Beyond Emancipation and Oppression: Post-Secular Intersectionality and the Muslim Woman in the French Republic

Abstract

This paper critically interrogates the French model of secularism (laïcité) and its implications for Muslim women’s rights in contemporary France, particularly within post-colonial and post-secular contexts. It explores how historical legacies of colonial governance continue to inform current regulatory frameworks around religious expression, especially regarding the wearing of Islamic veils in public institutions. While laïcité is officially presented as a principle of neutrality and universalism, its practical enforcement often targets Muslim women, functioning as a mechanism of exclusion that conflates religiosity with political threat. Drawing on intersectional feminist theory and recent debates on post-secularism, the paper examines how dominant feminist movements in France have struggled to incorporate the lived experiences and agency of pious Muslim women, frequently aligning with state-led narratives that instrumentalises gender equality in service of national identity and securitisation. Drawing upon the concept of intersectional post-secularity as discussed in recent scholarship, this article offers a new contextualised framework from within the French system of laïcité for analysing how secular governance, feminist discourse, and colonial legacies converge to regulate Muslim women’s visibility and subjectivity. This approach moves beyond binaries of secularism versus religion and emancipation versus subjugation, offering new insights into the entangled politics of faith, gender, and national identity. Ultimately, the paper calls for feminist and civic discourse that upholds democratic inclusivity, accommodates religious diversity, and resists the racialised governance of Muslim women’s bodies in the name of laïcité.

1. Introduction

Debates over Islamic dress in France, especially those targeting Muslim women, have become central battlegrounds where secular universalism, feminist solidarity, and national identity collide. While laïcité is presented as a principle of neutrality, its regulation of Muslim women’s attire reveals deep racialised and gendered exclusions. This article argues that only by adopting an intersectional post-secular framework can these dynamics be fully understood and moved beyond the simplistic binaries of emancipation versus oppression. Rather than presenting new empirical data, this study offers a theoretical intervention. It draws on a strategic review and synthesis of existing scholarship across feminist theory, sociology, and post-secular studies to propose intersectional post-secularity as a novel lens for analysing how secular governance, feminist discourse, and colonial legacies converge in the French regulation of Muslim women’s visibility and agency.

Recent scholarship on intersectional post-secularity has explored how religion, gender, and other axes of identity intersect within governance regimes that claim secular neutrality but remain shaped by historically dominant religious imaginaries. Lépinard (2020) demonstrates how feminist movements can simultaneously challenge and reproduce exclusions when navigating secular frameworks, particularly in contexts where Muslim women’s rights are politicised through discourses of gender equality. Gao et al. (2025) advance a post-secular feminist approach by bringing intersectionality into the conversation with debates on post-secularity and gender inequalities, showing how the religious subjectivities of Christian women migrant workers in China are formed through overlapping regimes of state power, patriarchal culture, and global capitalism, while also enabling diverse forms of agency. Similarly, Schnabel and Ghafour (2025) explore how individuals reconcile religious affiliation with gendered and sexual identities in ways that resist binary framings of religion and modernity, highlighting the agency exercised in negotiating belief and participation under secular governance. Writing from a comparative sociology perspective in the U.S., they trace tensions across post-secular societies, including France, where laïcité exemplifies how secular “neutrality” disciplines Muslim women’s visibility.

In the European context, Knibbe (2018) provides an important empirical anchor by examining how secularist understandings of Pentecostal healing in Amsterdam delegitimise embodied religiosity when gender and ethnicity intersect. Her analysis of controversies around HIV and “homo-healings” in African and Caribbean Pentecostal churches reveals how secularist narratives and sexual nationalism cast migrant religious actors as “backward,” simultaneously erasing women’s voices while foregrounding homosexuality. By calling for an intersectional “post-secularist” sociology, Knibbe critiques the ways secularist framings themselves reproduce racialised and gendered hierarchies. Smiet’s (2015) analysis, rooted in U.S. abolitionist and Black feminist histories, complements this by demonstrating how religion has long been integral to intersectional feminist struggles, even if later secular feminist receptions have tended to sideline it. Through her reading of Sojourner Truth’s abolitionist activism, Smiet underscores that the boundaries between secular and religious feminisms are historically porous and deeply entangled.

Taken together, these works show that intersectional post-secularity is not a singular or prescriptive theory but a methodological and interpretive orientation. Across diverse geographies—19th-century U.S. abolitionist feminisms, contemporary Chinese migrant labour contexts, Amsterdam’s Pentecostal churches, and French debates on laïcité—this approach illuminates how secular governance, feminist discourse, and colonial histories jointly structure the possibilities for religious visibility, agency, and participation.

Across these diverse geographies, intersectional post-secularity reveals the multiple ways religion, gender, and power intersect under secular regimes. Building on this foundation, the present article applies intersectional post-secularity to the specific socio-legal context of French laïcité, offering a framework that attends both to its historical entanglements with colonial governance and to its contemporary deployment in regulating Muslim women’s visibility. This situated approach retains the conceptual insights of earlier scholarship while demonstrating how laïcité’s distinctive legal architecture and political culture produce a particular configuration of post-secular power, one that requires analysis attuned to both systemic structures and lived experiences.

Intersectional post-secularity, as developed here, brings together post-secular theory and intersectional feminist critique to illuminate how religious, racial, and gender identities intersect under secular regimes, revealing forms of agency and exclusion overlooked by dominant frameworks. The following sections trace the historical evolution of laïcité, analyse its gendered and racialised enforcement, and argue that intersectional post-secularity offers a necessary framework to understand and contest these dynamics.

On 23rd February 2025, the Radio France Internationale website read “French Senate backs move to ban headscarf in sport” as “France’s right-dominated Senate has backed a bill to ban religious symbols including the Muslim headscarf in all sport competitions—professional and amateur—sparking accusations of discrimination from the left, and rights advocates.” This ban is one of the many similar legislations on religious clothing in the public sphere that have been enacted in France since 2004.

