Transfigurations of an intercultural bias
This piece grapples with the hypocrisy of the face veil bans for Muslim Women,which in France came into law in 2011, as well as Québéc‘s face covering ban, which came into law in 2017. Moreover it addresses the bone of contention in the narrativearound the niqab and the question of why the Covid 19 pandemic has changed the proxemics of public spaces and the grammar of “living together”.
Now that face masks are being used to help fight against the spread of Covid-19, it has caused some to look anew at general discriminations against Muslim women wearing niqabs. If everyone cannot go out, or enter any public spaces,without wearing a sanitary mask,why should Muslim women, who wear a niqab be discriminated against?
Will the change in boundary conditions produced by Covid-19 also induce these Governments to re-categorise the meaning of the niqab? The socio-semantic earthquake produced by Covid 19 compels us to rethink this and other issues orbiting around the translation of “facts” into legal language; furthermore, it highlights the instrumentality of many partisan and ethnocentric assumptions passed off as objectivity regarding those alleged “facts”.