The New School's Gender and Sexualities Studies Institute (GSSI) with the Philosophy Department at The New School For Social Research, invite you to join an upcoming conversation "Beyond Simone: Political phenomenology of the veil and its appearance in France". In this conversation with Romy Opperman, philosopher Hourya Benthouami will conceptualize the constitution of the veil and of Muslim women who wear it in Western countries, especially in France, as a “phobogenic” object, which arouses disgust at the sight of it. The discussion will explore the insistence of media and political institutions on regulating the order of appearance of veiled women. Hourya Bentouhami's thesis will be to show that laicization on the French model, in its most recent incarnation, is founded on a theory of appearances largely determined by a nationalist imaginary of the differences of the sexes, by the reactivation of sexual orientalism, and by rendering invisible the caring work to which Muslim women are often relegated.

Hourya Bentouhami is a french-moroccan associate professor of philosophy at Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès, and member of the Institut Universitaire de France. She is currently a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the philosophy department, University of Connecticut. Her work on political philosophy and phenomenology focuses on the material organization of the sensorial dynamics of racialization and gender assignment, the forms of economic dispossession, but also on the way of disobeying them to create new ways of seeing and feeling in a livable world.

Romy Opperman (she/her/hers) is a Mellon postdoctoral fellow in philosophy at the New School for Social Research. Her research centers Africana, Indigenous, decolonial feminist thinkers to foreground issues of racism and colonialism for environmental and climate ethics and justice. Romy’s work also contributes to continental philosophy and critical theory by examining how Africana and decolonial philosophy repurpose aspects of the former traditions for their own ends. She is currently at work on a book manuscript tentatively titled Groundings: Black Ecologies of Freedom. Romy received her PhD in philosophy from Penn State.

This discussion organized by Fania Noël (NSSR) is the inaugural event of the Gender Matters Symposium's 2022 edition.