The campaign for bodily autonomy and belonging in Grenoble, France: resisting epistemic violence, media discourse and othering

ABSTRACT

Shared public spaces can be sites of struggle where cultural practices are positioned as ‘other’ in starkly different ways ranging from being celebrated to being stigmatised. This article presents a longitudinal case study of a campaign by a citizens' group (Alliance Citoyenne Grenoble) for changes to swimwear regulations within municipal pools in Grenoble, France. Ethnographic data reveals that the campaigners experienced forms of othering and epistemic violence through media and political discourse and lived experiences which directly impacted their sense of belonging. The study analyses those discourses and the strategies adopted by the group to resist forms of marginalisation.

Les espaces publics partagés peuvent être des lieux de lutte où les pratiques culturelles sont positionnées comme « autres » de plusieurs façons différentes, allant de la célébration à la stigmatisation. Cet article présente une étude de cas longitudinale d’une campagne menée par un groupe de citoyens (Alliance Citoyenne Grenoble) pour changer les règles concernant les maillots de bain dans les piscines municipales de Grenoble, France. Les données ethnographiques indiquent que les membres de la campagne ont connu des formes d'altérisation et de violence épistémique à travers le discours médiatique et politique et ont vécu des expériences qui ont directement influencé leur sentiment d’appartenance. L’étude analyse ces discours et les stratégies adoptées par le groupe pour résister aux formes de marginalisation.

KEYWORDS:

• Epistemic violence
• intercultural studies
• media discourse
• belonging
• swimming

This article introduces a longitudinal case study highlighting two significant points. Firstly, it illustrates how the discursive and physical contestation of a shared urban space combined with hypersensitivity to minor differences serves as a mechanism for othering a marginalised group. This raises legitimate questions about the silencing of other ways of being in shared space through epistemic violence. Secondly, it underscores the ongoing necessity for those working in the intercultural field to be sensitive to the framing of social tensions as reductive binaries, which further exacerbates division. This necessity has largely been met by the field's shift away from an essentialist structural-functionalist paradigm which conflates country with culture, towards an approach which acknowledges shared cultural threads (Amadasi & Holliday, 2017) and promotes an open, ethical and reflexive philosophy (Holmes & MacDonald, 2020). Similarly, the field acknowledges the imperative to avoid a ‘totalising universality of Eurocentric epistemology’ (Yohannes et al., 2024, p. 501), while recognising that ‘the intercultural is always ideological and political’ (Dervin & Simpson, 2021, p. 108). Yet, there persists the question of how to use these nuanced and dialogic approaches from the field to enhance the quality of discourse in everyday interactions in shared spaces, particularly in a world marked by polarisation, social tension and multiple forms of violence.

Introducing the case

The Alliance Citoyenne of Grenoble (henceforth ACG), a citizens' group advocating for a more just and democratic society through non-violent action, launched a campaign lasting over three years in June 2019 which challenged the public swimming pool regulations in Grenoble, France, by advocating for free swimwear choice for all women and men provided that the swimwear was made from suitable swimsuit material. This included, but was not limited to, full-body swimsuits which cover more of the users’ bodies than allowed by the regulations of the pools. While these are frequently referred to as the ‘burkini’, where possible we use the term ‘covering’ swimsuits to describe this type of swimwear following the preference of our participants. Similarly, we follow the United Nations Population Fund's (UNFPA, 2021) definition of bodily autonomy as ‘the power and agency of individuals to make choices about their bodies without fear, violence or coercion’ while acknowledging that the concept can be mobilised in contradictory ways across complex contextual differences (see, for example, Chakravarty et al., 2020).

