Across Europe there have been growing tensions surrounding the Muslim practice of wearing hijab, niqab and jilbab in schools. In France, heated debate on this issue resulted in the passing of the law banning all religious symbols in public institutions; in England, individual cases have been tried before human rights courts; and in Sweden schools now have the right to expel students who wear burqa or niqab to school. One of the questions that is raised by these responses is how these Muslim girls are being conceived in relation to a certain image of who the ‘subject’ of learning ought to be and what that ‘subject’ ought to look like. That is, insofar as these girls are continually being threatened with expulsion and suspension from schools on the basis of their religious dress, they are rendered as being antagonistic to an ‘ideal’ image of the subject of learning. The first part of this paper explores how such an ideal is constructed at the social imaginary level (Castoriadis 1987), using examples from the three countries mentioned above, and paying attention the specific ways in which national and civic identities are differentially mobilized in these imaginary formations. Yet, instead of merely reiterating the by now commonly-heard refrain that Muslim girls are 'excluded' or 'marginalized' or 'othered' , I examine how this imaginary serves to position Muslim girls on far more ambivalent terms, which move beyond the dichotomies of centre/margin, inclusion/exclusion. I argue that Muslim girls are positioned along the lines of what Kristeva (1982) has termed the ‘abject’. The second part of the paper deals with Kristeva’s rendering of the abject in relation to Muslim girls and the issues this raises for moving toward a more sensitive (and I suggest democratic) appreciation of our own implication in creating social divisiveness and tension. The abject is a complex notion that refers to that which is cast off from the bodily self and to which we have an ambivalent relation when we reencounter it outside of ourselves. In Kristeva’s work, when the abjected material is expelled (and here she refers to such elements as bodily fluids, feces and blood) it becomes both objectified as revulsion yet remains intimately tied to a primal sense of our own desire and fascination with our own bodies. The abject is, in other words, neither subject nor object, but occupies an ambivalent imaginary space where the borders between love/hate; desire/revulsion meet. Thus, I argue that it is not simply that Muslim girls are being barred from the public sphere through various exclusionary moves, but that they signify, through abjection, both desire and revulsion in very particular ways: at the social level they are both repelled as being ‘not us’ and desired in the possibility of becoming ‘like us’ simultaneously. Positioned neither as subjects nor objects of learning, they occupy a space of ambivalence that raises crucial questions for how societies cope with what they perceive as a threat to their own imaginary ideals and identities. The aim of my analysis is to move beyond the dichotomous language of exclusion/inclusion that permeates educational attention to minority groups, and which neither captures fully the predicament that Muslim girls find themselves in across many European nations nor pays close enough tension to how the national ‘we’ is itself implicated in creating social antagonism. Instead, I argue that analyzing the treatment of Muslim girls through the notion of abjection leads to a more complex engagement with social discrimination and promotion of equity in and through education.

In offering a philosophical approach informed by psychoanalysis, my inquiry draws on the work of Cornelius Castoriadis and Julia Kristeva. Through their notions of the imaginary and the abject, respectively, I offer a critical reading of how three different national responses to Muslim girls’ sartorial practices in schools construct a certain image of the ideal learner and express specific relations of desire and revulsion at the social level.

I conclude this paper with some thoughts on how schools not only act as socio-political sites governed by rules, regulations and laws, but also as imaginary sites governed by ambivalent social expressions of desire and revulsion. This means reading national educational responses to what Muslim girls wear to school in ways that grapple self-critically with the difficult and tenacious aspects of 'our' own ambivalence.