A closer look into the history of religion in France’s public sphere reveals how these debates have consistently centred on Muslim communities, especially Muslim women. The question of Muslims in France is deeply connected to broader questions about the identity and structure of the French state itself (Camiscioli 2020). This connection stems from France’s unique post-revolutionary history, shaped by various external upheavals, most notably, the enduring legacy of its collaboration with Nazi Germany during World War II and the violence of its colonial empire (Camiscioli 2020). These historical moments are significant because they reveal how a political system that publicly promotes universal equality and claims to be blind to religion and race can, under certain conditions, be swiftly transformed to uphold racial hierarchies, as it did during the colonial era (Downing 2019, p. 39). This history challenges the persistent belief in French political discourse that the republican model is immune to racism or religious discrimination due to its constitutional emphasis on equality. Moreover, it is crucial to recognise that the French principle of separation between religion and the state did not emerge instantaneously (Downing 2019, p. 39). It was the product of a long historical process beginning in 1789, aimed at reducing the Catholic Church’s influence on political affairs. This process culminated in the 1905 law on the separation of Church and State. Interestingly, the term laïcité itself did not appear in any French constitution until the establishment of the Fourth Republic in 1946 (Downing 2019, p. 39), and since then, it continues to be pivotal in defining the place of religious expressions in the public sphere. Laïcité, whose defining feature is the strict separation of Church and State, demands neutrality of religious expression from individuals.

A direct impact of laïcité on religious clothing in schools was first seen when they were first banned in 2004, following the Stasi Commission report of 2003 (Stasi 2003). Since then, France has enacted a full-face veil ban, which was also challenged for violating rights guaranteed under the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). The law was eventually found to be justified by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in SAS v France (SAS v France Application no. 43835/11) (European Court of Human Rights 2014), with the justification that the ban was necessary for ‘living together’ in a democratic society. The argument for the ban on face-covering draws inspiration from the works of French philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas, who emphasised the significance of the face in social interaction (Assemblée Nationale 2010).

This principle was reflected in the French government’s campaign slogan, “la République se vit à visage découvert” (“the Republic is lived with an uncovered face”), promoting the idea that open visibility is essential for social cohesion (Stasi 2003). The Gérin Commission report, published on 26 January 2010, asserted that the full-face veil contradicts the three core values of the French Constitution: Liberté (women’s dignity), Égalité (gender equality and a mixed society), and Fraternité (a shared commitment to living together) (Assemblée Nationale 2010). In this context, the French laïcité is often presented as a neutral framework that guarantees religious freedom by ensuring the strict separation of religion from public institutions. However, in practice, laïcité has become a mechanism of state control disproportionately applied to Islam, raising significant questions about its impact on religious freedom and gender rights (Ragazzi 2023). While France is often upheld as a paradigmatic secular state, its model of laïcité is deeply rooted in a complex historical and ideological legacy shaped significantly by Christianity and increasingly contested by the growing presence of Islam (Pebay 2017). Drawing on post-secular theory, this discussion highlights how the French state’s effort to strictly separate religion from the public sphere paradoxically reveals the ongoing influence of religious thinking in shaping national identity and political discourse. The tensions surrounding Islam, particularly in the context of globalisation and security concerns, demonstrate how secularism can function as a tool of exclusion and marginalisation, with disproportionate effects on specific communities, especially Muslim women. The French case, therefore, challenges the assumed universality of secularisation theory by exposing the persistent and evolving relationship between religion and secular governance in contemporary society (Pebay 2017). This broader theoretical critique of French secularism is further substantiated by Parvez’s ethnographic work, which highlights how the abstract tensions between religion and laïcité manifest in the everyday experiences of French Muslims, particularly women (Parvez 2021).

The French state’s rigid interpretation of secularism not only suppresses religious expression but also reinforces racial and gendered hierarchies, resulting in structural forms of exclusion. Research conducted in Lyon shows that policies presented as efforts to promote gender equality and uphold republican values, such as bans on religious clothing, often act as tools of control that discipline and silence Muslim women under the guise of liberation (Parvez 2021). France’s secular framework is not neutral but is entangled with colonial legacies and dominant cultural norms, complicating any simplistic narrative of religious decline and affirming the need for post-secular and decolonial perspectives (Parvez 2021). These perspectives highlight that secularism does not operate in isolation but intersects with other axes of power, making it crucial to examine how religious, racial, and gendered identities are shaped within secular regimes. By challenging the political dismissal of intersectionality as a foreign or American concept, it is argued that this framework is essential for understanding how power operates through the interconnected forces of religion, race, gender, politics, and policy in France. This convergence has a direct and profound impact on the rights and lived experiences of Muslim women (Parvez 2021). In this context, the paper critically asks: How might post-secular intersectionality serve as a lens to interrogate the gendered and racialised dynamics of Politicised Islamophobia in France, particularly in the context of laïcité’s evolving role in regulating Muslim women’s visibility and agency in the public sphere? This complex relationship between laïcité and religious visibility materialises most distinctly in the regulation of Muslim women’s bodies, which have become central to broader debates on national identity, secularism, and social cohesion. As outlined in the preceding discussion, the ostensibly neutral framework of laïcité often functions as a mechanism of governance that selectively constrains religious expression, particularly Islamic practices, under the guise of gender equality and public order. These dynamics are not abstract but are concretely enacted through legal and institutional measures that disproportionately target Muslim women’s attire. To move beyond binary framings of resistance or submission, I propose the framework of intersectional post-secularity. This concept draws from post-secular theory and intersectional feminist scholarship but brings them into critical dialogue to re-theorise the lived experiences of Muslim women in France as shaped by both racialised governance and feminist exclusion. It is through this lens that the article seeks to offer an original contribution to existing debates.

In doing so, this article offers a strategic intervention into debates on secularism, Islamic dress, and feminist critique in France by proposing a novel framework of intersectional post-secularity. While grounded in secondary literature, this approach seeks to move beyond a descriptive review to reframe the problem space itself. This contribution lies in extending intersectional post-secular analysis to the juridical architecture of laïcité, showing how legal regimes codify exclusions that parallel, yet differ from, other contexts examined in the literature.

Rather than asking whether secularism is neutral or not, this article interrogates how post-secular and intersectional logics might converge to expose the racialised, gendered, and colonial residues embedded in the French state’s regulation of Muslim women. This framework is used to read the politics of Islamic dress not simply as a legal or cultural dispute, but as a site where competing visions of modernity, belonging, and liberation are contested.

