'I would have given them a piece of my mind': Spatialized Feelings and Emotion Work Among Racialized Muslim Women in Quebec


Jessica Stallone, University of Toronto

On September 10, 2013, the Quebec provincial government, le Parti Quebecois, proposed legislation to prevent religious minorities from wearing ‘ostentatious’ religious symbols when working in government institutions. The proposed legislation, the Charter of Values, was part of an ongoing attempt to restrict religious practice in response to immigrant and religious diversity (Laxer 2019; Zine 2009). As in France (Bowen 2007; Laxer 2019), justification of the legislation emphasized laicité (state secularism) and gender equality. The gendered effects of secular politics have been researched in Western Europe (Bowen 2007; Kassir and Reitz 2016; Korteweg and Yurkadul 2014), including work on the effects of headscarf bans on women who wear it (Abdelgadir and Fouka 2020), paying attention to the ways women respond to discrimination and social exclusion (Kassir and Reitz 2016; Laxer et al. 2023). Others have noted the importance of the state in solidifying social boundaries between national majority and Muslim minority groups (Korteweg and Yurkadul 2014; Laxer et al. 2023). Feminist scholars highlight colonial tropes in the discourse of secularism (Parvez 2017; Scott 2017), pointing to assumptions that Muslim women must be saved from ‘backward’ Islam (Farris 2017). While some scholarship has recognized the significant emotional toll headscarf bans may have (Laxer et al. 2023), the emotion work that racialized Muslim women do to manage their feelings about their sense of self and belonging (i.e., their subjectivities) in a hostile context is underexplored. Therefore, I ask to what extent such policies impact Muslim women’s identities, feelings about themselves, and their sense of belonging in Canada. More specifically, I examine how university-educated Muslim women in Quebec feel about themselves, their Muslimness and the headscarf, when their belonging to the nation is politically questioned. I develop a concept I call ‘spatialized feelings’, referring to how feelings—relationally accomplished in intersectional hierarchies (race, class, gender)—are contingent on the spaces that social actors occupy. I show that feelings women have about their Muslim identity change as they interact with people in different spaces, such as the workplace, school, and Mosque. Importantly, the spaces they occupy mediate how they feel about national belonging. Data were collected in 2014, after the Quebec government proposed the Charter of Values, when respondents became viscerally aware that the state was questioning the belonging of Muslim Quebecers because of their religion. I attended Friday prayer services at a Montreal university for nine months to build rapport and recruit participants. Through snowball sampling techniques, I conducted in-depth interviews with 22 university-educated women who identified as Muslim. I conducted a focus group to validate preliminary data, leading to a total of 23 respondents for the study. I also attended two Halaqa sessions—a women’s-only group that discusses religious materials. The emotional effects of secular policies for headscarf-wearing Muslim women are arguably more pronounced nearly a decade later with the implementation of Bill 21, making this research implicated in contemporary Quebec politics. This presentation will describe the scholarship on headscarf bans to situate the Quebec context. Then, I will outline my concept of ‘spatialized feelings’. After explaining my methodology, I will examine the data to determine the ways emotions were spatialized by my participants. I will show that participants felt alienated in primarily white spaces where interactions with non-Muslims reinforced the notion of their ‘difference’. In spaces with other Muslims, they felt connected, but belonging was complicated by racial, ethnic, and gender hierarchies. Using a relational-spatial approach to emotion, I examine how they engaged in emotion work to navigate their social exclusion in Quebec, drawing on insights from gender scholars to denote the ways emotion work is racialized and gendered (Ipsa-Landa and Thomas 2019; Kang 2003; Wingfield 2010, 2021).

This paper will be presented at the following session: