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one of the underlying issues surfaces here, then. it is---when you construct an image of islam for yourself, what do you appeal to?
what does the situation in taliban-controlled areas of afghanistan have to do with france?
it seems that the slide "taliban=islam" makes the arguments against the burkha seem more compelling, particularly if you're purporting to be acting in the name of defending women's rights...because what women's rights are violated if it's voluntary? you have to imagine coercion and the more explicit it is the better.
but i don't think that's the real issue in the french situation. i think it's much more about the front national's basically racist political viewpoints leaking into mainstream conservative politics.
but the debate skirts around that---and to an extent it has to----sarko could not be seen to endorse front national positions. so the secular nature of the republican public (in the sense of the french republic) and a variant of defending universal human rights (both central features of the french revolutionary tradition), which in turn enabled a knitting together of **one** feminist position on the politics of the veil in general (as it's called)---one in which the whole position rests on an assumption of coercion. which gets back to the initial question.
how are these images constructed?
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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