The following section explores how this intersection of faith, gender, and state policy has shaped a restrictive conception of public identity in contemporary France.

2. Historical and Policy Context: Muslim Women, Individual Religiosity, and the Construction of a ‘Laïc’ Public in France

In the French context, interactions with religious clothing in public spaces have predominantly impacted minority women, particularly Muslim women. Since 1989, France has enacted a series of laws aimed at restricting, sanctioning, and banning the veil and other religious attire in public spaces (Conseil d’Etat 1989). The first major restriction was introduced in 2004, prohibiting religious symbols and clothing in public schools (LOI n° 2004-228 2004). This was followed by a 2010 law banning full-face coverings in public, specifically targeting niqabs and burqas, which are predominantly worn by Muslim women (LOI n° 2010-1192 2010).

In April 2021, the French Senate voted to ban hijabs in public for girls under 18, reflecting the gendered implications of these laws (Beardsley 2021). In January 2022, the Senate passed a proposal to prohibit religious symbols at sporting events (Sénat 2021). Although these bans were not enacted by the National Assembly, in March 2022, France’s highest court upheld a ban imposed by the Bar Council in Lille on religious symbols, including head coverings, in courtrooms, impacting Muslim women lawyers and participants (Foroudi 2022).

In May 2022, the Grenoble town council voted to allow burkinis, body-covering swimwear commonly worn by Muslim women, at municipal pools (Foroudi 2022). However, France’s top administrative court overturned this decision, illustrating the complex intersection of gender, religion, and public life (Foroudi 2022). The debate continued with the abaya ban. In September 2023, the Council of State (Conseil d’Etat), France’s highest administrative court, upheld a restriction on the abaya, a loose-fitting dress worn mainly by Muslim women, in public schools, reflecting ongoing scrutiny of Muslim women’s clothing in public (Ayad 2023). Combined with the recent ban on the hijab in sports, these legal measures demonstrate how secularism in France is often applied in ways that disproportionately impact minority women, influencing their participation and visibility in public life.

The steady expansion of legislation regulating Muslim women’s clothing in France reveals a sustained effort by the state to construct a normative conception of public identity grounded in the principle of laïcité. Although these laws are presented through the language of neutrality, gender equality, and public order, they disproportionately target Muslim women and function as mechanisms of exclusion. Their effect is to restrict the visibility of Muslim women and limit their participation in public life. As Lépinard (2020) argues, the growing politicisation of Islam within European contexts, particularly through discourses on women’s rights, has significantly reshaped feminist debates and redefined national identity. Rather than addressing difference through the lens of race or immigration, contemporary French secularism treats religion, especially Islam, as the primary dimension through which difference is regulated. According to Lépinard (2020), this has produced two key consequences.

First, by emphasising religion rather than the immigration-based narratives that dominated public discourse in the 1980s and 1990s, the terms of feminist engagement with intersectionality have shifted. This has reopened debates concerning who is recognised as a legitimate feminist subject and how agency and liberation should be conceptualised within feminist thought (Lépinard 2020). Second, the deep entanglement of secularism with national identity, which has developed over more than two decades of debate surrounding religious accommodation and the integration of Islam, has resulted in gender and secularism becoming central elements in the definition of national belonging (Lépinard 2020). Therefore, even as Islam becomes racialised in the post-colonial Western context, the process Lépinard describes as the “racialization of religion”, it remains essential to examine how Muslim identities are socially constructed through religious affiliation. Lépinard (2020) emphasises that the religious dimension of this process must not be overlooked, as it plays a fundamental role in shaping how racialisation operates for Muslims in Western societies.

These regulations on Muslim women’s attire in France can also be understood within the broader context of Islamic Organisations, notably, the Union of Islamic Organisations in France (UOIF), which is ideologically linked to the Muslim Brotherhood. Although the French state enacts such laws to uphold a secular public identity, they simultaneously provoke political and legal mobilisation among French Muslims, particularly around issues of visibility and participation. For instance, the UOIF has offered legal counsel and public support to Muslim women challenging bans on headscarves in public institutions, including schools and childcare centres, framing these interventions as essential to combat discrimination and protect religious identity (Khosrokhavar 2010). The organisation’s involvement in symbolic disputes like the headscarf ban underscores how religious identity has become a critical terrain of contestation within the French public sphere. Moreover, the ambivalent position of groups inspired by the Muslim Brotherhood, oscillating between integration into French society and the affirmation of distinct religious identities, reflects the broader paradox inherent in French secularism: while purporting neutrality, it frequently imposes dominant cultural norms that marginalise religious minorities. This dynamic reinforces Lépinard’s (2020) argument that religion, particularly Islam, has emerged as the central axis through which difference is negotiated in contemporary France, generating both institutional resistance and renewed assertions of Muslim identity within a highly secular context.

This contested negotiation over religious visibility in public spaces, particularly through the politicised regulation of Muslim women’s attire, not only reveals internal tensions within French secularism but also signals a broader theoretical shift in how the role of religion is understood in modern societies. While the French state justifies such regulations under the normative principles of laïcité, the increasing legal and political activism of organisations like the UOIF highlights a countermovement that seeks to assert religious identity as a legitimate aspect of public life (Khosrokhavar 2010). This interplay between state-led exclusion and religious counter-assertion exemplifies the emergence of a social landscape akin to what Habermas (2008) describes as a “post-secular society.” In this context, religion is not relegated to the private sphere, as classical theories of secularisation might suggest, but remains a significant force demanding recognition and influence within public institutions and civic life. The visibility of Islam, particularly when embodied in gendered symbols such as the veil, thus becomes emblematic of deeper debates concerning pluralism, citizenship, and the boundaries of secular neutrality.

