(Un)Fair Play? Secularism as a Mode of Racialised Governance in French Sports

This article examines how laïcité (secularism) discourse regarding the need for neutrality in sport acts as an enabler of racialised governance in contemporary France. I first provide a brief contextual discussion of Republican political culture as a ‘perpetual civilising mission’, which is founded on an abstract universalist framing of the concepts of equality and liberty. The article subsequently discusses how the mobilisation of what I call a ‘civilising secularism’ in contemporary France has shifted from a primary fixation on schools, universities and the workplace to sports and sporting practices, thus illustrating how its ‘civilising’ work is never done. However, in the face of sustained efforts to mobilise laïcité as a civilising concept, I also demonstrate how Muslim women are resisting secularist calls for ‘neutrality’ through collective action against their exclusion, notably via campaign groups such as Les Hijabeuses and Basket Pour Toutes. Furthermore, I argue that their resistance needs to be understood not only empirically but also conceptually. My analysis of these two collective campaigns therefore illustrates how they are actively contributing to a re-evaluation of Republican conceptions of equality and liberty. I draw on the work of Étienne Balibar regarding ‘equaliberty’ in order to analyse the campaigns of Les Hijabeuses and Basket Pour Toutes before proposing an extension to his concept that more fully reflects their activism. I propose the concept of ‘sororal equaliberty’ to capture this contribution.