The campaign was conducted in an environment of wider political antagonism in France which suggests that what appeared to be the source of tension (centimetres of fabric) was not the entire cause of conflict but was part of wider manifestations of civil discord throughout France. Recent protests in France have been attributed to various causes ranging from perceived police brutality as seen in the 2017 Paris protests (and more recently in 2023 in reaction to the killing of Nahel Merzouk) to dissatisfaction with economic disparity as seen in the Yellow Vests Movement from 2018. Almeida (2018) draws connections between these events, suggesting they represent France's failure to articulate a positive postcolonial identity. The French context serves as a reminder that alternative forms of knowledge and ways of being are not only limited to places typically represented as peripheral, but that marginalised identities are prevalent across multiple spaces. While Shavit and Wiesenbach (2012) establish 2009 as the first refusal of entry into a municipal pool due to a swimmer wearing a covering swimsuit, rising discontent spread to debates over expressions of identity including swimwear most intensely in 2016. During this period, exacerbated by a terrorist incident in Nice, 31 municipalities imposed bans on the ‘burkini’ on beaches. This issue appeared to have been largely resolved when French courts overturned the bans; however, the debate subsequently shifted from the beach to municipal pools, particularly in Grenoble.

The campaign included ‘pool actions’ where women (and men) entered pools in Grenoble, some in covering swimwear (in violation of the pool policy) and splashed and sang songs denouncing the discriminatory swimwear policies and wider societal discrimination which they had experienced. The ‘pool actions’ generated significant media attention which was largely reported as ‘the burkini debate/ban’. Following on from these pool actions, the alliance strategically widened their campaign by engaging with other groups and by raising a petition to change the rules at the municipal level. ACG's efforts eventually motivated Grenoble City Council to consider changing the rules for swimwear. On May 16, 2022, the City Council voted in favour of changes to the rules which would allow both for ‘covering’ swimwear as well as for topless bathing. However, this change soon faced resistance from, among others, far-right political party members who under the ‘vivre ensemble’ (‘living together’) principle, a fundamental secular value, were vocal critics of the new rules. Consequently, the case was passed to the highest court in France (the Council of State) to review the changes brought about by Grenoble City Council. On June 14, 2022, the court voted in favour of allowing full-body swimwear, but rejected the skirt typically worn around the waist arguing that it represented ‘religious clothing’ and is a symbol that violates secularism.

We situate ACG's campaign in a wider space of power relationships and intersecting discourses and highlight the effect of these on the campaigners by presenting data from research participants, digital ethnography and participant observation to explore the forms of discrimination the campaigners faced. We also investigate how the campaigners strategically challenged media representations of Muslim women and their campaign for inclusive swimming spaces. Through a reductionist framing by large sections of the media, individuals were rarely seen for who they were, but were instead positioned either as a helpless homogenous group subject to patriarchal Islamic guidelines or as agitators determined to force their desires onto others. Epistemic violence is evident in the discrimination that the campaigners faced through misrepresentation of the campaign, its portrayal through the linguistic trope of the ‘burkini’, and through the refusal to allow for different ways of being within a municipal pool.

Swimming and accessibility: comfort and discomfort

At the heart of this study is a group's desire to use a publicly accessible swimming pool and to feel a legitimate sense of belonging in this space. This desire is understandable as publicly accessible swimming pools provide significant social connections and meaning for their users (Collins, 2021) through what Klinenberg (2018) sees as crucial ‘social infrastructure’ which should be considered a public asset and not a luxury. Yet, these social spaces can also be sites of contestation, discomfort, and cognitive dissonance with unequal access for users and organisational challenges for pool management (Collins & Pajak, 2019). Feminist geography has shown that barriers, such as the ones faced by the alliance, are not an uncommon phenomenon but are symptomatic of the tensions of human coexistence with the often-hidden power dynamics which are written into everyday social spaces such as swimming pools. Moreover, these social spaces are used to regulate women's lives (see, for example, Green & Singleton, 2007) as highlighted in Gökarksel's (2021, p. 7) observation:

The spaces and encounters of everyday life and work are structured to make those in power feel comfortable and the marginalized uncomfortable, all the while hiding the violence of this uneven distribution of discomfort.

This dynamic clearly resonates with ACG's campaign which shares similarities with other recent European cases where accessibility to sports, and in particular swimming, has been an issue and, for some swimmers, discomfort has been the norm (see Heirwegh & Van de Graaf, 2018; Lenneis & Agergaard, 2018; Lenneis et al., 2022; Michalowski & Behrendt, 2020; Miles & Benn, 2016; Ratna & Samie, 2018; Toffoletti & Palmer, 2017; Van de Graaf, 2021; Walseth, 2016). These recent examples also have parallels with Wiltse’s (2007) historical account of denied accessibility and violence waged against African Americans attempting to swim in municipal pools prior to and throughout the civil rights era in the USA. Emerging from much of this research are human narratives of attempts to carve out a space of belonging in the face of violence and access denied on the account of intersecting categories of race, religion, gender, class and through unevenly applied swimming regulations.

