Mapping Quebecois sexual nationalism at times of "crisis of multicultural accommodation"

The language of gender equality and sexual emancipation has become increasingly pivotal to western citizenship and migrant integration debates, giving rise to a new brand of nationalism in which women's rights and gay and lesbian rights are construed as the core civilizational values of the West, while migrant communities, particularly Muslims, are cast as threatening them. Operating through a re-configured Orientalism and the rhetorics and politics of "clash of civilizations", this incorporation has serious national and international consequences and constitutes a new inflection of racism in an era boisterously asserted as committed to diversity though anti-multiculturalist and post-racial. Yet, such enrolment also needs to be read in its connections with neoliberalism, which links biopolitics to geopolitics (Grewal 2005) and has made an array of social movements, such as feminism and gay and lesbian movement, marketable. Expanding on this critical framework inspired by postcolonial feminist and queer antiracist writings, this paper uncovers the ways in which gender and sexuality have become a key mode through which technologies of governmentality have come into existence via doxic frames and assumptions pertaining to "secularism", "modernity", "sexual freedom", "human rights" and "feminism versus multiculturalism". The context of this inquiry is the recent Quebecois debate over " reasonable accommodations" which concerns the extent to which minority religious accommodation should be practiced.