Furthermore, the French case highlights how rigid secularism, when institutionalised as a form of political governance, fails to account for the complex realities of post-colonial religious identities. Building on Habermas’s call for a “complementary learning process” (Habermas 2008), this article argues that the failure of French secularism lies not simply in its exclusion of religion, but in its refusal to engage with the multiple, embodied ways Muslim women inhabit modernity. Casanova’s model of “multiple modernities” supports this argument (Casanova 2009), providing a basis for reframing religious dress as a form of pluralistic modern subjectivity. This shifts the focus from secularism as normative neutrality to secularism as a site of contested epistemologies and subjectivities, particularly when it comes to regulating Muslim women’s bodies. While Casanova’s comparative work illustrates that the secularisation path followed by Europe is neither inevitable nor globally applicable (Casanova 2009), this article argues that the French case illustrates how secular governance actively produces its own anxieties, particularly around modernity, integration, and national identity, through the regulation of Muslim women’s religious expression. These policies are not simply legal mechanisms or cultural disputes but deeply embedded political projects that racialise religion to secure national imaginaries. As Lépinard (2020) notes, the convergence of race, religion, and gender in the French context exposes how religious affiliation is simultaneously regulated, politicised, and reclaimed.

Building on this, I argue that the dominant epistemologies through which both the state and many mainstream feminist actors interpret veiling rely on a reductive binary that frames Muslim women as either victims or threats. Salem’s (2013) feminist critique is instructive here, as she interrogates the secular–liberal assumptions within Western feminism that routinely marginalise religious women’s agency. However, rather than simply adopting her critique, I propose intersectional post-secularity as a conceptual framework that expands this line of inquiry. By bringing intersectionality into the conversation with post-secular theory, I offer a lens that centres the lived experiences of Muslim women in France, experiences shaped simultaneously by colonial memory, racialised surveillance, gendered expectations, and spiritual subjectivities. This framework resists the impulse to universalise “liberation” through secular logics and instead attends to the plural, situated ways in which Muslim women engage with both religious and civic life.

In the French context, where veiled Muslim women are routinely cast as antithetical to modernity, intersectional post-secularity helps us move beyond the reactive tropes of resistance or assimilation. It demands that we take seriously how faith and feminism can coexist, and how that coexistence disrupts dominant narratives about emancipation, visibility, and public belonging. Rather than reinforcing the dichotomies of secular/religious or modern/backward, this framework makes visible the contested, negotiated terrain on which Muslim women live and speak.

3. Post-Secular Paradoxes: Religion, Gender, and Muslim Visibility in the French Republic

Cesari and Casanova (2017) argue that in many Muslim-majority societies, questions surrounding gender and secularism are not peripheral but foundational to state-building and democritisation. Unlike the historical experience of Catholic-majority countries, where gender debates gained prominence only after democratic institutions were consolidated, in Muslim contexts, issues such as women’s rights, veiling, and the role of Shari‘a are often entangled with the very structure of emerging political orders. As such, gender becomes a central ideological battleground between secularist and Islamist visions of modernity, complicating pathways to democritisation and often resulting in heightened political polarisation.

In this context, Parvez (2021) highlights the necessity of adopting an intersectional framework, despite critiques that it is an “imported” American construct, to properly examine the complex convergence of religion, race, and gender. This call for a localised, decolonial intersectionality is echoed in Lépinard’s (2020) critique of French feminist movements, which she argues have largely failed to incorporate the lived realities of Muslim women. Dominated by secular, liberal, and universalist ideals, these movements often treat religion, particularly Islam, as antithetical to women’s emancipation. Through qualitative research, Lépinard demonstrates how this “gender-first” orientation marginalises religious and post-colonial identities, leading to paradoxical outcomes such as feminist support for veil bans that silence the very women they claim to protect. She thus calls for a more contextually grounded intersectional approach, one that interrogates how national ideologies like laïcité and republican universalism structure the limits of feminist solidarity.

This intersection of religion, gender, and political ideology also informs broader European perceptions of political Islam. As Holt (2021) notes, Islamism is frequently conflated with extremism, prompting restrictive secular policies that disproportionately affect Muslim communities, especially women. In France, these dynamics are intensified by counter-radicalisation strategies that securitise ordinary Islamic practices, embedding suspicion into everyday expressions of religious identity (Ragazzi 2023, pp. 50, 56). Holt contends that Islamism can function as an “alternative modernity,” offering a form of democratic engagement rooted in Islamic values, particularly among marginalised communities facing systemic exclusion. Echoing Bayat’s (2005) notion of “post-Islamism,” Holt observes that many Muslim actors now strategically adopt human rights discourse to assert their place within secular frameworks.

However, these efforts unfold within a post-colonial context where Islam is framed as fundamentally incompatible with national identity. Taguieff (2023) situates this tension within broader ideological and migratory shifts, suggesting that political Islam is often constructed as a cultural counterforce to secular republicanism. Debates over the niqab and burkini reflect not merely cultural anxieties, but ongoing struggles between assimilationist laïcité and pluralist multiculturalism. Such measures, including the 2004 law banning conspicuous religious symbols, are framed as safeguarding neutrality yet operate as mechanisms of exclusion (Ragazzi 2023).

Indeed, laïcité’s application increasingly reveals its selective enforcement. While ostensibly promoting autonomy, it has served to police Muslim visibility, particularly that of women. Christian cultural symbols frequently remain unchallenged, while Islamic markers are legislated out of public space (Bowen 2009; Fernando 2020). Casanova (2011) and Abu-Lughod (2013) argue that Muslim women are frequently instrumentalised within Western liberal discourse, portrayed either as oppressed subjects in need of rescue or as latent security threats. These reductive framings obscure deeper structural inequalities and reproduce colonial continuities under the guise of gender equality or national security. This dual representation of the veiled Muslim woman as both a victim and a danger has become a central trope in French public policy and media narratives (Scott 2018; Fernando 2020).

Policies and rhetoric that claim to liberate women from patriarchal traditions simultaneously re-inscribe surveillance, stigma, and exclusion (Najib and Hopkins 2019; Baubérot-Vincent 2016; Özyürek 2014). These contradictions reflect a racialised form of governance that invokes women’s rights to justify restrictions on religious expression. Historically, this approach is rooted in colonial practices. As Fanon (1959) famously argued, French colonial authorities in Algeria sought to unveil Muslim women as part of a civilising mission, viewing the veil not only as a symbol of cultural resistance but as an obstacle to colonial domination. In their eyes, conquering the women, through unveiling, was essential to conquering Algerian society itself. This logic persists in contemporary policies that centre Muslim women’s dress as a problem to be regulated.