Sitting squarely within this environment are campaigns by women for greater accommodation in pool spaces through women-only sessions and/or a loosening of the restrictions around covering swimwear. Regarding the latter, various strategies have emerged, but each share the aim of interrogating naturalised hegemonic assumptions about Muslim women and their needs. This is evident in a growing body of literature which challenges hegemonic meanings and the positioning of the burkini within ‘controversial dichotomies of religion vs secularity, tradition vs modernity, and oppression vs emancipation’ (El Shazly & El Falaki, 2021, p. 190). Almeida (2018) critiques the representation of the burkini as a form of politicised religiosity while Soltani (2021) examines social media celebration of diverse hijab practices in mixed-gender aquatic spaces where participants interrogate homogenous representations of both Muslim women and the hijab. Evolvi (2019, p. 476) highlights French women's efforts to reposition the materiality of the burkini as ‘an object that does not necessarily symbolise patriarchal Islam’ arguing that ‘Muslim women alone are entitled to define meanings of the burkini.’

In contrast to these attempts to redefine the understanding of the burkini and hijab practices, ACG's strategy, as noted above, distanced its campaign from the term ‘burkini’ in part because they considered its use as part of a prevalent discourse which portrays the campaigners as a homogenous group fighting for a type of swimwear that, despite efforts to reclaim its meaning, is framed as a symbol of militant Islam. This reflects a nativist discourse in Europe that Sweeney (2011, p. 257) likens to bio-political governmentality which has a significant spatial element whereby public space is reterritorialized into national space. These dividing practices are why the campaigners believe the term burkini is beyond strategic reappropriation. Yet, despite their efforts to avoid this term, it remains prevalent in media representations and political discourse.

Interpreting the relevance of epistemic violence to the Grenoble campaign

The notion of epistemic violence offers analytical leverage for understanding the case as a phenomenon located within ‘spatialized, embodied and materialist approaches’ (Brunner, 2021, p. 201) and which is manifested in daily human struggle with asymmetrical power relations. There are striking parallels in the campaign with early theories of epistemic violence. Spivak's (1994) frequently cited critique of the gender dynamic in the relationship between the coloniser and colonised as ‘white men […] saving brown women from brown men’ has resonance with a particular strand of discourse which represented the group as repressed by their own community and in need of the protection of the nation-state through its liberal and liberated bodily practices. While various understandings and definitions of epistemic violence exist, our strongest connection is with the definition from Garbe as given by the Centre for Peace Research and Peace Education (n.d.), which characterises it as ‘a forced delegitimation, sanctioning, and repression […] of certain possibilities of knowing, going hand in hand with an attempted enforcement […] of other possibilities of knowing.’ We relate this specifically to human connections with nature and to multiple ways of interacting with water and with each other in aquatic spaces.

Pinto's (2017, p. 182) emphasis on the corporeal dimension of epistemic violence is similarly salient in this case with its three phases of invisibility: ‘(1) making invisible what certain bodies say, think, feel, wish, and how they classify the world and themselves, etc.; (2) making invisible these bodies themselves; and finally (3) making invisible the very processes of epistemic invisibility.’ Epistemic invisibility is reliant on multiple converging practices where hegemonic practices are stabilised or made to appear as normal and, in this environment, as Pinto argues, (2017, p. 181) ‘certain bodies are listened to because their languages are considered understandable and reasonable, while others are turned into epistemic outcasts.’ These practices of silencing and making the outcast invisible are dependent upon a lack of communicative reciprocity and what Dotson (2011, p. 238) terms ‘pernicious’ or harmful ignorance. While epistemic outcasts are, on one hand, denied a voice of their own, the discourse about this group persists through othering practices.

