{"id":17592,"date":"2018-01-30T09:01:12","date_gmt":"2018-01-30T14:01:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/?p=17592"},"modified":"2024-07-03T19:51:41","modified_gmt":"2024-07-03T23:51:41","slug":"susan-whitney-reviews-sex-secularism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/2018\/susan-whitney-reviews-sex-secularism\/","title":{"rendered":"Susan Whitney Reviews “Sex and Secularism” in the Literary Review of Canada"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Prof. Susan Whitney<\/a> is an associate professor of history at Carleton University, where she served as an associate dean of the faculty of arts and social sciences for five years. She teaches European, youth, and women\u2019s and gender history, and is the author of Mobilizing Youth: Communists and Catholics in Interwar France (Duke University Press).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Below is an excerpt of her review of Sex and Secularism<\/em> by Joan Wallach Scott for the Literary Review of Canada entitled “Is secularism really better for women? Sex, niqabs, and the secular state<\/a>“:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In October 2017, Quebec\u2019s National Assembly passed legislation prohibiting women from receiving public services while wearing a niqab, which covers the wearer\u2019s face. Muslim women were among those who objected. Saima Sajid said to Globe and Mail reporter Ingrid Peritz, \u201cIf you choose to wear a bikini, why can\u2019t I cover myself?\u201d These contrasting approaches to women\u2019s bodies and sexuality lie at the heart of gender historian Joan Wallach Scott\u2019s probing and intentionally provocative new book, Sex and Secularism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sex and Secularism is the tenth title to appear in Princeton University Press\u2019s Public Square series, which aims to \u201cshowcase some of the world\u2019s finest public intellectuals writing on topics at the forefront of political discourse.\u201d Other series authors, especially Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore and University of Chicago philosopher Martha Nussbaum, will likely be better known to LRC readers. But the internationally renowned Scott has arguably had more influence within the academy. Yale\u2019s Joanne Meyerowitz called Scott\u2019s pioneering 1986 article \u201cGender: a useful category of historical analysis\u201d a \u201cfoundational text\u201d of women\u2019s and gender history. \u201cGender\u201d continues to appear on syllabi across North America, and to be used and cited by scholars across the globe. Scott\u2019s five subsequent single-authored books have been translated into eleven languages and she has received honourary degrees from universities around the world, including Harvard, Princeton, Brown, Concordia, Universit\u00e9 du Qu\u00e9bec \u00e0 Montr\u00e9al, and the University of Bergen in Norway. France made Scott a chevalier of the L\u00e9gion d\u2019Honneur in 2017.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The seeds of Sex and Secularism were planted in The Politics of the Veil (2007), Scott\u2019s first Public Square book. Turning her critical feminist historical eye to the heated debates around the headscarf then raging in France, home to western Europe\u2019s largest Muslim population, Scott asked how it was that one article of Muslim women\u2019s clothing\u2014the veil, as the headscarf became known in France\u2014could be endowed with such symbolic significance in French political life. How could a 2004 ban on the wearing of \u201cconspicuous signs\u201d of religious affiliation in public schools, a term that included large crosses and skullcaps but targeted headscarves, become such an important plank in the French response to the political uncertainties and violence of the post-9\/11 world?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Prof. Susan Whitney is an associate professor of history at Carleton University, where she served as an associate dean of the faculty of arts and social sciences for five years. She teaches European, youth, and women\u2019s and gender history, and is the author of Mobilizing Youth: Communists and Catholics in Interwar France (Duke University Press). […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":17622,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[43,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17592","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-history","category-news"],"acf":{"cu_post_thumbnail":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17592","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17592"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17592\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17623,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17592\/revisions\/17623"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17622"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17592"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17592"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17592"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}