019) showed that visible religiosity intensifies labor-market disadvantage by shaping judgments of fit, professionalism, and employability. Karimi (2018, 2020) demonstrated that hijab-related barriers must be read along a broader school-to-work continuum of classification, exclusion, and adaptation, and that veiled Muslim women in France often respond by building alternative entrepreneurial networks. Feminist and postcolonial scholarship has shown that the French hijab controversy cannot be reduced to a dispute over religion alone, since Muslim women’s bodies have long been produced as privileged objects of national anxiety, pedagogical discipline, and emancipatory rhetoric (Scott 2007; Fernando 2014; Ardizzoni 2004; Lépinard 2020). More recent French-language scholarship has analyzed the politicization of the veil in postcolonial frames and shown that the headscarf functions as a polysemic object whose meaning is repeatedly contested in feminist, anti-racist, and republican vocabularies (Bouyahia and Sanna 2013; Galonnier 2021).

What remains less fully specified across these bodies of work is the concrete mechanism through which visible Muslim femininity is rendered institutionally legible, aesthetically reworked, or professionally problematic across ordinary sites of everyday life, and the practical labor through which women themselves negotiate these classifications on and through their bodies. It is precisely this mechanism that the present study reconstructs. Drawing on seven in-depth interviews with young Muslim-background women in Paris whose parents have migration trajectories from Algeria, Morocco, Egypt, Afghanistan, and Guinea, the analysis shows that hijab in the core narratives emerges as an ethical form of composure and governed self-presence; that schools, workplaces, and leisure sites function as visibility filters that grade and classify acceptable Muslim femininity; and that women negotiate these pressures aesthetically, through fine-grained acts of stylistic calibration and respectable self-presentation. To name this process synthetically, the article develops the concept of embodied boundary-work (Boll and Müller 2020; Koenig 2023; Najib and Hopkins 2019) and situates it in close dialogue with Foucauldian accounts of disciplinary normalization (Foucault 1977) and feminist debates on the ambivalence of agency under norm-governed conditions (Mahmood 2005; Bartky 1990; Lépinard 2020).

The contribution of the article lies in three connected moves. First, it relocates the analysis of hijab in France from the macro-symbolic level of public controversy to the micro-institutional processes through which visibility is lived, classified, and recalibrated. Second, it conceptualizes women’s experiences through institutional boundary-making, showing how schools, workplaces, leisure sites, and public space operationalize secular norms through everyday classifications of acceptability, fit, and professional readability—classifications that recent French scholarship has begun to map as a spatial governmentality of laïcité (Almeida 2023; Najib 2021). Third, it demonstrates that the negotiation of hijab is inseparable from the negotiation of respectable femininity: women are not simply deciding whether or not to veil, but how to present themselves in ways that preserve both moral coherence and social intelligibility. At the same time, the analysis engages seriously with the ambivalence of such recalibration, drawing on Foucault’s account of disciplinary power and feminist critiques of it (Bartky 1990; Sawicki 1991) to ask in what sense women’s self-presentational labor transforms dominant norms of femininity and in what sense it reproduces them. The article proceeds in five steps: literature review, methodology, three empirical sections organized around ethical composure, visibility filters, and aesthetic recalibration, a discussion of agency and norm reproduction, and a concluding synthesis.

2. Literature Review

Scholarship on Islam, secularism, and Muslim incorporation in France has generated a large and often polarized body of work, organized around three relatively persistent questions: whether laïcité is best understood as a neutral constitutional principle or as a majoritarian technology of exclusion; whether hijab should be read primarily as religious duty, political symbol, or gendered subordination; and whether restrictions on visible religiosity foster integration or deepen marginalization. To clarify the contribution of this article, the present section organizes the relevant literature into four interconnected strands: (1) laïcité and the institutional regulation of visible religion; (2) the social and material effects of veiling regimes on education and the labor market; (3) feminist, postcolonial, and intersectional readings of the headscarf controversy; and (4) the spatial, embodied, and relational dimensions of Muslim women’s navigation of urban France.

2.1. Laïcité and the Institutional Regulation of Visible Religion

A first strand of literature situates the French case within a broader sociological framework of Muslim incorporation in Western Europe, in which inclusion and exclusion are mediated not only by formal citizenship or socioeconomic indicators but by symbolic, social, and institutional boundary processes that shape recognition, belonging, and access to opportunity (Koenig 2005, 2023; Cinalli and Giugni 2013). France occupies a distinctive place in this comparative landscape because republican universalism and laïcité provide a language of equality that simultaneously constrains the legitimacy of public difference when that difference is perceived as challenging national cohesion. Bowen (2007) influentially showed that the 2004 headscarf controversy crystallized around a century-long sensitivity to the public presence of religion in schools, fears about communalism, and anxieties about gender oppression in the banlieues. Frégosi (2025) extends this argument by demonstrating that the contemporary French state has become an increasingly intrusive governor of Islam, recurring to a quasi-colonial repertoire that seeks to produce a discreet, modern, and republican Islam while disqualifying expressions perceived as too visible. From a legal-semiotic angle, Hauksson-Tresch (2024) shows that the school does not read the religious sign through the wearer’s own meaning but through institutional interpretations of it as proselytism, radicalization, or a challenge to gender equality, so that laïcité operates less as a doctrine of belief than as a regime governing which signs can be read as compatible with republican order. Comparable dynamics have been documented beyond the French case. Analyzing the governance of Islam in Germany, Amir-Moazami (2022) argues that the liberal-secular state manages Muslim populations less through outright prohibition than through a structural interrogation that measures and conditionally accommodates religious difference, with the recurrent legislation on veiling across Europe exemplifying secularism’s capacity to decide which forms of public religiosity count as legitimate and which as transgressive.

Within this strand, the law of 15 March 2004 has been pivotal not because it stands alone but because it stabilized a normative grammar that has progressively expanded outward (France 2004; Circulaire 2004; Ministère de l’Éducation nationale 2024). The 2010 ban on face concealment, the Baby Loup ruling in 2014, the 2016 burkini affair, the 2023 abaya ban, and the 2024 Olympic prohibition together compose what Almeida (2023) calls a spatial governmentality of laïcité: an expanding regime in which the legitimate location of visible Muslim femininity is progressively reduced. Hauksson-Tresch (2024) shows that this trajectory increasingly treats laïcité less as a doctrine of neutrality than as a code of public legibility, while Pandey (2025) argues that the cumulative effect is a post-secular regulatory regime that disproportionately targets Muslim women under the rhetoric of universalism. The 2024 Olympic hijab ban—applied to athletes representing France under the neutrality/secularism rules governing national representation, while non-French athletes competed freely—made this asymmetry visible in unusually explicit form (Amnesty International 2024). What comes from this is that women in France do not confront one stable prohibition; they confront a shifting and internally differentiated field of permissible visibility.

2.2. Educational and Labor-Market Effects of Visibility Regimes

A second strand of scholarship examines the social and material effects of these regimes, particularly in education and employment. Abdelgadir and Fouka’s (2020) study of the 2004 ban demonstrates that the law reduced the educational attainment of Muslim girls, affected later labor-market trajectories, and worked partly through heightened perceptions of discrimination, even as it reinforced both national and religious identities. Their intervention moves the debate beyond symbolic controversy and shows that secular regulation can produce durable effects on life chances. Yet their focus necessarily remains at the level of aggregate outcomes; what it leaves underdeveloped is the interpretive level at which women themselves understand how those effects are produced—how they distinguish among law, institutional culture, employer expectations, customer-facing norms, safety rules, and diffuse suspicion (Naseem and Adnan 2019; Karimi 2018, 2020).

Naseem and Adnan (2019) show that second-generation Muslim women in France experience compounded labor-market disadvantage that intensifies with visible religiosity: lower probabilities of employment, fewer hours, and lower earnings, mediated by judgments of fit, professionalism, and Frenchness. Karimi (2018, 2020) extends this analysis by showing that hijab-related exclusion in the standard labor market generates alternative pathways, including the building of entrepreneurial networks among veiled Muslim women in France. These accounts make clear that the workplace is not simply where exclusion happens after education; it is one node in a wider chain through which women learn the costs of visibility and the necessity of managing them. What remains less fully theorized, however, is the fine-grained account of how women themselves recalibrate appearance, comportment, and embodied style in response to such expectations while seeking to preserve moral coherence.

2.3. Feminist, Postcolonial, and Intersectional Readings

A third indispensable strand comes from feminist and postcolonial scholarship on hijab, secularism, and Muslim women’s agency. This literature has been crucial in displacing the older reduction of the veil to either false consciousness or pure resistance. Mahmood’s (2005) intervention remains foundational because it argues that embodied religious practices cannot be adequately interpreted through liberal assumptions that equate agency only with resistance to norms; agency may also be exercised through inhabiting, cultivating, and ethically valuing norms in specific ways. Although her ethnographic setting differs from France, the conceptual lesson is directly relevant: hijab cannot be analytically exhausted by asking whether it is imposed or chosen in a narrow voluntarist sense. Fernando (2014) shows that Muslim French subjects inhabit religiosity through ethical and political forms of life that unsettle the supposed coherence of secular republicanism. Together, these interventions enable a reading of hijab as ethical self-formation under contested secular conditions rather than as a sign of difference to be decoded.