The study: walking into a minefield

During a recent conference presentation about this research, an attendee noted that we were ‘walking into a minefield’ by conducting this study and we agree that the methodological and political issues surrounding it are fraught. This section outlines how we have attended to these challenges while also accepting that the tensions related to the study cannot be erased. Our ethical starting point endeavoured to follow the guidelines of socially engaged research as outlined by Ladegaard and Phipps (2020, pp. 218–219). One key element of these extensive guidelines was moving from ‘research on and about disenfranchised groups, to also for and with them’ (Ladegaard & Phipps, 2020, p. 72) and this was important for our collaboration with the campaigners. This immediately invites accusations of bias which we mitigate by rejecting a positivist empirical approach and by openly declaring our position which is supportive of the campaign. Similarly, while we are generally open to a social constructivist framework where the boundaries between the researcher and researched are blurred (Ladegaard & Phipps, 2020), we are also attuned to the real structural obstacles that constrained the participants from having agency over their own identities and forced them to continually resist an identity imposed on them.

Our stance is further complicated by the fact that we approach the research context as outsiders thus opening the possibility that we may reproduce discourses which suggest an ethnocentric and ethical superiority of our own position. While we are supportive of ACG's campaign, our research is not motivated by a desire to make moral pronouncements or suggest binary ‘for’ and ‘against’ positions and we acknowledge the multitude of opinions and the value of the debate within Grenoble and beyond. Our focus rather is on firstly, how the campaigners experience the impact of the swimwear policy on their lives; secondly, the discourse directed at the citizens’ group during their campaign and the effect of this on them; and thirdly, the strategies used by the citizens’ group to resist this discourse and fight for more inclusive swimwear policy. While the study is limited to the specific case in Grenoble, as noted in the introduction, there are wider ramifications including the connection of the debate to the French legal concept of laïcité and to that of hijab practices in France and elsewhere.

Methodology and researcher positionality

Our longitudinal study was conducted over the course of 14 months between July 2021 and August 2022 and was initiated by Collins through an email to ACG which expressed a desire to learn about the campaign. The respondent to the email (Lila) had a key role in the campaign and after email discussions agreed to take part in the research and became a principal participant and regular correspondent. Data collection included: four approximately one-hour semi-structured interviews with Lila conducted in English which coincided with the swim season in August 2021, March 2022, May 2022 and August 2022 and produced over 25,000 words of transcribed data; an online focus group lasting just over an hour and conducted in French at the end of the project in July 2022 with Lila and four additional participants who had been part of the campaign; ethnographic observations made during a visit to Grenoble in May, 2022 (Collins) which included meeting the campaigners and attending an event (detailed on page 22); documentation of the positioning of campaigners in media reporting (see page 15 for specific media sources), and ACG's Instagram platform. Informing our interview questions were regular email exchanges between the authors and Lila which kept us up to date with campaign's developments. Focus group participants were campaigners who were keen to discuss the impact of the ban and campaign on their lives and who volunteered to take part. Data from the interviews and focus group was thematically ‘cross-coded’ using a process whereby each author worked separately to identify emergent themes and then discussed and shared analysis to establish agreement of themes.

In conducting our digital ethnography, we adopted a critical discourse analytical perspective to survey significant English and French language online coverage of the campaign in major international media outlets, selected on the basis of their distribution power and availability. This entailed analysis of 22 online newspaper articles on the campaign, online comments made by readers in response to a Euronews article and a French language television programme (Touche pas à mon poste!) which dedicated an episode to debates around swimwear regulations. Emerging early in the study was the huge discrepancy between the real-life experiences of the campaigners and the media coverage of the campaign and this led us to limit our analysis of online data to specifically considering how the participants were positioned by press coverage and reader comments. This included surveying the data for references to ‘the burkini’ and exploring the language used to describe the campaigners. Due to space constraints in this article, we first demonstrate how newspaper headlines position the campaigners and then we offer specific online comments by readers which were commonly used tropes. Research participants have been anonymised with pseudonyms depending on their wishes and we use the terms ‘campaigners’ and ‘participants’ interchangeably. Data collected in French has been translated by Boumechaal and the research was subject to ethical review and approved by the University of Leeds (FAHC 21-103).

