New article by Saaz Taher on Les paroles des femmes musulmanes et les dénonciations du racisme sont-elles audibles? Analyse discursive des auditions publiques sur le projet de Loi sur la laïcité de l’État au Québec, published in Politique et Sociétés.

Abstract

On the announcement of the tabling of Bill 21 or the Act respecting the laicity of the State in Quebec, various actors publicly assert their position on the racist nature or not of this project. By focusing on the public hearings held as part of the work of the Committee on Institutions on the Act respecting the laicity of the State, this article aims to understand how the discourses denying the racist nature of this Bill are maintained throughout the hearings, while other discourses denounce it as a manifestation of systemic racism. By combining works on postracialism, those on epistemic injustice and ignorance and the speech act theory, I offer a historical discursive analysis of the public hearings, to better understand the epistemic repercussions of the discourses of racism denial and their reproduction within these hearings. This analysis reveals that these discourses manage to remain in the Quebec public space through the epistemic injustices they produce and through specific linguistic mechanisms, which I call “illocutionary deviations.” These discourses of racism denial thus ignore the definitions and experiences of racism put forward by minority groups (hermeneutic injustices), as well as the voices of these groups and more particularly those of Muslim women (testimonial injustices).