At the same time, feminist scholarship on France has shown that the headscarf controversy is inseparable from the gendered racialization of Muslim women and their positioning as privileged objects of national anxiety. Scott’s (2007) critique of the French veil debates demonstrates how the rhetoric of emancipation depends on a prior construction of Muslim women as symbols of failed assimilation and incomplete citizenship. Ardizzoni (2004) had already shown that mainstream French representations of the veil reduced Muslim women to a binary of either oppressed or fanatical bodies, both equally problematic from the perspective of republican femininity. Bouyahia and Sanna (2013), in their edited collection on the polysemy of the veil, demonstrate the multiplicity of postcolonial frames through which the headscarf has been politicized in francophone Europe and show that the veil functions as a contested object on which French anxieties about migration, Islam, race, and gender are condensed. Galonnier (2021) shows that the beard and the headscarf operate as gendered markers of Islamophobia in France, transforming religiously identified bodies into objects of interactional scrutiny. Lépinard (2020) argues that French and Quebecois feminism have been internally divided by the headscarf question, producing classifications of “good” and “bad” feminist subjects that often align with state-led narratives of laïcité. Pandey (2025) synthesizes these critiques in a post-secular intersectional frame, showing that recent French legal expansions—from the 2010 face-veil ban through the 2024 Olympic hijab ban—operate through gendered, racialized, and colonial logics that present themselves as universal.

Recent work has further specified the everyday and embodied dimensions of this regulation. Kebaïli and Lépinard (2024) conceptualize the recurring scrutiny experienced by veiled Muslim women in France and Switzerland as a “pedagogy of coloniality” that operates through three interlocking processes: essentialization, surveillance, and demands of mimicry. Their hijabi interviewees are repeatedly asked to renounce, justify, or modify their veiling—wearing a turban rather than a hijab, for example—in order to align with majority cultural and secular norms. Idriss (2005), Kiwan (2023), Yardım and Hüseyinoğlu (2021), and Haleem (2015) document how the rhetoric of laïcité and gender equality has been mobilized to justify successive legal restrictions in ways that disproportionately police Muslim women’s public appearance. Spektorowski and Elfersy (2020) connect this trajectory to broader European debates about how secular states accommodate or reject Muslim religiosity. These contributions establish that the issue is not simply discrimination against Muslim women, but the specific gendered grammar through which their visible religiosity is rendered politically intelligible as a problem of national cohesion.

2.4. Spatial, Embodied, and Relational Dimensions

A fourth strand of literature, especially relevant for the study presented here, examines how Muslim women navigate urban France in spatial, embodied, and relational terms. Najib and Hopkins (2019, 2020) and Najib (2021), drawing on quantitative and qualitative data from Paris and London, show that anti-Muslim acts in Greater Paris are heavily concentrated in institutional and professional settings—public schools, universities, training centers, and workplaces—and that veiled Muslim women constitute the majority of those affected. Their qualitative interviews demonstrate that veiled women in Paris adopt sophisticated spatial and behavioral strategies to manage anticipated discrimination, modulating their dress, comportment, and choice of routes across the urban landscape. Almeida (2023) supplements this geography by analyzing autobiographical “hijab stories” to show how an ever-expanding exclusionary reading of laïcité has restricted the spatial practice of hijabi women and led to the creation of counter-spaces of subjectivation. Boll and Müller (2020) elaborate a praxeological account of body boundary-work that frames the body as a site of practical negotiation between self, others, and institutions, an approach that converges productively with the analysis developed below.

Critically, this strand also brings into focus the relational and collective contexts within which individual orientations are formed. Decisions around hijab are never purely individual: they are mediated by family migration histories, intergenerational transmission of religiosity, peer networks, neighborhood configurations, and the wider Muslim community’s norms of female respectability (Galonnier 2021; Karimi 2020; Najib and Hopkins 2019). Recent work has shown that Muslim-background young women in France often experience family dynamics as both formative and contested: parents may inhabit non-uniform religiosities (mothers and fathers differing in their veiling practices), grandparents may model alternative bodily codes, older brothers may attempt to police female appearance while younger sisters may pull in opposite directions, and peer networks may exert pressure either toward or away from veiling (Lépinard 2020; Galonnier 2021; Kebaïli and Lépinard 2024). Accounts of independent choice that the present article’s interviewees offer, then, must be read sociologically as accounts produced within these layered fields of socialization, even when respondents themselves narrate their decisions as private and autonomous. This article therefore treats individual narratives as situated reasoning within wider relational fields rather than as self-sufficient explanations of behavior.

In general, these studies show, first, that secular governance in France is not exhausted by legal doctrine but operates through symbolic, social, and institutional boundary dynamics that have progressively expanded across school, work, leisure, and public space (Koenig 2023; Almeida 2023; Frégosi 2025). Second, that the effects of those dynamics become visible not only in measurable outcomes but in women’s ongoing calibration of where, how, and under what conditions they can appear (Abdelgadir and Fouka 2020; Naseem and Adnan 2019; Karimi 2020; Najib and Hopkins 2019). Third, that hijab cannot be theorized adequately either as a marker of exclusion or as a sign of resistance, since it is also embedded in projects of ethical self-formation that operate within—and not outside—the disciplinary fields that shape women’s lives (Mahmood 2005; Fernando 2014; Bartky 1990; Foucault 1977; Lépinard 2020).

What remains less fully conceptualized, however, is the practical process through which these dimensions are held together in women’s everyday navigation of differently governed settings. Put differently, what is still needed is an account that does not treat these domains as separate variables or pre-given categories but reconstructs them as relational and contingent configurations formed under specific conditions of possibility (Jong 2023, 2025a, 2025b). To name that process, this article develops the concept of embodied boundary-work: the practical, moral, and aesthetic labor through which Muslim women negotiate institutional and social boundaries by regulating how their bodies appear, move, and remain intelligible across differently governed settings. The term captures both the external classification of visible Muslim femininity and women’s own situated work of preserving continuity between faith, dignity, and public presence under conditions of uneven visibility. In this sense, the concept synthesizes Koenig’s (2023) account of symbolic, social, and institutional boundary dynamics with praxeological scholarship that treats bodily boundaries as practically accomplished rather than naturally given (Boll and Müller 2020), feminist and Foucauldian accounts of bodily discipline and self-formation (Foucault 1977; Mahmood 2005; Bartky 1990), and recent work on the spatial and embodied strategies veiled Muslim women in Paris develop in response to public scrutiny (Najib and Hopkins 2019; Najib 2021; Almeida 2023). The analysis that follows uses embodied boundary-work as a synthetic concept for understanding how ethical composure, institutional filtering, and aesthetic recalibration become linked within the lived management of Muslim visibility in contemporary France.

3. Methodology

3.1. Research Design and Rationale

This article is based on a qualitative, interview-based study of seven young Muslim-background women interviewed in Paris during the summer of 2025 by the second author, using a semi-structured protocol designed around religion, body, beauty, work, public space, laïcité, and belonging. The choice of semi-structured interviewing followed directly from the nature of the research problem. Because the article seeks to understand how Muslim-background women interpret and negotiate secular governance across school, work, and public space, the method needed to capture not only opinion but also moral vocabulary, situational distinctions, retrospective interpretation, embodied reasoning, and shifting relations between family, institutions, and selfhood. Semi-structured interviews are particularly suitable for this purpose because they combine thematic direction with interpretive openness: they allow the researcher to pursue a shared architecture across interviews while preserving space for respondents to articulate meanings in their own terms (Brinkmann 2013; Gubrium et al. 2012; Kallio et al. 2016; Naeem et al. 2023).

The interview guide consisted of approximately thirty open-ended questions covering, in an integrated way, several interrelated dimensions of the respondents’ lives: basic demographic profile and family migration history; parents’ occupations, education, religiosity, and ongoing ties to the country of origin; childhood understandings of religion and early exposure to religious practices; the place of hijab within family life and kin networks; the timing, meaning, and emotional experience of adopting, refusing, or questioning hijab; experiences of school, friendship, and public interaction; perceptions of laïcité and restrictions on visible religiosity; workplace opportunities and constraints; relations between beauty, body ideals, dress, and self-presentation; differences in bodily comportment across family, work, friendship, and public settings; and questions of gender, Frenchness, Muslim identity, and belonging. The interview protocol thus situated hijab within a broader relational field linking migration, family socialization, religion, embodiment, aesthetic practice, institutional experience, and public recognition.

3.2. Sampling and Inclusion Criteria

Interviewees were selected purposively rather than randomly, following the qualitative logic of theoretical sampling (Robinson 2014; Small 2009). The aim was not statistical representativeness but the construction of an internally heterogeneous Muslim-background sample of young women in Paris whose narratives could illuminate the three social arenas central to the research question: education, work, and public space. Inclusion criteria were: (1) self-identification as a Muslim-background young woman; (2) residence in or daily mobility through Paris and its inner suburbs; (3) age between 18 and 30, in order to focus on cohorts socialized after the 2004 law; (4) family migration histories from Muslim-majority contexts (the resulting sample includes families from Algeria, Morocco, Egypt, Afghanistan, and Guinea); and (5) the capacity and willingness to reflect at length on religion, body, and institutional experience. Recruitment proceeded through a combination of personal networks, snowball referrals, and contacts in informal Muslim cultural settings in Paris.

