In the introduction to Sex and Secularism, Joan Scott writes with her characteristic clarity, “The book's arguments can be briefly stated this way: first, the notion that equality between the sexes is inherent to the logic of secularism is false; second, this false historical assertion has been used to justify claims of white, Western, and Christian racial superiority in the present as well as the past; and third, it has functioned to distract attention from a persistent set of difficulties related to differences of sex, which Western and non-Western, Christian and non-Christian nations share” (3–4). The clarity of this plan conceals many things: Scott's standing in the history of history; the genealogy of radical feminism; and finally, her extraordinary discernment.
The opening chapters of Sex and Secularism are built on Joan Scott's historiographic strength. They give us an account of the emergence and transformations of secularism from the French Revolution to the twentieth century. Scott describes herself as summarizing a vast historical literature, making the case that gender inequality is at the “very heart” of the emergence of modern Western nations (4). What she does not say but might is the role she had in shaping that literature: Scott, along with Louise Tilly, Natalie Zemon Davis, and a brilliant cohort of theoretically informed feminist historians, transformed the historiography of the modern. In doing so, they put in question the egalitarianism of the liberal revolutions, the deceptive identification of religion and the feminine, and the claims of secularism to advance gender equality. As Scott herself notes, the opening chapters of the book return to this early work. Seeing it once again, I am struck by how revolutionary it remains. The false promises of gender equality ascribed to liberalism, secularism, and modernity were, as Scott writes, “simply not true” (15), but they were—and they remain—powerful. For those who have not seen the evidence marshalled, these chapters will be a revelation.
Scott is a brilliant cartographer of the invisible architecture of power. Late modern critical theory has depended upon seeing what Gayatri Spivak called “what one cannot not want” and Stuart Hall termed the “taken-for-granted.” Efficacy in scholarship and in politics depends on seeing the structures of dominion and subjection, the direction of ambition and desire. These structures are strongest where they are least visible. The enterprise of mapping these must be done in time as well as space. Scott maps the structures that bound religion and reason, masculine and feminine, tradition and modernity, progress and the primordial, in forms that confined men and women to certain roles and secured the persistence of hierarchies of sex and race. More importantly, she shows how these structures shifted in response to political contingencies, constant only in their justification “of white, Western, and Christian racial superiority.”
Scott has been a powerful critic of the use of feminism against Muslims and Islam. Her critiques of “the clash of civilization,” the blanket condemnation of veiling, and the construction of secularism as always and everywhere emancipatory, are set here in a broader historical, theoretical, and practical context. Her work shows how the secularism of the present political moment serves as a license for the public presence of Christianity. Throughout Europe, insistence on the display of the cross as a cultural symbol is increasingly common. Scott cites an Italian court case affirming this practice; she could have found other cases in Germany (19). The familiar French insistence that Christmas and Easter are “cultural” and that the presence of Christianity in public space, in the construction of the workweek, is simply “historical” and therefore (by what logic?) religiously neutral is forwarded by politicians and scholars acting in bad faith. Scott not only makes these visible, but—as she has done so effectively before—she shows how the discourse of secularism functions to conceal continuing discrimination against women in the West and to license present imperial forms.
Scott is one of our most eminent exemplars of the relation of history to theory. She may be the most important for our understanding of the politics of secularism. Scott deploys high theory and is attentive to subtleties of meaning, but she never loses sight of the material costs that particular meanings exact and the burdens they impose on particular bodies.
Scott was a champion of intersectionality avant la letttre and with greater specificity and sophistication than many of its more zealous proponents. Her early and transformative recognition and mapping of the strategic relation of racial and sexual hierarchies in the French Revolution (indeed, all the liberal revolutions) informs this book. Her clear-sighted and courageous attacks on discrimination against newly raced (re-raced, and deracinated) Muslims in the West animate her readings of contemporary politics. In articulating exactly how the discourse of secularism serves to justify “white, Western, and Christian racial superiority” and to conceal its commitments to racial, sexual, and civilizational hierarchies, Scott arms us for the present struggle against the weaponized discourse of secularism.
At the close of the book, Scott calls on us to recognize that “the meanings of gender and democratic politics” are “perpetually and irresistibly open to change” (183). Against those who have justified “inequalities as natural phenomenon”(183)—given, primordial, ineradicable—Scott argues for the possibility of more ethical, more egalitarian forms of politics. This is not “scholar activism”; this is the political force of scholarship. Scott quotes the late Saba Mahmoud on the question of critique. Critique of a normative regime does not, Mahmoud argued, entail condemnation; rather, critique of a regime or discourse “deprives it of innocence and neutrality, so as to craft, perhaps, a different future” (8). The discourse of secularism and sexuality is a thicket of shifting meanings, thorny problems of sexual difference, and the complex contingencies of politics at particular sites and moments. Scott's work shows us how to find our way through.