Orientalist imaginaries have long shaped this discourse. Seferdjeli (2018) analyses how French visual culture, such as Delacroix’s Femmes d’Alger dans leur appartement, portrayed veiled women through a lens of exoticism, subjugation, and eroticism, reinforcing colonial fantasies about the Muslim woman as both hidden and hyper-visible. Such representations continue to animate modern policy, as evidenced by the 2010 ban on full-face veils, which echoes colonial anxieties while cloaked in feminist and security rationales (Abu-Lughod 2013).

Taken together, these dynamics reveal that French secularism, rather than operating as a neutral framework for coexistence, functions as a politically charged apparatus of governance, one that polices difference, reinforces historical hierarchies, and reifies the Muslim woman as a contested figure at the intersection of religion, gender, and nationhood.

These insights reveal the limits of dominant secular feminist frameworks, which often define emancipation solely in terms of resistance to religious authority. Yet, as Singh (2015) argues, such frameworks can be conceptually insufficient in post-secular contexts, where religious women assert agency through ethical and spiritual practices that may not conform to liberal norms of liberation. Rather than viewing piety or modesty as inherently oppressive, Singh urges intersectionality to engage with diverse moral and epistemic foundations, ones that recognise forms of self-making rooted in religious life. In this light, Mahmood’s (2012) analysis of the Egyptian mosque movement further complicates binary understandings of veiling, emphasising how religious discipline can constitute an active, embodied ethics. By foregrounding these alternative modalities of agency, a post-secular intersectionality moves beyond the opposition between resistance and submission, and toward a more pluralistic understanding of women’s political subjectivity across different socio-political and religious terrains.

While critiques of secularism advanced by scholars like Asad and Mahmood foreground its colonial entanglements and gendered exclusions, liberal cosmopolitan theorists such as Gülalp (2023) offer a contrasting perspective. Gülalp argues for a renewed commitment to secularism, not as a tool of cultural homoginisation, but as a necessary framework for protecting individual rights by resisting communal gatekeeping. He warns, however, that multicultural accommodations, though often well-intentioned, can inadvertently reinforce patriarchal authority within minority communities, silencing dissenting voices, particularly those of women. This tension is especially salient in the French context, where universalist secularism, while claiming neutrality, paradoxically operates as an apparatus of exclusion and surveillance (Gülalp 2023).

4. Beyond Resistance: Reimagining Intersectionality in a Post-Secular Frame

While intersectionality has become a widely adopted concept across academic disciplines, both its analytical promise and its practical limitations require careful consideration. In this context, it is essential to clarify how the term is defined and applied. Intersectionality refers to a conceptual and analytical framework that investigates how various forms of social stratification, such as gender, race, class, religion, and national origin, intersect to shape differentiated and context-specific experiences of oppression and privilege (Crenshaw 1989). Rather than viewing these categories as isolated or additive, intersectionality insists on their mutual constitution and simultaneous operation. Bassel and Emejulu (2010) deploy this framework to explore how institutional processes in both republican France and multicultural Britain frequently fail to engage with intersectional claims. Their comparative study shows that despite their contrasting models for accommodating difference, both states misrecognise and compartmentalise axes of inequality. In France, the republican commitment to universalism depoliticises demands rooted in identity and effectively silences claims that challenge the homogeneity of the public sphere, especially those raised by racialised and migrant women. Conversely, in the UK, institutional processes, such as those surrounding the formulation of the Single Equality Bill, acknowledge multiple inequalities but treat them as discrete and disconnected, thus obscuring their simultaneity and undermining comprehensive policy responses. In both cases, intersectionality reveals how institutional structures marginalise the experiences of those who inhabit multiple, overlapping sites of disadvantage. As such, intersectionality remains an indispensable tool for interrogating the failures of policy frameworks and advocating for a more inclusive, context-sensitive vision of social justice (Bassel and Emejulu 2010).

Building on these institutional critiques of intersectionality, it becomes necessary to interrogate not only how intersectional claims are excluded or misrecognised in state policy, but also how the very framing of intersectionality may marginalise certain forms of subjectivity. While scholars like Crenshaw (1989) and Bassel and Emejulu (2010) reveal the institutional erasure of compounded inequalities, more recent work calls attention to the epistemological boundaries of intersectionality itself. In particular, Singh (2015) challenges the secular assumptions underlying much intersectional theory, arguing that it often fails to account for religious forms of agency. This shift toward a post-secular understanding of intersectionality invites a reconsideration of how liberation and resistance are conceptualised, especially for religious women whose ethical and political lives are shaped through faith-based practices rather than oppositional secular logics.

Drawing on Avtar Brah’s Decolonial Imaginings (2022), a decolonial feminist lens further exposes the shortcomings of secular universalism in addressing the lived realities of Muslim women. Brah critiques French laïcité as a “civilizational feminism” that, under the guise of gender equality, instrumentalised feminist discourse to justify exclusionary state practices (Brah 2022). Rather than treating Muslim women as passive subjects requiring rescue, Brah foregrounds their agency and insists on an intersectional politics rooted in diaspora and coalition. She challenges the binaries of oppression/emancipation and secular/religious by emphasising “situated knowledges” and the plurality of feminist subjectivities, including those formed through faith (Brah 2022). In Brah’s view, veiling can represent ethical self-cultivation, not submission, echoing Saba Mahmood’s critique of Western liberal norms. Her call for a “reconstructed secularism” that resists both religious dogma and secular authoritarianism aligns with the emerging framework of post-secular intersectionality advanced in this paper, reinforcing the imperative to build solidarities across difference rather than impose singular models of liberation (Brah 2022).

