By “taking the veil,” the French state took its most strident step toward stripping its Muslims from a place in the nation. More specifically, it ushered in a new order of gendered Islamophobia bent on policing Muslim women's bodies—women who were stereotyped as “powerless” beings oppressed by the “violent” Muslim males in their families. While Islamophobia imagined Muslim men as “terrorists,” its feminine dimensions cast Muslim women as imminent victims of that tyranny who desperately needed to be “saved” by the French state and its law.

XREF: Connects to feminist critiques of state paternalism and postcolonial scholarship on gendered orientalism (e.g., Spivak's 'white men saving brown women').

Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamopho…, loc. 702