Monitoring intimacy: gender and sexual norms in France's prevention of radicalisation

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This article examines the entanglement of gender, sexuality, and national identity in the French counter-radicalisation framework. Drawing on a qualitative study conducted between 2016 and 2019, including 78 interviews with prefectural officials and social workers, it analyses how state-led prevention operates through the regulation of gendered behaviours and personal relationships. Since 2015, the fight against radicalisation has increasingly been framed not as a matter of political violence but as a moral and civilisational issue requiring the reform of cultural norms, especially those relating to gender and sexuality. Gender equality, secularism, and republican values are mobilised to justify targeted interventions in working-class, postcolonial neighbourhoods, where women are portrayed as needing protection and men's attitudes toward women become central indicators in radicalisation assessments. By foregrounding everyday gestures and intimate behaviours as “low-level indicators,” the preventive apparatus shifts from identifying ideological positions to scrutinising private life, reinforcing racialised readings of ordinary practices.