Importantly, no claim is made that this sample is representative of all Muslim-background women in France, of all second-generation women, of all hijab-wearing women in Paris, or of all veiled Muslim women in Greater Paris. The small sample size precludes any categorical or generalizable conclusions; the contribution of the study is interpretive rather than enumerative. The aim is to refine concepts through patterned similarity, contrast, and interpretive comparison across a deliberately heterogeneous corpus, rather than to estimate the prevalence of particular attitudes (Small 2009; Robinson 2014). The number seven was arrived at iteratively rather than fixed in advance: interviewing continued until the authors judged that further interviews were yielding diminishing returns in terms of new conceptual categories relevant to the three thematic domains, while acknowledging that thematic saturation in such a contested and internally varied field is an analytic judgment, never an absolute outcome, and that additional interviews would surely add nuance (Braun and Clarke 2021; Naeem et al. 2023).

3.3. Participants

The seven participants ranged in age from 18 to 30 and varied substantially in migration trajectory, religiosity, household configuration, education, employment status, and relation to veiling. To protect anonymity, participants are referred to throughout the analysis only by an interviewee number (Interviewee 1 through Interviewee 7), with cities of residence and family-origin details, employer specifics, and other potentially identifying particulars omitted. Five of the seven participants were born in France; two were born abroad in their parents’ countries of origin and migrated to France with their families. The sample composition is summarized in

Table 1. Sample composition (anonymized by interviewee number).

Interviewee	Age	Parents’ Country of Origin	Household Situation	Hijab Status
Interviewee 1	30	Both Algerian	Married, lives with husband	Wears hijab; chose it as a young adult
Interviewee 2	20	Both Moroccan	Lives alone	Never veiled; emphasizes individual choice
Interviewee 3	22	Both Afghan	Lives with parents	Wears hijab since adolescence; deeply held conviction
Interviewee 4	23	Both Algerian	Lives with mother	Wears hijab since childhood; strong identification
Interviewee 5	24	Algerian and Egyptian	Lives with partner	Never veiled; identifies strongly with French laïcité
Interviewee 6	25	Algerian and Moroccan	Lives with parents	Began wearing hijab recently (within the past two years)
Interviewee 7	18	Both Guinean	Lives with parents	Veiled briefly in childhood under family pressure; later removed; aspires to modeling

.

Across the corpus, family migration trajectories, household arrangements, degrees of religiosity, and relations to veiling vary substantially. Five participants were born in France and socialized mainly there; two were born abroad in their parents’ countries of origin and migrated to France with their families at a young age; and the sample includes both refugee and labor-migration backgrounds. Some are strongly pro-hijab and currently veiled (Interviewee 1, Interviewee 3, Interviewee 4, Interviewee 6), while others have never veiled, have veiled only briefly, or have explicitly rejected veiling as incompatible with their sense of bodily freedom or aspirational career (Interviewee 2, Interviewee 5, Interviewee 7). This internal heterogeneity is one of the analytic strengths of the corpus, because it permits contrastive reading across different moral grammars of bodily legitimacy while holding the broader field—Muslim-background femininity in France—constant. Within the comparative reading, the analytic center of gravity lies with Interviewee 1, Interviewee 4, Interviewee 6, and Interviewee 3, because their narratives most directly illuminate hijab as ethical composure, institutional visibility, and aesthetic recalibration, while Interviewee 2, Interviewee 5, and Interviewee 7 function as indispensable contrastive cases whose alternative moral grammars of bodily autonomy, beauty, and aspiration sharpen rather than dilute the specificity of the pro-hijab accounts.

3.4. Data Collection, Transcription, and Translation

Interviews were conducted by the second author in Paris during the summer of 2025, at locations chosen by participants for comfort and privacy: in private apartments, in quiet cafés outside peak hours, and in one case in a community center. Each interview lasted between 75 and 130 min, with an average length of approximately 95 min. Interviews were conducted primarily in French, with occasional code-switching into Arabic or Persian where participants preferred. All interviews were audio-recorded with the explicit consent of participants. Recordings were transcribed verbatim by the second author into French text, and subsequently translated into English by the same author for the purpose of cross-checked analysis with the first author. Translation was iterative: ambiguous or culturally specific expressions were retained in both the original and English in the working files, and analytic readings were checked against the original transcripts to avoid losing affective or moral nuance. Final pseudonymization and minor redaction of potentially identifying detail (specific addresses, employers, neighborhood names beyond arrondissement level) were carried out before analysis.

3.5. Reflexive Thematic Analysis

The interviews were analyzed through a reflexive thematic strategy. Following Braun and Clarke’s (2006, 2021, 2024) understanding of reflexive thematic analysis, themes were treated not as passively “discovered” but as interpretive outputs produced through theoretically informed engagement with the material. The analysis proceeded through repeated close reading of the transcripts; initial open coding of passages related to religion, body, school, work, beauty, visibility, and belonging; and progressive clustering of codes into higher-order themes (Naeem et al. 2023; Kogen 2024). Early descriptive codes preserved participants’ own terms—peace, dignity, protection, fit, neutrality, choice, beauty, pressure, modesty, shame—before being gathered into the more analytically ambitious categories that organize the empirical core of the paper: ethical composure, visibility filters, and aesthetic recalibration. The movement from participant language to thematic interpretation was guided by recurrence in the corpus and by the article’s theoretical interest in embodied citizenship, institutional boundary-making, and the gendered public legibility of Muslim women.

The concept of embodied boundary-work emerged through this comparative interpretation. It became analytically necessary because the interviews repeatedly showed that the issue was not simply whether hijab was allowed or disallowed, but how women worked on the body itself when faith, public appearance, and institutional legibility came into tension. In methodological terms, the concept names a patterned set of practices that recurred across the corpus: differentiating between acceptable adjustment and coercive demand, preserving continuity between inner conviction and outward form, managing the terms of being seen in schools and workplaces, and reformulating dress, style, and comportment so that modesty (for the veiled) or stylistic self-determination (for the unveiled) could remain both morally coherent and socially readable. The thematic strategy thus synthesizes hijab as ethical composure, institutions as visibility filters, and aesthetic recalibration as a practical response to those filters.

Ethically, the study was designed to minimize risk and maximize candor. The protocol assured participants of confidentiality and anonymity, made clear that all names would be fully concealed, allowed them to decline any question, and emphasized that participation was entirely voluntary and could be discontinued at any point. Given that the topic concerns religion, gender, embodiment, and possible experiences of discrimination, such protections were a necessary condition for generating reflective qualitative material (Tong et al. 2007; O’Brien et al. 2014). No personally identifying information was collected beyond what was strictly necessary for participant description, and the data are not publicly available.

Regarding methodological transparency, a brief note on researcher positionality is warranted. The interviewer (second author) is a young Muslim-background woman with extended experience in Paris and shared linguistic competence with most participants. This positionality facilitated rapport and allowed participants to use religious vocabulary, family idioms, and intimate body talk without translating themselves into the assumptions of a non-Muslim or non-female outsider. At the same time, this proximity carries known interpretive risks: participants may have foregrounded narratives of ethical composure or independent choice because of the perceived sympathy of the interviewer, and the analyst must remain attentive to what is being left out as well as what is being said (Pillow 2003).

Like any small interpretive study, this one has clear limits that warrant explicit emphasis. First, as mentioned earlier, the sample is small (n = 7) and does not support categorical or generalizable claims about Muslim women in France, second-generation women, or veiled women in Paris. The conclusions are interpretive contributions to a conceptual conversation, not statistical estimates. Second, the corpus captures retrospective and narrated experience rather than direct observation of institutional encounters as they unfold; the data therefore reflect how respondents account for their experience to themselves and to the interviewer, and not necessarily the unmediated reality of school or workplace encounters. Third, the sample is internally heterogeneous in migration trajectory, religiosity, and class position but is concentrated in Paris and its inner suburbs; provincial, rural, and small-city experiences are not represented. Fourth, the analysis does not include the perspective of institutional actors (teachers, employers, recruiters, public officials), whose accounts would be required for a fully bilateral account of visibility filtering.

4. Hijab as Ethical Composure, Self-Possession, and Dignity

What emerges most clearly from the corpus is not a single attitude toward hijab but a patterned field of meaning organized around four interrelated themes: hijab as ethical composure; hijab as governed self-possession; hijab as a contested claim to dignity in public space; and choice as appropriation within moral formation rather than as atomized voluntarist self-invention. The material does not support a flat opposition between “religious women” and “free women,” nor between “imposed veiling” and “liberal choice.” It shows instead that the female body is interpreted through competing moral grammars, and that in the pro-hijab narratives hijab is meaningful precisely because it stabilizes a relation between faith, bodily presentation, and public selfhood (Mahmood 2005; Fernando 2014). The contrastive accounts of Interviewee 2, Interviewee 5, and Interviewee 7 matter because they reveal, by difference, what Interviewee 1, Interviewee 4, Interviewee 6, and Interviewee 3 mean when they speak of peace, dignity, and self-command.

