Changing Societies & Personalities, 2019
Vol. 3, No. 3, pp. 273–275

http://dx.doi.org/10.15826/csp.2019.3.3.076

Received 15 September 2019 © 2019 Andrey S. Menshikov 
Published online 5 October 2019 asmenshikov@urfu.ru 

BOOK REVIEW

Joan Wallach Scott (2018). Sex and Secularism. 
Princeton University Press

Andrey S. Menshikov
Ural Federal University, Yekaterinburg, Russia

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The work on the text was supported by the grant of the Russian Science 
Foundation (No. 17-18-01194)

This book, written by a notable specialist in “gender and women’s history in 
France” (p. 15), makes its intent clear from the start. It is a polemical contribution 
to the ongoing debate on the “clash of civilizations”, and the role of Islam in 
the modern societies. Islam, however, is not at the focus of the analysis. The 
author consistently deconstructs a rhetorical equation between secularism 
and modern values such as freedom and equality by reconstructing the ways 
the discourse of secularism functioned at different historical stages. Today, the 
identification of secularism with the Enlightenment, with the triumph of reason 
over religion, with emancipation and gender equality produces discursively its 
own counterpart, which is oppressive, violent, and irrational Islam: “By definition, 
secularism is associated with reason, freedom, and women’s rights, Islam with 
a culture of oppression and terror” (p. 3). However, the historical genealogy 
of secularism traced by Joan Wallach Scott reveals that “gender inequality 
was fundamental to the articulation of the separation of church and state that 
inaugurated Western modernity […] Euro-Atlantic modernity entailed a new 
order of women’s subordination, assigning them to a feminized familial sphere 
meant to complement the rational masculine realms of politics and economics” 
(p. 3, italics in the original).

By disentangling the meanings of the secular, which refers to “things 
nonreligious”; secularization, which designates the process of replacing religious 
authority with rationality; and secularity, which captures the modern situation of 
nonreligious way of life, J. W. Scott makes clear that the discourse of secularism 
was hierarchical from the start, and was designed to order the relation between 
the European and its cultural others, the past and the future, masculine and 

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274 Andrey S. Menshikov

feminine. This hierarchical ordering eventually necessitated the emergence of religion 
as a singular phenomenon (lumping together everything non-secular) and the invention 
of “world religions”. In the late nineteenth century during the anticlerical campaigns for 
the separation of organized religion from the state and for the moral autonomy of the 
individuals against cultural hegemony of Christianity, the term secularism was coined 
in England by George Holyoake, a founder of the British Central Secular Society, in 
1851, while in France the word laïcité was first used in 1871. Thus, a set of following 
oppositions emerged: 

“Political” and “religious” in the nineteenth century meant the nation versus 
institutionalized religion (state versus church), but also the Christian nation 
versus the “uncivilized” and “primitive” tribes in Africa and the Ottoman lands. 

“Public” and “private” separated the market and politics, instrumental rationality 
and bureaucratic organization from home and family, spirituality, affective 
relationality, and sexual intimacy (p. 13). 

The separation of the public with its rationality and the market with its competition, 
on the one hand, from the private with its personal spirituality and the family with its 
emotional sustenance, on the other, was reflected in the gender division between 
male and female domains of society: “Gender difference was inscribed in a schematic 
description of the world as divided into separate spheres, public and private, male 
and female” (p. 31). It is necessary to highlight in this context that gender relations 
were not subordinate to politics. On the contrary, J. W. Scott emphasizes the “mutually 
constitutive nature of gender and politics” (p. 25). Indeterminacy of the denaturalized 
and secularized politics needed certainty that would be rooted in “immutability of 
gender” and “in human nature and biology rather than divine law” (p. 31), whereas 
gender inequality was interpreted through the optics of political interests (demographic 
reproduction and family morality), and social laws (complementarity of genders in the 
division of labor). Thus, gender inequality is inseparable from the development of 
nation-state and capitalism.

The last chapter of the book focuses on the implications of secularism 
in modern society. In particular, how the criticism of Islam from the perspective 
of secularism reveals the underpinning asymmetries in Western societies. 
Subordination of women in Islam is presented primarily through the practices of 
veiling, and consequently, the liberation is understood as “unveiling”. Human 
agency of Muslim women is limited in this discourse to sexual liberation, to the right 
to uncover their bodies, and thereby to “advertising their sexual availability, and so 
appealing to longstanding gender asymmetries” (p. 158). As J. W. Scott points out, 

“the focus on liberated sexuality (whether hetero- or homosexual) echoes with the 
notion of consumer desire as the motor of the market and serves to draw attention 
away from the economic and social disadvantages that result from discrimination 
and structured forms of inequality” (p. 159). The equation of freedom with ability 
to pursue sexual desire occludes the persistent inequalities (wage disparity, glass 
ceiling, domestic violence, etc.): 



Changing Societies & Personalities, 2019, Vol. 3, No. 3, pp. 273–275 275

Humans are the subjects and objects of desire, at once consumers and 
commodities, naturalized as such. The collapse of the distinction between public 
and private, the entry into the public arena of the formerly private feelings and 
practices of sex does not necessarily politicize sex […] the idea that sex itself is 
natural (and so presocial) is depoliticizing (p. 177). 

So, in their struggle against gender oppressive Islam the Western societies 
demonstrate that today we too often limit the individual freedom to consumer freedom, 
and the liberation to sexual liberation. Thus, echoing Foucault, J. W. Scott reminds us 
that in our historical deconstruction of emancipation it is not only the positive ideal that 
mattered but also “the point was a negative one: to be emancipated from sex, not to 
be defined by it” (p. 162).

Finally, it is worth keeping in mind that secular self is in no way more “natural” 
than any other, and it equally 

means a set of bodily practices to be learned, rehearsed and performed, ranging 
from ways of dressing (and undressing), talking and socializing with men to 
enacting in public. The habitations of the secular are not transmitted “naturally” 
and implicitly, but on the contrary become part of a project of modernity and 
politics of self that require [for those coming from outside] assimilation and 

“acculturation” to Western culture (p. 164).

Although the author planned to “revisit a large body of literature written by second 
wave feminists, as well as by historians of religion, race, and colonialism” and to 

“synthesize this work and offer new interpretations based upon it” (p. 3) rather than 
offer an analysis of new empirical material, the book will be useful to historians, as well 
as to political philosophers, and specialists in Religious Studies.

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