Sex and Secularism: The Public Square

"Scott poses a direct and clear challenge to those who equate secularism with progress, and who conclude that feminist progress relies on secular history. Her book is disorienting, provocative, and lively, challenging her readers to come to know the historical legacies of secularism that inform the common concepts of feminist debate and which are rarely exposed to the light of day. The story she tells is at once sweeping and incisive, offering a substantially new account of equality and emancipation."--Judith Butler, University of California, Berkeley

"Joan Wallach Scott is a scholar who forces us to think harder, and to think differently, about questions of class, identity, and faith. In Sex and Secularism, she turns her attention to our assumptions about what it means to be modern, showing how entangled they are with attitudes about gender and sexuality. Writing on a topic that lends itself to intellectual complacency, she is a tonic: erudite, lucid, and original. No one who studies the question of secularism can afford to ignore her."--Adam Shatz, contributing editor, London Review of Books

"This wonderful book addresses both academic and activist worlds concerned with feminism, secularism, sexuality, and politics. With her historian's sensibility and signature analytic clarity, Scott offers a novel account of the vicissitudes of gender in Western secular thought and practice."--Wendy Brown, author of Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism's Stealth Revolution

"Sex and Secularism is a timely, rich, and highly informative book. Its concise and clear arguments are expertly woven around the differing discourses and myths of secularism in the West. Scott clearly demonstrates that not only has secularism not been feminist, it has been a main organizer of discriminatory practices against women."--Joseph A. Massad, author of Islam in Liberalism