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On 23 June 2019, seven Muslim women staged a protest at a swimming pool in Grenoble, France in defiance of rules prohibiting burkinis in swimming pools. French law 2010–1192 criminalizes the bodies of visibly Muslim women by prohibiting full-face coverings in French public space. This creates precarious bodies through law and facilitates an institutional Islamophobia, which I argue circulates in French society through a logic of hygiene. This logic of hygiene refers not merely to cleanliness but to the racial purity of the French republic. Law performs a dual cleansing role: it cleanses public space(s) of the presence of colonial markers and acts to displace colonial memory in France. This article traces the emergence of pro-ban feminist arguments supporting the criminalization of Islamic dress in France to a historical foundation of humiliation and cleanliness in post-WWII shavings of the hair of dissident French women. The article draws parallels with the forced uncovering of the hair of Muslim women in historical colonialism and in contemporary France to conceptualize hair as the patriarchal symbol of the French republic. Muslim women are made precarious through law's complicity with the hygiene and sterilization agendas of French coloniality and post-war capitalist modernization. The conclusion is that Muslim women are the site of the racial and gender differentiation necessary for the maintenance of the French republic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2016 burkini controversy and the criminalization of visibly Muslim women in France is a violent reminder of the precarity of colonial bodies in public space. These laws demonstrate the ongoing management of colonial bodies and communities which speaks over time from historical colonization to present, and future, neocolonial narratives. This article moves beyond the dominant logics of security and gender oppression in the Islamic dress debate which, it is argued, are invoked in a strategic manner to obfuscate the colonial condition and engender a normative, institutional Islamophobia in the public‐political imaginary. It critiques the instrumental use of law in creating political space for such agendas and analyses the whiteness of public space and institutions. The article insists that it is necessary to acknowledge the epistemic lens of the colonial condition in the Islamic dress debate and critically reflects on the alienation and reduced capacity for action of bodies wearing Islamic dress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]