It is commonplace in contemporary political discourses to posit secularism as the guarantor of gender equality. In Sex and Secularism Joan Wallach Scott provocatively challenges this association. Scott argues that the claim that secularism ensures women’s emancipation is historically false. Moreover, this claim has functioned to conceal the centrality of sexual difference to the foundation of modern secular regimes, as well as to justify “white,Western, and Christian racial and religious superiority” (3). Sex and Secularism builds on Scott’s earlier book The Politics of the Veil (2007), which examined the headscarf controversies in France through the lenses of secularism, racism, individualism, and sexuality. This time around, Scott foregrounds her inquiry into secularism by tracing the shifts in its gendered meanings from nineteenth-century anticlericalism, Protestantism, and the colonial “civilizingmission” to themore recent history of the Cold War and anti-Muslim campaigns. She also broadens her geographic scope by including cases from avariety ofWestern andMiddle Eastern contexts. The starting point and principal focus of the book, however, is the Muslim question in western Europe. Early in the book Scott clarifies that she approaches secularism not as a political and social reality or “a fixed study of analysis” but as a discourse whose operation and “generative effects need to be examined critically in their historical contexts” (4). She convincingly shows how this discourse, in all its variations across time and place, has relied on different articulations of gender, defined as “attribution of meaning to the difference of sex” (24). The first chapter narrates the association of women with religion as a pretext for denying them political rights in early nineteenth-century Euro-Atlantic modernity. The second chapter shows how scientific discourses in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries emphasized women’s reproductive capacity to “answer the uncertainty of life without God” (73) while maintaining gender asymmetry at home and in politics. The third

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性与世俗主义

在当代政治话语中，将世俗主义视为性别平等的保障是司空见惯的。在《性与世俗主义》中，琼·瓦拉赫·斯科特 (Joan Wallach Scott) 挑衅地挑战了这种关联。斯科特认为，世俗主义确保妇女解放的说法在历史上是错误的。此外，这种说法的作用是掩盖性别差异对现代世俗政权基础的核心作用，并为“白人、西方和基督教种族和宗教优越性”辩护（3）。性与世俗主义建立在斯科特早期的著作《面纱的政治》（The Politics of the Veil，2007 年）的基础上，该书通过世俗主义、种族主义、个人主义和性的视角审视了法国的头巾争议。这阵子，斯科特通过追溯世俗主义的性别意义从 19 世纪的反教权主义、新教和殖民“文明使命”到冷战和反穆斯林运动的近期历史的转变，突出了她对世俗主义的研究。她还通过包括来自各种西方和中东背景的案例来扩大她的地理范围。然而，本书的出发点和主要焦点是西欧的穆斯林问题。在这本书的开头，斯科特澄清说，她不是将世俗主义视为一种政治和社会现实或“固定的分析研究”，而是将其视为一种话语，其运作和“生成效果需要在其历史背景下进行批判性审查”（4）。她令人信服地展示了这种话语如何随着时间和地点的所有变化，依赖于不同的性别表达，定义为“将意义归因于性别差异”（24）。第一章叙述了在 19 世纪早期的欧洲-大西洋现代性中，妇女与宗教的联系作为剥夺她们政治权利的借口。第二章展示了 19 世纪和 20 世纪早期的科学话语如何强调女性的生育能力，以“回答没有上帝的生活的不确定性”（73），同时在家庭和政治中保持性别不对称。第三 第二章展示了 19 世纪和 20 世纪早期的科学话语如何强调女性的生育能力，以“回答没有上帝的生活的不确定性”（73），同时在家庭和政治中保持性别不对称。第三 第二章展示了 19 世纪和 20 世纪早期的科学话语如何强调女性的生育能力，以“回答没有上帝的生活的不确定性”（73），同时在家庭和政治中保持性别不对称。第三