4.1. Ethical Composure: Hijab as a Practice of Inner Steadiness

In the pro-hijab accounts, hijab is described not as a bare rule but as a practice that produces steadiness, inner order, and continuity of self. Interviewee 1 defines it as “an intention: a reminder of the spiritual dimension in everyday life,” adding that “it embodies my desire to place faith above appearances. The motivation is religious, but it is also part of a feminist approach to controlling my image”; she then ties this directly to affective stability: “Yes, it calms me, because it reminds me who I am.” Interviewee 4 articulates the same structure in a warmer devotional register: “Religion has always been a lamp of hope and the warmth of the heart… I chose hijab before the age of religious maturity. It was a personal decision, and there was no pressure from the family, even though all the women in my family wear it. For me, this hijab helped me find myself as a woman.” Interviewee 6, who began veiling only recently, uses a more theological vocabulary—hijab as “a sign of obedience to God,” “conduct marked by modesty and dignity”—and reports that it now “brings peace” because it has become “part of me and my beliefs.” Interviewee 3 reinforces the pattern in yet another idiom: “At first I started mostly because of my parents’ words, and it was a strange feeling; but later, when I followed my religion myself and researched it of my own accord, it turned into a powerful belief,” became “a part of my identity,” and is now “the peace of my heart.”

These accounts are not merely asserting that hijab is important; they name a specific mechanism: hijab produces calm because it aligns inner conviction with outward form, turning the body into a morally ordered surface rather than a site of dissonance. This is why the respondents speak in a vocabulary of remembrance, identity, peace, and completeness that resonates closely with what Mahmood (2005) describes as the cultivation of pious dispositions through embodied practice. The contrastive interviews confirm the mechanism by negation. Interviewee 2 says she has “always respected those who decided to wear it” but “personally never felt the need for it,” adding that some women “feel better with it, and others, like me, feel freer without it.” Interviewee 7 is sharper: “Having it gave me stress,” and “for me it feels like it holds me back.” These counter-cases are decisive because they show that the scarf is not automatically calming: calm emerges only where hijab is appropriated as a meaningful ethical form, and where it is experienced as misaligned with one’s desired body, aspirations, or trajectory, it can generate stress rather than composure—consistent with Bartky’s (1990) insight that bodily practices produce contradictory effects of empowerment and constraint depending on whether the subject inhabits them as her own.

4.2. Governed Self-Possession: Framing Rather than Erasing the Body

The second theme concerns not whether women cover or uncover but how they understand bodily visibility itself. Interviewee 1 gives the clearest formulation: hijab is “part of a feminist approach to controlling my image,” “a frame… that highlights your personality,” and beauty under hijab means being “neat, clean, aligned with your values.” Hijab is thus not opposed to appearance but a means of governing it: the body is not erased from visibility but framed, disciplined, and ethically ordered. Interviewee 4 develops the same logic through the language of de-objectification: “In society, I see hijab as a protection that keeps me respected and does not let me be seen as an object. I believe hijab preserves a woman’s dignity,” and she goes further—“even half of a Muslim woman’s faith lies in wearing hijab.” For Interviewee 6, hijab “protects the woman” and “keeps her away from others’ attention,” while beauty remains possible as “good intention and respect for self and faith.” Interviewee 3 supports the same line in a more sheltering vocabulary, calling hijab “a safe, protecting cover” that is “like a newborn child wrapped in swaddling—it protects me from every direction.”

Self-possession here is not the opposite of normativity; it is achieved through norm-guided bodily practice, which is why the public binary between visibility and concealment is too crude for the material. None of these respondents aspires to bodily disappearance: Interviewee 1 curates a moral-aesthetic style, Interviewee 4 speaks of beauty as care and essence, Interviewee 6 allows self-care within modest bounds, Interviewee 3 links hijab to a composed and knowing presence. What they refuse is not public presence but unregulated exposure—a mode of being seen in which the female body is surrendered to dominant readings. The contrastive cases specify the field of contestation. Interviewee 5 insists that “a woman’s body belongs only to herself, not to men and not to religion,” defining beauty as an appearance that shows “the real self” and equating “beauty with freedom”; Interviewee 7 associates beauty with “model bodies,” “beautiful hair,” and an open, runway femininity. Across all seven interviews the issue is bodily selfhood; what differs is the grammar through which it is realized—governed modest visibility for some, unveiled self-display for others.

4.3. Dignity as Counter-Reading of Public Suspicion

The third theme is dignity as a counter-reading of public suspicion. As the introduction argued, visible Muslim femininity in France is often made over-legible, turned into an object of institutional and social reading (Galonnier 2021; Kebaïli and Lépinard 2024). The pro-hijab participants do not simply endure that condition; they answer it with a moral vocabulary that reverses the terms of judgment. Interviewee 1 recalls being “caught between pride and anxiety: pride in embracing my faith, anxiety because of the teachers’ gazes,” yet her response is not retreat but moral prioritization—faith above appearances. Interviewee 4 makes the reversal explicit: “Sometimes remarks have upset me, but I see them as coming from ignorance, and that does not humiliate me. I believe I know something they do not know.” Interviewee 3 performs the same epistemic move—keeping hijab where possible “gives me a feeling of being different and of knowing, because I know things they do not know”—while Interviewee 6’s insistence that hijab is “part of me and my beliefs” regardless of place similarly prevents external criticism from exhausting its meaning.

This theme matters because it shows that dignity in these interviews is not just self-esteem. It is a counter-interpretation of the public field. The women refuse the secularized assumption that visible hijab necessarily signifies backwardness, passivity, or lack. Instead, they recast themselves as morally grounded, knowledgeable, and internally coherent. The contrastive interviews again sharpen the theme. Interviewee 2 insists that “every woman, without pressure from the state or society, should wear or remove hijab,” which means that even from a non-veiling position the central issue remains coercion and legitimacy, not simple rejection of hijab. Interviewee 5, too, says “hijab is completely personal and no one has the right to force anyone,” even while identifying French freedom with the possibility of living without it. The corpus as a whole therefore suggests that dignity is a shared concern across divergent positions, but it is substantively filled in differently. For the pro-hijab participants, dignity is tied to modest yet publicly present bodily governance; for the non-hijab participants, dignity is tied to non-imposition and open self-display. This convergence on dignity-as-non-coercion, even across opposing veiling decisions, is consistent with Kebaïli and Lépinard’s (2024) observation that the moral injury reported by hijabi women is rarely about being seen veiled as such, but about being repeatedly asked to justify, modify, or renounce their veiling.

4.4. Choice as Appropriation Within Moral Formation

A fourth theme, cutting across the first three, is choice within moral formation rather than choice outside it. The pro-hijab women insist on choice, but not in the sense of atomized liberal self-invention. Interviewee 1 says, “No one asked me,” tying her decision to a moment of recognition “after a trip to Algeria, when I felt I had to express my identity.” Interviewee 4 describes an early, exemplary formation: “I think I started around six years old. No one imposed anything on me. I would see my mother covering herself before going out, and I wanted to do the same; it gave me a sense of growing up,” adding that her veiling “was a personal decision and there was no pressure from the family, even though all the women in my family wear it.” Interviewee 3 narrates an initial family-led practice that later, “through my own research,” became “a powerful belief.” Interviewee 6 presents the inverse familial configuration: “My mother does not wear hijab, but some women in the family do. I started in November 2023, and my parents played no role in my decision. At first it felt strange and I sensed the change, but later I grew used to it and considered it the best decision.” What these accounts share is not atomized autonomy but appropriation within inheritance, which is why “family pressure” and “free choice” are both too crude as analytic categories.

The contrastive cases show the same formal pattern from the other side. Interviewee 5’s “free dress is my own choice and I was never under family pressure for a specific belief or style,” Interviewee 2’s insistence on the right to wear or remove hijab, and Interviewee 7’s repeated “my choice has always been not to have it” all place choice at the center. But thematically, choice here is not one thing. It names different outcomes because it is embedded in different moral worlds. For the pro-hijab interviewees, choice culminates in disciplined bodily composure. For Interviewee 5 and Interviewee 7, it culminates in non-veiling, openness, and freedom from perceived control. The analytic payoff is clear: the real issue is not whether women choose, but what moral grammar makes a given choice feel livable, dignified, and true. This finding aligns directly with Mahmood’s (2005) critique of the voluntarist conception of agency: across the corpus, agency operates through, not despite, the moral and relational fields the women inhabit.

At the same time, the analysis attends to the collective and relational contexts within which such accounts of choice are produced. The pro-hijab women’s narratives of independent decision are not analytically self-sufficient. They emerge within layered fields of family socialization: mothers who veiled (Interviewee 1, Interviewee 3, Interviewee 4) or did not (Interviewee 6); fathers and brothers with their own religious sensibilities; close friends with similar trajectories; and a broader public discourse that already treats the hijab as a politicized object before any individual decision is made (Bouyahia and Sanna 2013; Galonnier 2021; Karimi 2020). Their insistence on independent choice should therefore be read sociologically as a strategic and morally meaningful claim within a context that constantly questions and politicizes Muslim women’s motivations (Kebaïli and Lépinard 2024)—not as evidence that decisions were made in a vacuum. Read this way, the corpus identifies the first layer of what is here called embodied boundary-work: before hijab appears as a problem for institutions, it is already being fashioned by the interviewees as a morally ordered mode of bodily presence relationally formed and ethically reaffirmed under conditions of public scrutiny.

