Sexual Emancipation

Abstract

This chapter explores the complex uses of feminism and appeals to “sexual democracy” in the new discourse of secularism. The story is anything but straightforward and involves the insistence on sex as a public matter, and on women's sexuality (and by extension, nonnormative sexualities) as a right of individual self-determination. The emphasis on individualism is a part of neoliberalism's “rationality;” it is not the same as its nineteenth-century antecedent. At the same time, the difference of sex and its heteronormative claims has not disappeared, confusing woman's status as a desiring subject with her status as an object of (male) desire. The contemporary discourse of secularism, with its insistence on the importance of “uncovered” women's bodies equates public visibility with emancipation, as if that visibility were the only way to confirm women as sexually autonomous beings (exercising the same rights in this domain as men). The contrast with “covered” Muslim women not only perpetuates the confusion between Western women as subjects and objects of desire, it also distracts attention from (or flatly ignores) persisting racialized gender inequalities in markets, politics, jobs, and law within each side.