Exceptional citizens: Secular Muslim women and the politics of difference in France

This article traces the emergence of secular Muslim women into the French public sphere. I focus on Fadela Amara, co-founder of Neither Whores Nor Doormats (Ni Putes Ni Soumises), an association protesting the denigration of women in the immigrant suburbs. I argue that Amara is politically efficacious for the French government, shifting focus from the structural causes of socio-economic problems in the suburbs to ‘Islamic fundamentalism’. In addition, I argue that figures like Amara are effects of the dual universalising and particularising imperatives of republican citizenship and, moreover, that such figures help to defer the contradiction between those imperatives.