Iris Young and the Face Veil on France

The late American feminist Iris Young was a leading feminist philosopher of inclusive democracy. But what would she have said about French bans on Islamic dress, the subject of considerable debate and the focus of anti-immigrant harassment and even violence in the EU? The attention she paid throughout her work to inclusion, democratic participation, and difference suggest that she would be strongly opposed to such bans as marginalizing, culturally imperialist, and violent, and that she would have argued for respect for radical difference, including the face veil. But her democratic theory and her feminist phenomenology should logically compel her to support the ban on the face veil. The importance of the face in establishing personhood, the ability to communicate the empathy and other emotions that Young and other feminists maintain that are so important to interpersonal communication, and indeed the importance of “face to face” democracy, all raise profound political and phenomenological questions for Young’s version of feminism and democratic theory that would require a subtle differentiation between the face veil and other forms of Islamic covering. I draw in part on research on face transplants and facial disfigurement to develop an argument about the central importance of faces in establishing our identities as democratic citizens. Operating out of disability studies, this literature leads to a different way to assess Young’s feminism, highlighting some of its inconsistencies and the tensions she never recognized between her democratic theory and her feminist theory.