This paper begins by considering Femme de la rue (2012), a documentary on sexual harassment in the streets of a neighborhood marked as Arab and considered to be a rough neighborhood in the dominant mental map of Brussels, Belgium. Femme de la rue provoked much public debate, which was haunted by the figure of the Arab/Muslim man and resulted in a new law against “sexism (in the public sphere)” that came into force in August 2014. This legal codification of sexism is striking in various respects, including the power-evasive and symmetrical manner in which the law casts sexism, the way in which gender is taken to be an individual characteristic, and the emphasis on intentions. The law, in other words, casts sexism as a problem of sexist individuals with bad intentions.
The significance of this law, I argue, can only be understood when keeping the connection between the documentary and the law in mind. Femme de la rue provided the privileged vantage point from which the question of sexism was considered and subsequently addressed; it provided the law with an imaginary, with a primary scene of sexism that consists of an encounter between individuals, with at least one bad-intentioned sexist individual in the public sphere. The documentary gave that individual a face – the face of an Arab/Muslim man. The significance of the law, moreover, cannot be understood without taking into account yet another striking feature: the law is generally considered – largely to entirely, depending on the interpretation – as redundant with respect to its actual legislative powers. It is indeed not uncommon for the law’s defendants to acknowledge that the law is rather redundant in both its content and reach, given the existing laws and regulations that cover sexual harassment, yet this acknowledgement is not taken as a reason to doubt the law’s raison-d’être. The rationality of the law, the defendants insist, is to a large extent symbolic, to “raise a fist against sexism”.
While the law might indeed be primarily symbolic, its symbolic function, I argue, lies elsewhere than where it is announced. It lies first and foremost in its “muscular liberalism” that proclaims a “no tolerance” approach to what it frames as the failure of brown men to respect women and women’s emancipation. This symbolism is disavowed, and only becomes visible when taking into account the documentary that facilitated the law. Along the way, moreover, it reinforces a neoliberal post-feminist ideological imaginary, through its emphasis on individuals and intentions, and its evacuation of structural power relations, thus eroding more accurate understandings of sexism that decades of feminist organizing and scholarship have given us.
This interaction between the documentary and the new law in Belgium illustrates what Schirin Amir-Moazami (2011) has called the “gendered governmentalization” of Islam in Europe. In the name of symbolically “raising a fist against sexism”, we are left with a liberal, power-evasive legal codification of sexism, that in a disavowed manner serves to construct Arab/Muslim men as “civilizational others”. This discussion is part of a larger research project that investigates how gender and sexuality operate within Europe’s “Muslim question”, and more precisely, how Europe’s “Muslim Question” brings to the fore a set of existing contradictions with respect to the gender and sexual regimes inscribed into liberal democratic political regimes of Western European nation states.
—By Sarah Bracke