Introduction

This chapter analyses two Danish debates about Muslim women's head and body covering. One of these debates focuses on a 2007 prohibition of fully-veiled women from working in the Danish public sector; the other involves a 2009 proposal to outlaw full veiling (burqas and niqabs) in Denmark. These debates function as a window to a broader understanding of how categories of race and ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion and nationality are constructed. The chapter shows that these debates have played important roles in excluding Muslims from the Danish community, and that within them, gender, gender equality and sexual liberty became hostages in nationalist constructs of the Danish nation as white.

Materials and methods

Over the past decade, Muslim women's head and body covering has been an integral part of Danish debates about migrants and integration. Most debates have been about the ‘hijab’, the headscarf that covers the hair and shoulders and represents the most prevalent type of headwear among Danish Muslims. Recently the debate has changed from a focus on hijabs to an emphasis on niqabs and burqas, which are the veils that fully cover a woman's face and body (Siim & Andreassen 2010). Most Nordic research on veiling has concentrated on the hijab.

This chapter expands on previous research and sheds light on recent debates about full facial veiling. The sources for the analyses are mainly media representations of debates (on television, in newspapers and on websites), especially politicians’ utterances in these debates. Based on the theoretical foundation of social constructivism (Foucault 1990: 93 ff; Butler 1999: 43 f.) and intersectionality (Crenshaw 1991), the methodological approach is a combination of discourse analysis (Laclau & Mouffe 1985) and frame analysis (Verloo & Lombardo 2007). Media reports on these debates function as a window to a broader understanding of how categories of race and ethnicity, gender, sexuality and nationality are constructed and contested. The study analyses how these constructions play into minorities’ inclusions or exclusions in the national community. As the chapter will demonstrate, the two cases studied imply a demand that women be physically accessible in order to receive citizenship rights and to be included in the national community. It argues that debates about veiling are not simply about ‘white men wanting to save brown women from brown men’, as Spivak (1993) put it, even though that is at play