Gendernativism in the (Il)Liberal State: The Burqa Ban in Switzerland

On March 7, the Swiss electorate will vote on the so-called ‘burqa ban’. This popular initiative as well as the counterproposal stand for what we call gendernativism; the idea that the ‘native’ Swiss are genuinely gender-equal and that only Swiss women can voluntarily wear the veil. The consequence is not only the silencing and marginalizing of (migrant) Muslim women but their erasure as political subjects of the liberal state, as individual right holders.

“In enlightened European states like Switzerland, one of the central, inalienable basic values of living together is showing one’s face. […] Free people – women and men – look each other in the face when they talk to each other. No free human being covers their face.” (Egerkingen Committee)

The face veil, usually referred to as the burqa or the niqab, has been the subject of public attention, legislation and research in many areas of the world. The Swiss electorate is called on to vote on the ‘burqa ban’ on March 7. While Scholars brought up many well-funded arguments why ‘burqa bans’ are problematic, one aspect in this debate has not yet been fully considered. Our analysis of the arguments of the pro-ban committee and the report of the Federal Council shows that the discourse about the ‘burqa ban’ is best understood as gendernativist. By gendernativism, we understand a gendered and racialized form of xenophobia that constructs the ‘Other’ as the opposite of the free, gender-equal, ‘real’, ‘authentic’, ‘rooted’ citizen (Duyvendak 2012) and mobilizes the idea that ‘states should be inhabited exclusively by members of the native group (the nation) and that non-native elements (persons and ideas) are fundamentally threatening (Mudde 2007, 19). We do not deny that the face veil may entail oppression, just as we do not deny the existence of any form of gendered violence, in Switzerland and elsewhere. Instead, we point to problematic ways in which the issue is framed politically and discursively.

Nativist Cohesion and Mainstreaming of the Liberation Discourse

According to the pro-ban committee, the ‘Muslim migration wave’ has imported ‘a backward, archaic understanding of women’ into Europe. The face veil is framed as a problem of migration and depicted as fundamentally opposed to the assumably lived equality of men and women in Switzerland. Covering one’s face is interpreted as a form of submission that signals that Muslim women are unequal to both Muslim men and Swiss women and must be ‘saved’ (Spivak 1993) from their sexist and illiberal culture and/or Islam. In opposition, a superior European, liberal, occidental civilization and culture is claimed. This form of boundary work is based on a romanticized imaginary of Swiss gender equality according to which only native Swiss women possess the capacity to be free and gender-equal. This discourse draws upon the idea of a Swiss nation, historically free from immigration and composed – in nativist terms – of real, authentic, rooted, and equal citizens. This produces a bright boundary between the Muslim migrantized ‘Other’ and the native, cohesive Swiss ‘We’.

Such nativist and gendered boundary making is no longer exclusive to right-wing actors and nationalist parties. Rather, it has become prevalent across the political landscape and in everyday discourses, for instance in the report of the Federal Council. By adopting a counterproposal to the popular initiative as a ‘specific response to problems that may result from face coverings’, the Federal Council agrees with the committee that face veils pose a problem. A draft of a counterproposal even contained a specific provision that ‘anyone who forces someone to cover the face by force or threat of serious harm or by other restrictions on the freedom of action shall be punished’ even though any such act was already prohibited by the more general offense of coercion (art. 181 Swiss Criminal Code). This provision was dropped, and the Federal Council clearly opposes the popular initiative. Still, the counterproposal perpetuates gendernativism by reproducing the image of the oppressed woman – as well as the male perpetrator, respectively – as the standard assumption regarding Muslim women.

Negation of the Liberal Subject Status

According to the pro-ban committee, veiled women cannot be free and equal citizens, and thus, part of the Swiss nation, as citizens show their face in public (note that, apart from its bluntness, the argument seems quite out of place in times of COVID-19). By referring to veiling one’s face as only ‘allegedly’ voluntary, the committee bypasses the argument that the ban constitutes an infringement on individual rights because an involuntary act cannot be considered to be an exercise of an individual right.