5. Schools, Workplaces, and Leisure as Visibility Filters

If the previous section showed that hijab can function as an ethical technology of composure, governed self-presence, and dignity, the interviews also show why schools, workplaces, and leisure sites become such decisive arenas: they are the institutional sites where that ethically composed presence is sorted, translated, or made conditionally acceptable. Read thematically, the corpus suggests not a single experience of exclusion and regulation, but a patterned set of visibility filters through which Muslim women learn where hijab is tolerated, where it must be modified, where it becomes professionally costly, and where it remains a matter of negotiated coexistence. Because the interview protocol explicitly asked interviewees to differentiate among educational, occupational, leisure, and public settings, the material makes it possible to reconstruct not only attitudes toward laïcité in general, but the concrete institutional geography through which visible Muslim femininity is managed in practice (Najib 2021; Almeida 2023; Najib and Hopkins 2019). This section organizes the analysis into five sub-themes: graduated regimes of tolerable visibility in schools; workplace neutrality as selective legibility; leisure sites and the burkini geography; differential continuity across spaces; and institutional literacy as response.

5.1. Schools: Graduated Regimes of Tolerable Visibility

Institutions rarely operate through a simple binary of permission and prohibition; they more often produce graduated regimes of tolerable visibility. Interviewee 1’s account is revealing. In her public lycée she did not simply wear or remove the scarf but altered it: “In the public lycée, I changed the scarf—a simple turban and loose jeans—to comply with the 2004 law on conspicuous religious signs. Inside the buildings I had to remove it; when I left, I put it back on.” Although there were no explicit insults, she heard remarks such as “for an internship, you’ll have to take it off,” and lived with “a kind of constant alertness—the feeling that for some teachers I was a test case for secularism.” The institution does not merely expel visible religiosity; it trains women into calibration, requiring not disappearance but translation into a more manageable format. The school thus becomes a pedagogy of regulated appearance—the kind of space Kebaïli and Lépinard (2024) describe as enacting a “pedagogy of coloniality” through demands of mimicry, and that Almeida (2023) frames as the original site of laïcité’s spatial governmentality.

The same theme appears in a more intimate and painful form in Interviewee 3’s account. She says bluntly, “In school I was not allowed to have hijab,” and recalls one especially painful moment when classmates saw her arrive veiled and then remove it: “They started saying, ‘so what? We saw your hair—what does it even mean to wear hijab outside if here we see you without it?’ The first time was very upsetting because, as someone who did not yet know enough about her religion, I did not know anything that could calm my heart.” This passage sharpens the analysis in two ways. First, it confirms that school filtering does not only regulate access; it also produces forms of symbolic incoherence. The student is made to appear inconsistent—veiled outside, unveiled inside—and that inconsistency is then turned back on her by peers. Second, it shows that institutional filtering has an epistemic dimension. What wounds is not only the rule itself, but the inability, at that stage, to render oneself intelligible against it. The later strengthening of her conviction can therefore be read as a retrospective repair of an institutionalized fracture—a finding consistent with Abdelgadir and Fouka’s (2020) observation that the 2004 ban paradoxically strengthened both national and religious identities while producing measurable educational disadvantage.

Interviewee 7 confirms the same school dynamic from a non-hijab endpoint. “In our mixed school, hijab was not possible, and I never let anyone know that I had hijab,” she explains, “because I had seen that the children who wore hijab were bothered. Then I became sure I did not want to keep it.” What she disliked most, she adds, was “to feel that I was not one piece with my friends and the others, or to be mocked.” These formulations show that the school as a visibility filter does not only constrain those who persist in veiling; it also shapes abandonment. The pressure need not take the form of formal punishment: it works through anticipation, concealment, and the wish not to stand out as institutionally troublesome or socially fragmented—precisely the diffuse interactional effects that Najib (2021) documents at the urban scale and that Galonnier (2021) describes as the work of religious markers as “interactional hooks” for the everyday operation of Islamophobia.

Interviewee 2, finally, illustrates a third configuration in which the school is not a site of laïcité-enforcement but of inverse pressure from a Muslim-background principal. She reports that in her school, hijab was allowed, but on some occasions the principal tried to pressure her into wearing it “under the pretext of special ceremonies,” and that her father intervened to defend her freedom. This testimony is analytically significant because it shows that visibility filters do not always operate in the same ideological direction. What links the cases is not whether the institution promotes or restricts hijab, but whether it attempts to control the woman’s mode of appearance rather than allowing it to remain self-determined. The school operates as a filter regardless of the directionality of its pressure.

5.2. Workplace Neutrality as Selective Legibility

The second theme concerns workplace neutrality as selective legibility. Under French labor law, a private employer may restrict the visible manifestation of religious belief only through a general clause of neutrality that is justified by the nature of the task and proportionate to the aim pursued (Service Public 2023). Here Interviewee 1’s interview is especially rich because it shows how the logic learned at school intensifies in recruitment and employment. Recalling her BTS internship search, she says: “The HR manager welcomed me and immediately explained that ‘in open space, we remain neutral.’ I agreed to remove my hijab on site, but he still rejected my application. Three months later, an unveiled classmate—with the same CV—was hired.” Later she describes another rejection in a cosmetics interview where “brand image” was deemed incompatible with hijab. The analytic force of these episodes lies in the mismatch between stated rule and practical outcome. Even willingness to adapt does not guarantee access. “Neutrality” here operates less as a stable principle than as a language through which the visibly Muslim female body becomes harder to read as professional fit—a finding that mirrors Naseem and Adnan’s (2019) statistical demonstration of compounded labor-market disadvantage and Karimi’s (2020) analysis of how alternative entrepreneurial pathways emerge in response.

Interviewee 3 reveals a comparable dynamic from a less formal but equally telling angle. “When I went looking for work—yes,” she recalls; “I remember once going to an interview, and they told me, ‘This is a clothing shop, but it does not match your style; you don’t really understand the clothes sold here.’ Mostly the jobs I lost were in boutiques and clothing shops.” Workplace filtering here operates through aesthetic translation rather than explicit anti-religious declaration: hijab is inserted into a commercial visual economy and judged incompatible with the brand’s imagined customer-facing femininity, so that the respondent is rejected not only as religious but as stylistically illegible to the labor-market segment in question (Karimi 2018; Naseem and Adnan 2019). The closure can be internalized as a narrative about veiled futures, which Interviewee 3 voices and then refuses in the same breath: “The ideal for veiled women is to stay at home, because they will not endure the pressure of work and of struggling to be accepted in society—but this ideal is not ideal for everyone; the definition of the ideal differs for each person.”

Interviewee 6 adds a more synthetic and institutionally comparative view. Asked to evaluate France for veiled women across sectors, she distinguishes carefully:

Public schools: there are many restrictions. Friends: it depends, some are open and some are closed. Leisure: there are restrictions at the pool, beach and in sports. Work: the public sector is restricted; the private sector varies. Public places: there are looks, insults and social pressure.

She then adds in a more personal register: “I would like to go to the beach, but there are restrictions. Employers sometimes do not accept hijab,” and notes, “I lost one job opportunity because of hijab.” The value of this interview is that it maps the institutional field as differentiated rather than uniform. Interviewee 6 does not present France as a monolith. She presents it as a layered environment in which each setting has its own threshold of acceptable Muslim visibility—an articulation that empirically corroborates Najib’s (2021) quantitative finding that anti-Muslim acts in Greater Paris are concentrated in institutional and professional sites, and Almeida’s (2023) qualitative finding that French hijab stories repeatedly describe an expanding cartography of exclusion.

Interviewee 4 introduces a more anticipatory and normative relation to work. She has not herself been fully inserted into the labor market yet, but precisely for that reason her interview shows how institutional filtering can be known and felt before direct occupational exclusion occurs: “Some work environments ask women to remove their hijab. I have never accepted that, but I had friends who were forced to do it. I do not judge them, because I believe society is not yet fully ready. For me, there has always been a balance. When a choice became forced, I always chose my hijab. At university I have not had any problem.” She then generalizes the principle: “What matters is that a woman should have the right to choose, whether at university, at work, or in society. No law or regulation should force her to remove the hijab.” This testimony helps identify a third sub-theme: the line between acceptable adaptation and coercive choice. Interviewee 4 does not present all institutions as equally closed; indeed, university is experienced as manageable. But she is acutely aware that work can transform “choice” into necessity.

5.3. Leisure, Sport, and the Burkini Geography

A theme that warrants particular attention is the regulation of religious dress in places of public recreation—pools, beaches, and sport. Interviewee 6’s mapping already pointed to this dimension when she identified “restrictions at the pool, beach and in sports” as part of her felt institutional environment, and added the wish: “I would like to go to the beach, but there are restrictions.” This brief observation opens onto one of the most contested and rapidly evolving zones of laïcité’s spatial expansion. The 2016 municipal burkini bans on Mediterranean beaches—issued in Cannes, Nice, Villeneuve-Loubet, and roughly fifteen further towns—were eventually overturned by the Conseil d’État, but the controversy nonetheless transformed the beach from a recreational site into a politicized zone in which visibly Muslim femininity became a public problem (Almeida 2023; Hancock 2017). The subsequent extension of restrictions into competitive sport—the French Football Federation’s 2006 ban on the hijab in competitive football, the basketball ban introduced in 2022, the volleyball ban in 2023, the Senate’s 2025 vote in favour of a broader cross-sport bill, which still required approval by the National Assembly to become law, and the much-debated 2024 Olympic prohibition on French athletes wearing the hijab even while non-French athletes were free to do so (Amnesty International 2024; Pandey 2025)—together constitute what may be described as a leisure-and-sport geography of differential visibility.