As Singh suggests, a post-secular intersectionality must then create a space for diverse ways in which to define oppression and liberation; thus, it should be limited to only meaning to negate oppression (Singh 2015, p. 670). He critically engages the recent structuralist turn in intersectionality by juxtaposing it with the emerging literature on religious women’s agency, and Singh argues that intersectionality’s prevailing anti-oppression consensus is conceptually and politically insufficient in a post-secular context (Singh 2015, p. 670). While intersectionality has traditionally served as a critical framework for exposing how systems of oppression intersect across race, gender, class, and more, it often assumes an oppositional, secular–humanist subject, where identity and agency are framed almost exclusively through resistance to power. Such framing, Singh argues, inherently limits the spectrum of experiences it can capture, particularly those of religious women, whose agency may not manifest through overt resistance, but through culturally and spiritually rooted practices of affirmation, discipline, or piety (Singh 2015, p. 670). This notion of piety relates to Mahmood’s analysis of the mosque movement in Egypt (Mahmood 2012). The internalisation of modesty and shyness, often read as submission, must be understood not simply as passive acquiescence but as an active form of self-discipline shaped by gendered expectations and religious identity. Within the mosque movement, for example, veiling is not merely imposed but is frequently embraced by women as a means of cultivating modest deportment. In this context, the veil functions as a marker of ethical achievement rather than simply a symbol of subordination (Mahmood 2012, p. 157). To view it solely as a tool of patriarchal oppression is to overlook the agency embedded in religiously motivated self-regulation (Mahmood 2012, p. 157).

This is because there are, broadly speaking, two critical approaches to understanding veiling. The first sees political and ideological structures, whether secular or religious, as objectifying women’s bodies and rendering them sites of control. Veiling is often interpreted in this view as a mode of subjection, where women’s voices and subjectivities are suppressed, and the subaltern cannot speak except in terms legible to hegemonic discourse (Mahmood 2012, p. 158). The second approach interrogates the secular–religious divide itself, noting how secularism derives its authority by defining and regulating the boundaries of religion. By relegating religion to the private or domestic sphere, the secular exerts its normative power under the guise of neutrality. However, secularism is not a universal condition; rather, it is a historically and culturally contingent framework whose claims to universality often mask the reproduction of power (Mahmood 2012, p. 159).

These forms of agency challenge the presumed universality of oppression/resistance binaries and demonstrate that all critiques of power are themselves grounded in particular ethical–political traditions. Therefore, the notion of a “freestanding” or universally agreed-upon critique of oppression, on which much of structural intersectionality depends, is untenable. Instead, liberation and oppression must be understood as contextually defined, with different communities identifying and responding to injustice through their own moral and epistemological frameworks. The literature on religious women’s agency thus calls for intersectionality to accommodate a broader plurality of ethical commitments and political aspirations, beyond those aligned with secular liberal feminism (Singh 2015, pp. 669–70).

In doing so, Singh argues, intersectionality must resist the seduction of a negative consensus on oppression and instead undertake the difficult, situated work of building coalitions across genuinely diverse traditions and experiences of agency, resistance, and liberation. This reconceptualisation not only deepens intersectionality’s theoretical scope but also makes space for feminist solidarities that are ethically generous and politically capacious. “No one ought to expect the forms of our liberation to be any less various than the forms of our oppression. We need to be at least as generous in imagining what women’s liberation will be like as our oppressors have been in devising what women’s oppression has been” (Spelman 1988, p. 132).

Singh (2015) critiques the anti-oppression consensus within intersectionality for being conceptually limited in post-secular contexts, where agency is often framed through resistance rooted in secular–liberal norms. This limitation becomes evident in Mainardi’s (2022) ethnographic work on Muslim girls in France, who experience a paradox of hypervisibility and erasure. Their veiled bodies are frequently scrutinised in public discourse, yet their political subjectivities are dismissed, reinforcing the idea that religious expression is incompatible with democratic participation (Mainardi 2022, p. 558). These dynamics align with Singh’s concern that intersectionality often overlooks non-oppositional or spiritually grounded forms of agency. Echoing Mahmood’s (2012) analysis of piety as ethical self-formation, Mainardi (2022) shows that digital platforms become critical spaces, where Muslim girls construct counter-narratives, challenge Islamophobia, and assert their identities through both individual and collective strategies (Mainardi 2022). These practices disrupt secular–religious binaries, as girls engage politically without abandoning religious identification. Their re-appropriation of feminist discourse, particularly their critique of exclusionary white feminism and their embrace of intersectional feminism online, demonstrates a commitment to ethical and political forms of belonging that are often marginalised in dominant feminist frameworks (Mainardi 2022). This shift embodies a broader call, echoed by Spelman (1988), to imagine liberation in terms as diverse as the forms of oppression it resists. Rather than negating faith-based subjectivities, Mainardi’s findings emphasise situated knowledge and solidarity, revealing how Muslim girls build epistemic and affective communities that expand the horizon of feminist politics. This vision reinforces Singh’s call for an intersectionality rooted in plurality, capable of sustaining coalitions across differing moral, religious, and political traditions, that transcends a narrow anti-oppression consensus. Braidotti’s (2009) in her exploration of notion of post-secular feminist ethics, offers a vital contribution to this rethinking by shifting the focus from resistance to affirmation, and from fixed secular rationalism to a relational, affective, and embodied ethics of becoming. She critiques the dominance of melancholia and oppositional politics in contemporary feminist thought, arguing instead for an ethics that affirms “zoe”, life in its generative, interconnected, and nonhuman forms, as a basis for ethical relations (Braidotti 2009, pp. 46–47).

This affirmative stance does not dismiss pain or oppression but urges a transformation of suffering into creative, relational possibilities. In doing so, it complements Mahmood’s (2012) analysis of piety among women in Egypt’s mosque movement, which similarly challenges the secular framing of agency as necessarily oppositional. Mahmood highlights how acts such as veiling and modesty can function as ethical self-cultivation rather than submission, demanding a broader understanding of liberation grounded in specific moral and spiritual traditions. Mainardi (2022) extends this line of thought through her empirical study of Muslim girls in France, who are constructed in public discourse as hyper-visible symbols of religious alterity yet rendered socially and politically invisible. Their agency emerges not through rejection of religion, but through digital practices that foster feminist solidarities and affirm their faith-based identities. These girls, as Mainardi notes, “define themselves as feminists” (p. 564), not despite, but through their religious and cultural positions, thus directly resisting normative secularism and white feminist exclusion. Singh’s critique of structural intersectionality finds its practical resonance here: these expressions of agency (deeply situated, affective, and spiritual) are illegible within frameworks that reduce liberation to secular critique alone. Braidotti reinforces this point by advocating a nomadic subjectivity, one that does not rely on sameness or universal moral rules, but engages with otherness as a source of ethical becoming (Braidotti 2009, pp. 49–51). Such an approach foregrounds multiplicity, affect, and interdependence, offering a generative alternative to liberal models that centre autonomy, rationality, and resistance. In affirming “life” over “lack,” and enduring pain not as victimhood but as a site of transformation, post-secular feminist ethics pushes intersectionality toward a more capacious and inclusive political vision, one that can accommodate Muslim girls’ digital self-articulations, religious women’s ethical practices, and trans-local solidarities rooted in plural epistemologies and shared vulnerability.

