Should the Burqa Be Banned?
How can so many American feminists have come out against a burqa ban in France (as they largely have this past month) when the burqa, along with other excessively modest religious garb, appears to be a classic tool of gender oppression? The answer is that singling out the burqa as the only article of clothing patriarchal enough to merit legal regulation — or even strident criticism — is racist. Critique of women’s clothing, from burqas to cleavage, is often leveraged for other purposes, whether they be religious, cultural or political, and should be called out when it’s faux feminism, as Aziza Ahmed argued on RH Reality Check. But it’s also true that almost every cultural or religious group sets standards of appearance that oppress women. Most fashion, from the corset of yore to the bikini to the FLDS prairie dress to the Nike sneaker (made by women in sweatshops, marketed to Western women), tends to hew in some way to patriarchal norms. So the quandary we grapple with, as feminists,