Interviewee 6’s short comment must therefore be read against this background. Her wish to go to the beach is not a private preference but a marker of an institutionally constrained leisure life. Where the school filters access to learning and the workplace filters access to income, the pool, beach, and sports field filter access to embodied recreation, physical health, and the affective experience of public ease. The interview material does not contain extended narratives of beach or sport encounters—an empirical limitation worth acknowledging—but it does register a shared atmospheric awareness across pro-hijab respondents that recreational space is not freely available, and that the body is unevenly entitled to enjoyment depending on its religious legibility. This finding aligns with Amnesty International’s (2024) documentation that France stands out in Europe for imposing bans on religious headwear across multiple sports federations, and with UN human rights bodies’ characterization of these bans as disproportionate and discriminatory.

The contrastive interviews are again clarifying. Interviewee 5 reports that in work or university settings she dresses appropriately for the environment but that “I am not supposed to cover my hair because of someone else’s belief.” Interviewee 7 articulates the leisure and aspirational dimension from the opposite endpoint: “I love fashion and bright, glittery clothes, and the hijab was not really compatible with that. I wanted to be a model … the hijab blocks my dreams and my work,” and her ideal female image is “Kendall Jenner—with my hair loose, on the runway: that is the most beautiful.” These accounts make visible the asymmetry embedded in institutional normality: Interviewee 5 and Interviewee 7 can adapt dress by context while remaining unmarked, their self-presentation legible as ordinary professionalism or ordinary aspirational femininity. For the pro-hijab respondents, by contrast, contextual adaptation is loaded with the added problem of religious visibility—and that added problem is precisely where individual embodied agency is tested against, and partly shaped by, normalizing institutional fields.

5.4. Differential Continuity Across Spaces

A fourth theme emerging across the interviews is that visibility filters produce unequal continuity across spaces. Some women can carry the same self across school, work, street, and leisure; others must become different versions of themselves depending on the site. Interviewee 1’s account makes this explicit: she altered the scarf at school, removed it in the building, put it back on outside, later agreed to remove it in a laboratory for the required hairnet, contemplated removing it at work, but ultimately sought a digital small-and-medium enterprise where she could keep it. What matters analytically is the cumulative effect of these adjustments. The question is no longer simply “is hijab allowed?” but “under what institutional conditions can one remain morally continuous?” Interviewee 6’s statement that hijab is “part of me and my beliefs,” coupled with the fact that “employers sometimes do not accept hijab,” sharpens this tension further: the more hijab is incorporated into the self, the more costly situational suspension becomes.

Interviewee 7, by contrast, describes from a non-hijab endpoint how labor-market filtering is already anticipated at the level of imagined future. She says she disliked hijab because she wanted to become a model and because “hijab blocks my dreams and my work.” She also observes that among friends “many had problems and were discriminated against because of their clothing and the way they were seen.” This matters because it shows that workplace filtering shapes not only those who keep the hijab but also those who never wear it: some careers are perceived as practically incompatible with hijab before any formal application is made. The institutional field thus governs both inclusion and pre-emptive self-modification.

5.5. Institutional Literacy and Interpretive Skill

A final theme, cutting across school, work, and leisure, is that women develop forms of institutional literacy in response to these filters. The interviews do not simply depict women as confronting closed structures. They show them learning where compromise is intelligible, where it becomes too costly, and how different institutional languages should be interpreted. Interviewee 1 draws a clear distinction between functional adjustment and ideological overreach: removing the scarf in the university laboratory to wear a compulsory hairnet was, for her, “an easy compromise,” whereas removal in internships or luxury marketing under “neutrality” or “brand image” carried a very different moral charge. Interviewee 6 similarly differentiates between settings rather than treating all constraints alike. Interviewee 4 distinguishes between a university environment that is workable and work settings in which choice becomes forced. This literacy is part of what the previous section called ethical self-possession. Once hijab has become integrated into self-understanding, institutional navigation requires not only conviction but interpretive skill (Najib and Hopkins 2019; Almeida 2023; Kebaïli and Lépinard 2024).

Seen together, the interviews support a more precise claim than a general statement about discrimination. Schools, workplaces, and leisure sites function as visibility filters because they do not merely admit or exclude; they classify the veiled female body according to institutional norms of neutrality, aesthetic fit, professionalism, and social ease. At this point, embodied boundary-work takes on a specifically institutional form. Women are not confronting fixed rules alone; they are learning to interpret differentiated thresholds of acceptability and to decide, case by case, whether bodily continuity can be preserved, strategically reformulated, or temporarily suspended. Schools, workplaces, and leisure sites are sites in which Muslim women are compelled to perform interpretive labor on the body: to assess when a request counts as technical adjustment, when it becomes ideological overreach, and how far adaptation can proceed without dissolving moral coherence. Embodied boundary-work thus names the practical negotiation through which institutional boundaries are encountered not outside the self, but precisely at the point where selfhood must pass through publicly regulated forms of appearance. What is at stake is the institutional testing of bodily coherence under uneven regimes of visibility (Koenig 2023; Karimi 2020; Najib 2021; Almeida 2023).

6. Aesthetic Recalibration and Respectable Self-Presentation

If schools, workplaces, and leisure sites operate as visibility filters, the interviews show that women do not encounter those filters only at the level of law, access, or explicit institutional judgment. They also meet them through the far more everyday labor of dressing, styling, adjusting, and calibrating the body across contexts. What emerges here is a patterned form of aesthetic recalibration: the practical work through which women modulate color, cut, fabric, cosmetics, silhouette, and degrees of visibility in order to remain socially legible, morally coherent, and situationally appropriate at once. Respectable self-presentation is therefore not a secondary question of “fashion” added onto religion or work. It is one of the main media through which women negotiate the contradictory demands already identified in the previous sections: piety and employability, modesty and femininity, comfort and public scrutiny, self-expression and institutional fit. This section organizes the analysis into four sub-themes: contextual restyling, credibility and competence, the contradictory feminine ideal, and the production of alternative aesthetics.

6.1. Contextual Restyling: The Relational Body Across Settings

Self-presentation is almost never described as fixed across settings. Across all seven interviews women speak of the body not as something displayed identically everywhere but as something contextually restyled. Interviewee 1 is explicit: “At work, I am more formal: an oversized blazer and a neutral hijab. With family, I add a bit more colour. With friends, sometimes a tighter turban and visible earrings. But the common point remains modesty.” Interviewee 6 gives the same structure more concisely: “At home comfortable, at work formal, in class comfortable and simple, when going out comfortable and classic.” Interviewee 2 says clothing should be adapted “to places and situations, out of respect for the environment,” though “not as an obligation.” Interviewee 5 echoes this from an unveiled position—“at work or university I wear clothing suitable for that space, but when I go out with friends I wear something more relaxed”—and Interviewee 7 confirms the same logic through family/friend distinctions: “With family I dress more covered, and among friends I can dress more openly.” The body is managed relationally across the corpus; what differs is not whether recalibration occurs but the grammar by which it is justified.

For the hijab-wearing participants, however, recalibration has a distinct additional charge. It is not only a matter of decorum or situational taste. It becomes a way of maintaining continuity between modesty and public competence under conditions where visible Muslim femininity is already being read through suspicion or sectoral expectations. Interviewee 1’s shopping criteria make this especially clear: she values “comfort, fabric opacity, a loose but structured cut, and ethical production,” and prefers brands offering “modest and simple clothing lines.” This is not simply consumer preference. It reveals an aesthetic logic in which clothing must solve several problems at once: avoid exposure, preserve structure, remain elegant, and sustain ethical coherence. The phrase “loose but structured” is particularly telling. It rejects both bodily display and shapeless invisibility. What is sought is a form that can remain modest without appearing socially unreadable or professionally unserious.

Interviewee 4 shows the same process in a more explicitly moral vocabulary. She defines beauty as located in “essence and the care one takes of oneself,” always “within respect for Islam,” and says that the ideal body is “healthy before anything else, whatever its size.” She adds, “I have always felt beautiful, because my family and my religion gave me the strength to see beauty in all conditions, through the care and cleanliness that I maintain.” Here respectable self-presentation is organized less through stylistic experimentation than through cleanliness, care, health, and inner balance. Yet analytically, this is not radically different from Interviewee 1’s logic. It is another version of aesthetic governance. Beauty is detached from display and relocated into maintenance, hygiene, and composure.

Interviewee 6 sharpens the same point by making visible the tension between personal modesty codes and dominant French ideals of femininity. On the one hand, her clothing criteria are clear: “Clothes should be long and loose, with appropriate non-clinging fabric.” On the other, when asked about the ideal female image in French public space, she says: “A slim woman, neat, made up, and fashionable. She should be beautiful and feminine but not provocative.” The analytical importance of this pairing is considerable. Interviewee 6 is not outside French visual culture; she can describe its ideal type very precisely. But she does not simply internalize it. She reworks it. Neatness, femininity, and non-provocation are retained, while bodily display and cling become unacceptable. The result is not withdrawal from femininity, but a selective refashioning of femininity. Interviewee 3 reinforces this theme by articulating respectable self-presentation through the language of appropriateness and bodily shelter: the underlying structure is the same. Bodily appearance has to be managed so that it does not undo moral self-command. For Interviewee 3 in particular, recalibration becomes especially significant because her earlier experience of school scrutiny made bodily inconsistency feel painful. Aesthetic discipline is thus not merely ornamental. It is reparative—a way of re-establishing coherence where institutional settings had produced fracture.