The regulation of Muslim women’s attire in France, especially during the 2004 headscarf controversy, highlights a deep crisis within French feminist movements concerning the limits of secular universalism and the failure to practice an inclusive intersectionality. As Lépinard (2020) demonstrates, the debate surrounding the loi sur les signes religieux was not initiated by feminists but quickly became a site of ideological contestation within the feminist field, particularly among actors from the Collectif National Pour Les Droits Des Femmes (CNDF). Despite its historic commitment to anti-capitalist and anti-racist causes, the CNDF failed to address the specificities of Muslim women’s religious subjectivities. Instead, it often reproduced a secular, moralsing narrative that equated veiling with patriarchal subjugation, denying the legitimacy of alternative feminist imaginaries rooted in religious and post-colonial experiences (Lépinard 2020, pp. 68–72).

This epistemic exclusion was further reinforced by the claim, frequently echoed by feminist leaders, that the headscarf cannot be emancipatory in any context, despite acknowledging its plural meanings. Feminist organisations like NPNS and secularist intellectuals argued that veiling signified religious proselytism and submission, and that its presence in public schools posed a threat to the moral fabric of the Republic (Lépinard 2020, p. 71). Such claims erased the agency of veiled Muslim women, treating them as either misguided or dangerous, and aligned feminist rhetoric with state efforts to discipline Muslim visibility. This configuration, in which feminist discourses are co-opted to justify policies of exclusion, exemplifies what has been termed femonationalism, the instrumentalisation of gender equality to promote nationalist and Islamophobic agendas (Farris 2017; Lépinard 2020). Femonationalism describes how European right-wing parties and neoliberals advocate for gender equality while simultaneously promoting xenophobic and racist agendas. It also highlights the role of prominent feminists and femocrats in shaping the prevailing narrative that portrays Islam as inherently misogynistic, a framing in which Muslim women, often depicted as passive victims, are seen as needing to be ‘rescued.’ As a result, such actors tend to support legal measures like bans on veiling (Brah 2022).

Lépinard’s study of the CNDF further reveals how feminist coalitions failed to integrate anti-racism institutionally or structurally. At major national conventions in 1997 and 2002, migrant and racialised women’s issues were relegated to marginal panels, such as those on female genital mutilation or international solidarity, without serious engagement with the lived experiences of French Muslim women (Lépinard 2020, pp. 76–78). This marginalisation was not merely procedural but reflected a deeper inability, or refusal, to conceptualise veiled Muslim women as feminist subjects. When such women attempted to participate in CNDF organising meetings during the 2004 and 2012 marches, they were subjected to intrusive questioning about their positions on abortion, LGBTQ rights, and secularism, signalling that their presence was not only contested but conditional (Lépinard 2020, p. 79).

This lack of intersectional reflexivity among dominant feminist actors is particularly troubling in a post-secular context, where religion has re-emerged as a key axis of political subjectivity. Singh (2015, p. 670) critiques the structuralist turn in intersectionality for its failure to accommodate religious forms of agency, arguing that the prevailing anti-oppression consensus assumes a secular, oppositional subject. This assumption renders invisible the ethical practices and self-understandings of religious women, particularly those for whom modesty and piety are not forms of submission, but expressions of autonomy and spiritual discipline. As Mahmood (2012, p. 157) shows in her ethnographic study of the Egyptian mosque movement, veiling can be an embodied ethical practice, a marker of virtue, not subordination. Framing it solely through the lens of patriarchal oppression not only flattens its meaning but negates the agency of the women who choose it.

In the French context, where laïcité functions not merely as state neutrality but as a normative cultural project (Fernando 2020), the failure to engage religious agency as politically meaningful has profound implications. As Casanova (2011) and Abu-Lughod (2013) argue, Muslim women are often positioned as needing to be saved, whether from Islam, their families, or themselves. This trope, rooted in colonial representations of veiled women as oppressed, continues to shape policy and feminist discourse alike. Lépinard (2020, p. 80) traces this logic within CNDF’s inability to address its own racialised exclusions, showing that the veil became a moral boundary: the visible sign of a subject who could not be fully feminist.

Taken together, these dynamics suggest that French secular feminism remains entangled in an epistemology of ignorance, an unexamined privilege that occludes the perspectives of the racialised and religious “other.” A truly post-secular intersectionality would require more than rhetorical inclusivity. It would demand an ethical reorientation: a commitment to listening across lines of moral and epistemological difference, and to reconceiving feminist solidarity beyond the normative frameworks of secular liberalism. As Lépinard (2020, p. 80) cautions, unless feminists in France critically interrogate how laïcité, race, and religion intersect to structure exclusion, they risk reinforcing the very systems of marginalisation they claim to resist.

5. Conclusions

Building on recent scholarship on intersectional post-secularity (Smiet 2015; Knibbe 2018; Schnabel and Ghafour 2025), this article has contributed to the discourse by showing how laïcité in France operates not as a neutral doctrine, but as a racialised and gendered system of governance.

By moving beyond simplistic binaries of resistance and oppression, it reveals how both state policies and dominant feminist discourses risk erasing Muslim women’s agency and reproducing colonial dynamics under the banner of gender equality. Rather than merely surveying existing scholarship, this article seeks to reframe the problem space itself, demonstrating how intersectional post-secularity provides a fresh lens for analysing the politics of Islamic dress, national identity, and secular universalism in contemporary France.