Aquatic childhoods and adult obstacles: motivations for swimming

In contrast to the single narrative frequently presented in media accounts about the campaign, a rich sense of the importance of pool access and of multiple meanings of swimming emerged in interviews and focus groups. Although the campaigners were frequently positioned as ‘foreigners’ who had failed to acculturate to local expectations, the participants were born and raised in France and described swimming as an important leisure activity which they had taken part in since childhood and early school life, although many of these were memories of secluded lakes. The theme of an aquatic childhood followed by obstacles to swimming in adulthood was prevalent as the campaigners reminisced about their initial love for the water as seen in Lila's account:

I know that since I was a kid, with my family, we went a lot to the sea or in the mountains and so there were lakes and I remember when I was really very small I don't know how old I was, but I loved to play in the water, and there's anecdotes that mom still tells me […] about when I was all blue, that I was super cold because I was barely two years old, and I refused to come out of the water.

The swimmers stressed the importance of bonding time for mothers with their children and how mothers feel the need to be present when their children are learning how to swim, but they were aware, even as children, of restrictions that could limit access for their family. Anikou explains her mothers’ disappointment and the initial impetus for the campaign:

This movement already started going back to when mums complained about not being accepted, not being able to take their children to the pool every summer. And this frustration of saying, well, I prepare the bag, I prepare the things [but] it is my husband who takes them every year. In fact, […] we are stuck especially since we live in a city like Grenoble where we have [..] extremely hot summers. We are in a pitiful situation.

Likewise, Lila recounts the experience of her mother and sisters who have been denied access to the pool to accompany their children:

My mum […] has always been very involved in the school life of her children. She was there, at every sports competition, and with the pool she had problems, they did not let her in. I have one of my sisters who has daughters, and they are 4 years old and 3 years old. So, the little ones go with their dad to the pool. […] How do we explain to 3- and 4-year-old girls what discrimination is?

The fond memories of swimming faded for the campaigners as they began to experience more obstacles as adults. The importance of swimming to the campaigners’ health and family life also emerged with reports of how the regulations have repercussions on their physical health as seen in Lila's comments:

I have health issues. Every time the doctors tell me to go swimming and I say okay, and I know I’m not going because I can't go to the pool. But now, I really wish I could go to the pool to take care of me. In fact, [it's] a medical care that I don't have access to.

As the campaigners conveyed their desire to swim for multiple aspects of their life (social, health, and family), their narratives highlighted the personal and social impact of the restrictive swimwear regulations on them. These rules effectively exclude them from public pools and deny them the benefits of practicing an activity they cherish.

Belonging and autonomy: challenging regulations

The imposition of a ‘one swimwear for all women policy’ made the campaigners perceive public pools as a place of exclusion and had a profound effect on their sense of belonging and autonomy. Data from the campaigners offers a stark contrast to the discursive positioning of the group and their motivations as presented in media coverage. The campaigners emphasised that the campaign was for all women and men who wanted a choice of what to wear in public swimming pools. Lila encapsulates the aims in the following data:

The idea is that everyone should be able to dress in the swimming pool as they want to dress, knowing that for security and hygiene questions we have to follow a certain type of material, swimming suit materials, that's the only thing that is mandatory […]. The main reason was to draw attention to this situation to show that this is absurd actually, to have women being kicked out of the swimming pool because they decided they wanted to cover their bodies.

The issues and values that the campaign addresses resonated with a wide range of women including non-Muslim women who joined to support the cause. For example, Elodie explains how the campaign made her realise the possibility that she does not need to avoid the pool anymore:

[Because of] sexist remarks when I was young […] I think I didn't want to be exposed at all, to expose my body to other people. I think I stopped going to the pool because I thought it was too intimate, I didn't want to share this with others. And I hadn't realised it at all before coming to the syndicate [ACG] and I said, that's it […] We are in a free world.

What is significant in Elodie's data is how the possibility of bodily autonomy in the pool space becomes a realisation for her through her involvement with ACG. This contradicts one of the common representations of the group as wishing to force covering swimwear on others and hence limit their freedom. Elodie's data also suggests the possibility of multiple motivations for covering swimwear which include comfort or the need to be shielded from the sun in an outdoor pool.

Locating violence in discourse: swimming + protests + Grenoble  = ‘burkini’

Despite clearly articulating their campaign and motivations for desiring changes to the regulations, the group experienced continual misrepresentation and discrimination across three main areas. These include political rhetoric, media accounts of the campaign (including social media comments), and the lived experience of the campaigners (including encounters with security forces in Grenoble). Due to space constraints, we focus on the latter two areas in this section.

