Since the turn of the century emotional public debates over Muslim women’s head and body covering have taken place across Europe. Compared to the heated debates only few restrictive policy-decisions dealing explicitly with Muslim body covering have been taken, as for instance in France, Turkey and some German Länder. Other countries established accommodating regulations, while others are characterized by non-regulation. In most of these debates from very different political and ideological backgrounds mobilized intersecting frames of gender equality to argue for or against the toleration of Muslim women’s body covering. The paper argues that this “intersectionality from above” feeds on one hand into political strategies which can be labeled according to Sara Farris as “femonationalism” – a strategy which constructs a gender equal “We” and a patriarchal “Other” in order to put forward a neoliberal bio-political anti-immigration agenda. On the other hand these intersectional strategies run the danger to victimize women. The paper will show by which frames and through which argumentative patterns these intersections are forged. The paper draws on the empirical results of a frame analysis of policy documents of eight European countries conducted in the VEIL-project.