This study has explored the deeply entangled politics of religion, gender, and secularism in France, focusing on how the figure of the veiled Muslim woman has become central to both feminist and state imaginaries of national identity, emancipation, and security. Through a critical examination of the French model of laïcité, this analysis shows that what is often framed as a commitment to neutrality frequently functions instead as a tool of exclusion, particularly when deployed within a context shaped by colonial histories of governing Muslim populations and regulating Islamic visibility. The debates surrounding the headscarf and other forms of Islamic dress, particularly since the 2004 law banning conspicuous religious symbols in public schools, exemplify how Muslim women’s bodies have become sites of contestation in the struggle over the meaning of republican values, secularism, and national cohesion. While proponents of such legislation claim to protect individual autonomy and gender equality, this paper has shown that these justifications often mask deeper anxieties about the presence of Islam in the public sphere. As Lépinard (2020) and others have argued, the mobilisation of gender equality to police religious expression aligns feminist discourse with nationalist and securitarian agendas, what Farris (2017) terms femonationalism. In this process, Muslim women are rendered both hyper-visible and politically voiceless, simultaneously constructed as oppressed subjects and potential threats to the secular order.

What emerges, then, is a troubling continuity between colonial governance and contemporary secular policy. In both cases, veiled Muslim women have been positioned as obstacles to modernity; as signs of cultural backwardness; and as figures requiring intervention, unveiling, or saving. From Fanon’s (1959) analysis of the colonial project in Algeria to current counter-radicalisation strategies, the veil has remained a symbol overdetermined by external political and moral meanings. As this paper has illustrated, such a focus not only re-inscribes colonial logics of civilisational superiority but also reduces complex social, religious, and political realities to visual markers of difference and danger.

More critically, the obsession with veiling as a proxy for political Islam or radicalisation has contributed to a misdiagnosis of the challenges facing French society. While political Islam, like any political ideology, may pose legitimate questions regarding its compatibility with democratic norms, its conflation with personal religious expression, especially as embodied by women, obscures the structural causes of alienation and radicalisation. Socioeconomic exclusion, racism, state violence, and the marginalisation of Muslim identity play far greater roles in creating conditions for political extremism than the personal choice to wear a headscarf or niqab. Policies that centre surveillance and discipline of Muslim women’s dress do little to address these root causes and instead fuel the very dynamics of marginalisation and resentment that undermine social cohesion.

Moreover, as thinkers like Mahmood (2012) and Singh (2015) have shown, feminist and secularist critiques that fail to recognise religious agency as a valid form of selfhood replicate the same disciplinary logic they seek to critique. The assumption that liberation must look secular, Western, and oppositional to religion disregards the possibility of ethical agency embedded in pious practices. In this sense, the binary between emancipation and oppression, so central to French feminist arguments about veiling, fails to grasp the full complexity of Muslim women’s lived experiences and political subjectivities

The inability or unwillingness of mainstream French feminist organizations to fully engage with these dynamics has created a rift in feminist solidarity. As Lépinard (2020) documents, the exclusion of veiled women from feminist spaces and coalitions such as the CNDF and the failure to institutionalise anti-racist and intersectional reflexivity signal a profound epistemic and political limitation. Muslim women are asked to prove their feminism, to disavow their religiosity, and to conform to secular norms to be granted space in feminist discourse. This gatekeeping reinforces the notion that secularism is a moral threshold and that those who fail to meet its criteria are unfit for participation in civic or feminist life.

In light of these findings, this paper advocates for a fundamental shift in how France addresses the intersections of religion, gender, and national belonging. First, policies aimed at regulating Muslim women’s attire should be reconsidered not as tools of integration or emancipation, but as mechanisms that entrench social hierarchies and reproduce colonial forms of governance. Second, feminist movements must move beyond secular universalism and toward a post-secular intersectionality that accommodates diverse forms of ethical and political agency, including those rooted in religious life. This does not mean uncritical acceptance of all religious practices but requires engagement grounded in humility, context, and a refusal to reduce women’s autonomy to a singular model of liberation.

Finally, the state’s approach to radicalisation must be redirected away from symbolic politics and toward substantive strategies that address inequality, disenfranchisement, and structural racism. The veil, and by extension the Muslim woman, should no longer be the battleground upon which national anxieties about integration, security, and identity are played out. Instead, what is needed is a renewed commitment to pluralism, one that neither instrumentalises gender equality for exclusionary ends nor allows religion to become a stand-in for racialised fears of the “other.” As Gülalp (2023) argues, both liberal secularism and multicultural communitarianism fail to address the structural exclusions faced by women within religious minorities. This reinforces the need for a post-secular intersectional framework, one that centres lived agency and resists both universalist and identity-based gatekeeping.

By moving beyond these binaries, France can begin to reconcile its commitment to secular democracy with the lived realities of its diverse population. This does not require less religion in the public sphere, but rather a more just and plural engagement with it, one that listens to, rather than legislates over, the voices of those most affected. Ultimately, this analysis underscores that a post-secular intersectional framework is crucial for understanding and challenging the racialised and gendered exclusions embedded in contemporary applications of laïcité.

Building on earlier scholarship, this article positions intersectional post-secularity not as a wholly new paradigm but as part of an emerging body of work that situates religion, gender, and power across diverse contexts. The present article extends the ongoing discourse by situating intersectional post-secularity within the specific socio-legal terrain of French laïcité. Unlike the U.S. histories Smiet recovers or the Dutch Pentecostal controversies Knibbe analyses, laïcité’s distinctive architecture stems from colonial governance and a republican political culture that presents itself as universalist while disproportionately targeting Muslim women. By foregrounding these dynamics, the article shows how intersectional post-secularity must grapple not only with everyday negotiations of identity but also with the juridical and political structures that codify religious difference into law and policy. In this way, the French case adds depth to comparative debates by revealing how post-secular power operates through legal form as much as through discourse.

More broadly, this analysis underscores the importance of approaching intersectional post-secularity as a travelling framework that takes shape differently across contexts. By bringing the French case into the dialogue with these wider debates, this article both contributes to and advances intersectional post-secularity as a framework for critical analysis and transformative advocacy. Ultimately, the French case demonstrates that a post-secular intersectional framework is not only analytically powerful but normatively urgent for rethinking secularism, feminism, and minority rights in diverse democracies.