Reframing Citizenship at the intersection of gender, religion and ethnicity. Headscarf debates in Europe

Fierce and emotional public debates over Muslim women’s head and body covering have taken place across Europe since the turn of the century. Policymakers in some countries decided on restrictive headscarf regulations, such as France, Turkey and some German Länder. Other countries established accommodating regulations, while others are characterized by non-regulation. This paper argues that in headscarf debates and policies – be it the more restrictive or the more tolerant –new concepts of citizenship, of political, social and cultural rights are negotiated at the intersection of gender, religion and ethnicity. Particularly, new requirements and preconditions for citizenship rights are discursively constructed in policy-debates about Muslim body-covering and put in place in the context of a neoliberal state transformation. The paper will show by which frames and through which argumentative patterns boundaries of belonging are constructed and reconfigured, boundaries between the „We“ and the „Other“ in the context of new bio-political strategies. The paper draws on the empirical results of a frame analysis of policy documents of eight European countries conducted in the VEIL-project.