6.2. Credibility, Competence, and the Heavier Representational Burden

A second major theme is that the body is being recalibrated not only to remain modest, but also to remain credible—as competent, serious, reliable, and non-excessive. This theme cuts across both hijab and non-hijab narratives. Interviewee 5 states this directly: “Being well dressed is important to me. I think style, depending on the environment, can show a person as trustworthy and professional. That is why at work or university I have clothing appropriate to that space, but when I go out with friends, I wear something more relaxed.” Interviewee 2 echoes the same logic when she says that adapting dress to place is not coercion but “a matter of politeness and etiquette.” Even Interviewee 7, despite her stronger orientation toward open and glamorous femininity, distinguishes between family, friendship, and aspirational beauty worlds. What this shows is that respectable self-presentation is not imposed only on hijab-wearing women. All of the respondents inhabit a field in which the female body must be formatted for context. But for hijab-wearing women the task is heavier, because they must make themselves readable as competent and ordinary while carrying a sign already overread as exceptional (Naseem and Adnan 2019; Kebaïli and Lépinard 2024).

This is why Interviewee 1’s work-specific styling matters so much. Her “oversized blazer and neutral hijab” is not a trivial fashion preference. It is a solution to a specific institutional problem: how to appear formally professional without erasing the scarf, and how to make the scarf itself look consonant with occupational seriousness. The neutral hijab, the structured cut, the ethical but simple brands—these are all elements of a strategy of legibility. They do not only express modesty. They translate modesty into a code recognizable to secular-professional environments. The same is true, in different terms, for Interviewee 6’s “formal” work clothes and “simple” classroom presentation. Aesthetic recalibration thus becomes the practical bridge between ethical selfhood and institutional navigation.

6.3. The Contradictory Feminine Ideal

A third theme is that recalibration is driven by a highly contradictory social ideal of femininity, one that all seven interviews register in some way. The women repeatedly describe public expectations as internally divided: one should be beautiful but not too visible, feminine but not provocative, modern but not judged, polished but still “natural,” professionally appropriate yet aesthetically legible. Interviewee 1 captures this contradiction with clarity when she says that in public space there is “pressure to be fashionable while defending oneself against sexist judgments,” and that ideally every woman should be able to dress “without fear of sexualization or stigma.” Interviewee 6 articulates the same contradiction almost formulaically: the ideal French public woman is “beautiful, feminine but not provocative.” Interviewee 4, while operating within a more explicitly Islamic language, also answers this contradiction by relocating beauty to care, health, and cleanliness rather than to externally validated display. Interviewee 2 similarly says that beauty comes from “self-confidence” and from living in a way that makes one feel comfortable with oneself. The important point is that the corpus does not show one side attached to beauty and the other side detached from it. It shows all respondents negotiating beauty under pressure, but through different normative vocabularies.

The contrastive cases make this especially visible. Interviewee 5 says that beauty means confidence and that she wanted, like other girls, to look more beautiful through make-up during adolescence; at the same time, she insists that no one should be forced to cover her hair because of another person’s belief. Interviewee 7 defines the “most beautiful body” through runway and model imagery—“beautiful hair,” an easy path opened by conventional attractiveness—and links her own ideal explicitly to open-hair visibility. These accounts differ sharply from the pro-hijab ones, but analytically they illuminate the same field: bodily presentation is tied to social mobility, recognition, and ease. What varies is the route chosen. For Interviewee 7, ease is imagined through compatibility with glamorous openness. For Interviewee 1, Interviewee 6, Interviewee 4, or Interviewee 3, ease must be built through a more difficult balancing act in which modesty has to be rendered elegant rather than dowdy, visible but not disruptive.

6.4. Producing Alternative Aesthetics

A fourth theme is that this recalibration is not merely reactive but productive of alternative aesthetics. The hijab-wearing interviewees do not simply mimic dominant French norms; they selectively recompose them. Interviewee 1 values care, structure, and even playful variation—“with friends, sometimes a tighter turban and visible earrings”—while keeping modesty as the constant, a modest-fashion grammar in which elegance is reformatted rather than abandoned. Interviewee 3 makes the productive dimension vivid: for her the headscarf is itself a medium of aesthetic invention. “My colourful hijab was the strong point of my dressing,” she recalls; “it was a colourful choice that appeared like a rainbow.” After an older woman once praised how beautifully she had tied it, “I was very happy that I had the hijab, and I tried to learn different styles of tying it so that it would be more attractive.” Interviewee 4’s emphasis on feeling beautiful through care and cleanliness performs the same operation at a quieter register, and Interviewee 6’s insistence that women should dress “according to their own will,” alongside her refusal of clinging fabrics, shows that she too stabilizes her own version of respectable femininity rather than obeying a ready-made code. These women are not only filtered by public norms; they actively generate styles through which Muslim femininity can appear coherent, neat, serious, and attractive on its own terms (cf. Almeida 2023 on counter-spaces of self-expression).

At the same time, the non-hijab interviews demonstrate that alternative aesthetics are being produced there as well. Interviewee 2’s ideal is a “healthy and proportionate body” and clothing chosen by oneself while respecting place; Interviewee 5’s is self-owned, context-aware stylishness; Interviewee 7’s is overtly aspirational and transnationally mediated through celebrity and modeling culture. This is why the section should not be read as if only hijab-wearing women engage in aesthetic labor. They all do. What distinguishes the pro-hijab cases is that aesthetic labor must simultaneously preserve piety, resist oversexualization, satisfy contextual demands, and neutralize institutional suspicion. Their styling work therefore carries a heavier representational burden.

Read this way, the body becomes a site of configurational work in which visibility, style, and selfhood are continuously recomposed under conditions of fluidity and indeterminacy rather than simply expressing a pre-given identity (Jong 2024). Aesthetic recalibration is the most visible form of embodied boundary-work in the corpus. It is the point at which women do not simply endure institutional and social classifications, but actively recompose the body so that piety, femininity, competence, and ordinary social readability can be held together in practice. What emerges, then, is neither passive accommodation to dominant norms nor simple refusal of them, but a situated labor of translation through which Muslim women seek to remain both morally intact and publicly intelligible. The next section turns to the analytical tension this finding raises: to what extent does such recalibration transform dominant norms, and to what extent does it operate within and reproduce them?

7. Discussion: Agency, Norm Reproduction, and Embodied Boundary-Work

The analysis developed thus far raises an analytical question that the article takes up directly: to what extent does the recalibration of hijab transform dominant norms of femininity and public legibility, and to what extent does it operate within—and thereby reproduce—the very standards of acceptability it seeks to navigate? In many of the accounts examined here, efforts to render hijab “acceptable” or “professional” rely on criteria such as neatness, moderation, structure, and non-provocation, criteria that function as taken-for-granted benchmarks of legitimacy and that are rarely made explicit by participants as themselves subject to question. Even when women reinterpret these norms—relocating beauty to care, refusing clinging fabrics, choosing a “loose but structured” cut, pairing a “neutral hijab” with an “oversized blazer”—they continue to operate within a framework that defines what counts as appropriate, readable, or legitimate in public space (Foucault 1977; Bartky 1990; Lépinard 2020). This is the central tension that the concept of embodied boundary-work must hold open.

7.1. Foucauldian Discipline and the Normalization of Acceptable Appearance

Foucault’s (1977) account of disciplinary power offers an important lens here. Discipline, in his analysis, does not operate primarily through prohibition but through normalization: through the production of bodies that are trained, observed, and made docile in relation to micro-norms of conduct, posture, and appearance. Bartky (1990), extending this account to gender, argued that disciplinary regimes of femininity work through a thousand small calibrations—body size, makeup, hair, gait, voice—each of which seems chosen by the woman herself, but which together produce a recognizable feminine body legible to dominant culture. Sawicki (1991) refined this further by insisting that disciplinary fields are not seamless: they generate both normalization and the conditions for new forms of resistance and self-formation. A parallel logic has been identified in the German context by Amir-Moazami (2011), whose Foucauldian analysis shows that the secular state manages gendered Islam less by sanctioning deviation than by normalizing it—reshaping the Muslim body through a conditional affirmation of difference that targets corporal practices such as veiling. Read alongside the French material, this indicates that disciplinary normalization proceeds not only through legal prohibition but through paralegal, pedagogic techniques that invite Muslim women to refashion their visible religiosity into an acceptable form. Lépinard (2020) shows that in France this disciplinary logic has been mobilized through the language of laïcité and gender equality to classify which forms of femininity—and which feminist subjects—count as legitimate. Pandey (2025) extends this critique into the contemporary post-2010 legal architecture, where the disciplinary norm of acceptable feminine appearance is increasingly codified into law (sport, school, beach, Olympics).

