Improper Intimacies and the Cunning
of Secular Power
with Mayanthi L. Fernando,
University of California, Santa Cruz
Tuesday, Oct. 22, 2013
2:00-4:00pm
Salomon 203
How does the public/private distinction so central to secular-liberal democracy map onto the secular
state’s regulation of sex and religion? Focusing on contemporary France, this talk analyzes how
political and legal practices aimed at securing secularity by rendering both sex and religion private
paradoxically compel Muslim women to reveal in public the innermost details of their sexual and
religious lives. That dual incitement to hide and to exhibit, and the grim consequences of exhibiting
that which must be hidden, constitute what might be called the cunning of secular power.
Mayanthi L. Fernando is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa
Cruz. She is primarily interested in the intersection of religion, politics, sexuality, and secularity. Her
first book, The Republic Unsettled: Islam, Secularism, and the Future of France will be out in 2014 with
Duke University Press. She has recently begun a second project that examines the nexus of sex,
religion, and secularism, and in particular the French state’s regulation of Muslim women’s sexual
and religious intimacies.
Sponsored by the Religion and Internationalism Project, the Department of Religious Studies and the Cogut Center for the Humanities.