The Federal Council does not adopt this argument. Yet, while its report considers the ban an infringement on personal rights and accepts that wearing a face veil can be voluntary, it does so along nativist lines. The only sentence referring to autonomy and voluntarism in the entire report explicitly refers to Swiss converts. It highlights the nativist boundary between the free Swiss convert who may indeed wear a veil voluntarily and the migrant Muslim woman who is incapable of such voluntarism. This nativist boundary drawing was reinforced by the public figure of Nora Illi, a controversial Swiss convert who died in March 2020. She regularly appeared on television in a face veil and stated that it gave her ‘a feeling of freedom’. In her case, the face veil was never interpreted as a symbol of oppression, and her claim that it allowed her to feel free was never questioned – instead, it was denounced as an act of provocation.

In other terms, fundamental freedoms of migrant Muslim women – to dress freely – are not merely restricted but not even conceded in the first place. Because these women are assumed to be oppressed and lacking in autonomy, they are excluded from the very subject status that is supposedly at the core of the liberal state. This leads to the discursive negation of the veiled migrant woman as a subject of liberal democracy with individual rights and liberties. Her veiling the face is never considered an expression of liberty, nor its banning an infringement on this liberty. As autonomy is a necessary condition for political subjecthood, denying autonomy to veiled migrant women violates a fundamental premise of liberal democracy (Galeotti 2015).

Towards Recognition of Political Subjecthood

We propose to reject the racialized, culturalized and migranticized lenses through which phenomena like the face veil are all too often examined (Dahinden 2016). This would demand a reflexive and more inclusive stance regarding the (European) model of liberal society (Shachar 2007; Gianni 2019), asking the following questions. To whom do supposedly liberal states like Switzerland concede full subject status, including the autonomy to make decisions that might not seem ‘normal’? Who is given a voice in interpreting topics, and how can anti-racist feminism – that takes the issue of equal political subjecthood seriously – be promoted? An important characteristic of such a revised intersectional and liberal perspective includes the recognition of migrant and Muslim women, as political subjects and equal citizens.

This blog is based on an upcoming article: Dahinden, Janine, and Manser-Egli, Stefan. forthcoming. “Gendernativism and the (Il)Liberal State: The Cases of Forced Marriage and the Burqa Ban in Switzerland”.

Janine Dahinden is a professor of Transnational Studies at the ‘Maison d’analyse des processus sociaux’ (MAPS) of the University of Neuchâtel and a Project Leader of the nccr – on the move. Stefan Manser-Egli is a doctoral researcher at the nccr – on the move and at the MAPS, University of Neuchâtel.

You can find an extended German translation of this blog contribution on the Gender Campus blog website. 

References:

– Dahinden, Janine (2016). A Plea for the ‘De-Migranticization’ of Research on Migration and Integration, Ethnic and Racial Studies 39(13),  2207–2225.
– Duyvendak, Jan Willem (2012). Holland as a Home. Racism and/or Nativism? Krisis (2).
– Galeotti, Anna Elisabetta (2015). Autonomy and Cultural Practices: The Risk of Double Standards. European Journal of Political Theory 14(3), 277–296.
– Gianni, Matteo (2019). Injonction à l’intégration et citoyenneté pour les musulmans en Suisse. Une relation paradoxale. In: L’islam (in)visible en ville, 83–103. Genève: Labor et Fides.
– Mudde, Cas (2007). Populist Radical Right Parties in Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
– Shachar, Ayelet (2007). Feminism and Multiculturalism: Mapping the Terrain. In: Multiculturalism and Political Theory, edited by Anthony Simon Laden and David Owen, 115–147. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
– Spivak, Gayatri (1993). Can the Subaltern Speak? In: Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, edited by Laura Chrisman and Patrick Williams, 66–111. New York and Sydney: Harvester Wheatsheaf.