In this regard, the practices of aesthetic recalibration discussed in the previous section are unmistakably disciplinary in form. The pro-hijab interviewees are not outside the normalizing field of French professional and aesthetic femininity. They internalize many of its core categories—neatness, slimness, professional appropriateness, non-provocation, polish—and rework hijab to be compatible with them. When Interviewee 6 describes the ideal French public woman as “beautiful and feminine but not provocative” and immediately recodes her own dress within those very terms, what is visible is not the rejection of the dominant norm but its selective reinhabiting. When Interviewee 1 pairs an “oversized blazer” with a “neutral hijab” to enter open-space office environments, the disciplinary code of corporate professional femininity is preserved and even rearticulated through the hijab itself.

7.2. Mahmood and the Ambivalence of Norm-Inhabiting Agency

Yet the disciplinary reading cannot exhaust the analysis. Mahmood’s (2005) intervention is crucial here because it refuses to equate norm-inhabiting practice with mere subordination. Her argument is that agency may also be exercised through the cultivation of dispositions that the subject ethically affirms, even when those dispositions are inseparable from the field that produces them. In the interviews analyzed above, this kind of agency is visible everywhere: in Interviewee 1’s description of hijab as “a feminist approach to controlling my image”; in Interviewee 4’s claim that hijab “helped me find myself as a woman”; in Interviewee 3’s reframing of an initially imposed practice as “the peace of my heart”; in Interviewee 6’s decision in November 2023 to begin wearing the hijab after extended deliberation; and in the refusal of all four pro-hijab women to read public suspicion as a definitive verdict on their bodily form.

The analytical question, then, is not whether the women’s recalibration transforms norms or reproduces them; it is how the two operate simultaneously. The recalibration transforms dominant norms in at least three ways. First, it inserts visible Muslim femininity into precisely those professional, aesthetic, and public spaces from which laïcité’s spatial governmentality has tried progressively to remove it (Almeida 2023; Frégosi 2025). Second, it produces forms of modest fashion—the modest-fashion grammar of structured cuts, ethical brands, and modular hijab styling described by Interviewee 1—that destabilize the assumption that elegance and modesty are incompatible. Third, it gives the women themselves a vocabulary of feminist self-image-control that displaces the secular republican monopoly on women’s emancipation (Scott 2007; Lépinard 2020; Pandey 2025). At the same time, the recalibration reproduces dominant norms in at least three ways. First, it accepts neatness, professionalism, and non-provocation as the unquestioned conditions of public legitimacy, leaving the underlying disciplinary grammar largely intact. Second, it places the burden of legibility almost entirely on the women themselves: they must do the interpretive and aesthetic work of becoming readable, while the institutions doing the reading remain analytically off the hook. Third, by aiming at acceptability, it implicitly accepts that some forms of visible Muslim femininity—looser, less stylized, less marketable—will not be readable and may therefore be filtered out (Karimi 2020; Kebaïli and Lépinard 2024).

7.3. Embodied Boundary-Work as a Conceptual Hinge

Embodied boundary-work is here a useful concept precisely because it names this tension and double movement. It refers to the practical labor through which Muslim women maintain moral coherence and social intelligibility under conditions of regulated visibility, while also doing so within a normative field that is not of their making and that they cannot exit at will. To put it sharply: women’s agency in recalibrating self-presentation may simultaneously modify and reproduce the same normative standards it seeks to navigate. Whether one reads this ambivalence as disappointment or as opening depends on one’s normative starting point. From a strict Foucauldian-feminist perspective (Bartky 1990; Sawicki 1991), it is a sobering reminder that resistance often takes the form of selective reproduction. From a Mahmoodian perspective (Mahmood 2005; Fernando 2014), it is a reminder that the agency embedded in norm-cultivating practice cannot be measured by its distance from dominant norms. Both readings are correct, and they are both required to make sense of the corpus.

What follows for the broader argument is that the French hijab question cannot be settled either as oppression or as resistance. It is most accurately described as a field of contestation in which institutional regulation, ethical self-formation, and aesthetic translation are continuously entangled. Embodied boundary-work names the labor of inhabiting this field. Reading the interviews through this concept does not require us to decide between Foucault and Mahmood; it requires us to hold them together. The corpus shows that disciplinary power normalizes and that ethical agency is exercised, often in the same gesture (Lépinard 2020; Pandey 2025; Kebaïli and Lépinard 2024).

8. Conclusions

In contemporary France, hijab is not experienced by the women in this study primarily as a static sign of religious difference, nor can it be adequately understood through the familiar opposition between secular emancipation and religious constraint. What the interviews show more precisely is that hijab becomes meaningful where it secures a livable relation between conviction, body, and public presence, and that the central social problem is therefore not visibility as such but the unequal institutional regulation of which forms of visible Muslim femininity can appear as ordinary, competent, and respectable. Read in this way, the French secular order emerges less as a neutral framework of abstract equality than as a differentiated regime that redistributes the costs of public legibility onto Muslim women’s bodies through school rules, workplace expectations, leisure restrictions, aesthetic norms, and the diffuse social demand to remain readable without appearing excessive (Koenig 2023; Scott 2007; Fernando 2014; Almeida 2023; Frégosi 2025).

Three connected findings have organized the core of the article. First, in the core narratives, hijab functions as an ethical form rather than merely an identity marker. It gives calm where it aligns inward conviction with outward presentation; it gives self-possession where it allows women to regulate the terms of their visibility; and it gives dignity where it makes possible a counter-reading of suspicion rather than submission to it. Interviewee 1, Interviewee 4, Interviewee 6, and Interviewee 3 articulate this in distinct vocabularies that nonetheless converge on a shared analytic point: the scarf is not lived as a passive residue of tradition but as a worked ethical practice through which the self is stabilized under conditions in which that self is repeatedly overread from outside. The findings here sharpen Mahmood’s (2005) critique of liberal-voluntarist accounts of agency by showing how norm-guided embodiment becomes a mode of self-formation precisely within a secular public field structured by suspicion rather than outside it.

Second, this ethical form is continuously processed by institutions that act as visibility filters. Schools, internships, workplaces, leisure sites, and public spaces do not simply admit or exclude; they classify, grade, and recalibrate acceptable appearance. The interviews consistently reveal that women must learn where hijab can be carried intact, where it must be modified, where it becomes professionally costly, and where it is read as aesthetically incompatible with a role, a sector, or a recreational practice. Interviewee 1’s altered scarf in school, Interviewee 3’s experience of symbolic incoherence when forced to remove hijab in front of peers, Interviewee 6’s mapping of differentiated restrictions across school, work, leisure, and public space, Interviewee 4’s distinction between manageable settings and moments when “choice became forced,” and Interviewee 6’s reported loss of a job opportunity because of her hijab all point to the same mechanism. The cumulative effect, when read alongside Najib’s (2021) institutional cartography of anti-Muslim acts in Greater Paris and Almeida’s (2023) account of the expanding spatial governmentality of laïcité, is that French institutions turn the continuity of self into a question of fit (Abdelgadir and Fouka 2020; Naseem and Adnan 2019).

Third, the burden of holding together faith, body, work, and dignity is carried not only by law and organizational discourse but by the fine-grained labor of bodily presentation. Respectable self-presentation—neutral hijabs, structured loose cuts, careful fabrics, restrained cosmetics, cleanliness, health, and context-sensitive dress—is not incidental detail of style. It is the technique through which piety is rendered legible without being surrendered, and through which women seek to remain both morally coherent and socially credible. Interviewee 1’s “oversized blazer and neutral hijab,” Interviewee 4’s relocation of beauty to care and cleanliness, and Interviewee 6’s reworking of dominant French femininity into a form that is “beautiful and feminine but not provocative” show that aesthetic recalibration is not secondary to the argument but central to it (Karimi 2020). The body is where secular rule, labor-market sorting, and moral selfhood are made to meet.

The contrastive interviews make this argument sharper. Interviewee 2, Interviewee 5, and Interviewee 7 show that the same field can be inhabited through rival moral grammars: beauty as freedom, bodily truth as non-concealment, aspiration as incompatibility with hijab, or dignity as the right to wear or remove it without coercion. What this clarifies is that the real analytic issue is not whether Muslim-background women “choose” in the abstract, but what kind of bodily form can be lived as coherent, dignified, and future-bearing under contemporary French conditions. The pro-hijab narratives become distinctive precisely because they claim calm, self-command, and dignity through an ethically inhabited norm, while the non-hijab narratives claim them through non-imposition and open self-display. Across both positions, the female body remains the central site on which legitimacy is negotiated.

The article has described women’s responses to this field as a form of embodied boundary-work: the practical, moral, and aesthetic labor through which the body is kept coherent while passing through institutions that differentially organize the legitimacy of Muslim visibility. The discussion in the previous section has insisted that this labor is doubly entangled with disciplinary normalization: it transforms dominant norms by inserting modest, visibly Muslim femininity into spaces that would prefer to filter it out, and it reproduces those same norms by accepting their underlying grammar of neatness, professionalism, and non-provocation. Under these conditions, hijab becomes both an ethical resource and a socially costly form of visibility, while the burden of holding together faith, body, work, and dignity falls disproportionately on women themselves. That is the specific problem this study brings into view, and it is also where its contribution lies: in showing that the governance of Muslim visibility in France is lived, above all, as the management of morally composed female bodies.