While media coverage has varied in its degree of support or opposition to the campaign, it has predominantly misrepresented the campaigners as a homogenous group by foregrounding their Muslim identity and failing to fully engage with their motives. This has been done through the consistent association of the campaign with the burkini. Examples can be seen in results from internet searches in September 2022 using the respective French and English keywords below: Manifestations + les piscines + municipales à Grenoble and Swimming + Protests + Grenoble. The top ten search results were published in French and English respectively by the following sources: Le Dauphiné Libéré, Franceinfo, TF1, LaDepeche, Le Figaro, Le Point, Ouest-France, 20 min, Euronews, ESSOR Isère and (in English) France 24, BBC, The Guardian, Youtube, CNN, Reuters, RFLI, The Times, The Independent (two articles) and DW. These articles, in the case of both French and English, all use the term ‘burkini’ in their headlines which reduces the campaign to a single story. Further along the spectrum of media coverage is a sharper tone, which describes the campaigners as des militants musulmans or ‘militant Muslims’ (see, for example, Radio France International 2019) and the French talk show Touche pas à mon poste! (Don't touch my TV set!), where panellists discussed and debated the ‘burkini’. The following statement, made on the show by a panellist who is a journalist for the French magazine Causeur, was indicative of other comments:

The burkini is pushed by an organisation that has a hidden agenda. They are associated with Islamists. They try to separate Muslims from the rest of the society and test us. If we accept the burkini, tomorrow they will ban our miniskirts.

The frustration over an inability of the group to influence the narrative emerged from focus group discussions and interviews. Lila recounts numerous exchanges with journalists where she and other campaigners repeatedly tried to explain to no avail their pro-choice position which would allow everyone to choose their own swimwear:

All the press, all the media, everyone was like, so you just want burkinis in the swimming pool? And we’re like, no, that's not what we’re saying here. So, everyone was painting our fight being like Muslim women want to go to the swimming pool and we were like, no, I want all women to go to the swimming pool.

Similarly, nuance of the campaign was lost in media coverage particularly through references to the burkini as Lila explains:

Yes, that's [burkini] a pejorative word. What we want to say is ‘covering swimsuits’ because it can be that you’re covering from head to toes, it can be covering just your arms, or because you don't want to show your belly for example, so […], it can be a lot of things. And when we spent an hour talking with the journalists saying, ‘covering swimsuit’, and the title of his press release is, ‘Burkinis in Grenoble’ and we were like, seriously? And that happens all the time. So that's complicated.

For the campaigners, the use of the term ‘burkini’ in the media reports misrepresents their campaign, is symptomatic of a refusal to seriously hear their voices and it positions them in an anti-Islamic discourse where they are portrayed as a homogenous group fighting for a single type of swimwear symbolically equated with a militant brand of Islam. This positioning is particularly damaging because it gives license to more extreme forms of speech in social media and in online comments to media articles. One such example can be seen in the remarks made in English to the online article by Euronews on 22 July 2021. Below we list the themes emerging from our analysis of the readers’ comments followed by an example of comments (as originally posted online with grammatical errors) in brackets:

•	frequent online comments linked the campaign to disparaging remarks about Islam [‘Islam has made itself the enemy by trying to force itself worldwide without any respect for local customs and values’].
•	assumptions were made about ACG campaigners’ nationality and desire to enforce their choice on others [‘Natives shouldn't have to assimilate to newcomers’].
•	attempts were made to align the campaigners with restrictions against women in countries such as Afghanistan and Iran [‘Afghanistan girls get shot for wanting an education’]
•	discourse marginalised, separated and ‘othered’ the campaigners [‘France has approximately 5 million Muslims, they can build their own public swimming pool the problem solved’]
•	discourse positioned the campaigners as less ‘civilised’ [‘They don't want to civilize themself, why they come over Europe and do no stay in them country instead’].

This represents only a small, edited sample of the discourse encountered by the campaigners and we have chosen not to repeat some of the more extreme forms of what could be considered as hate speech endured by the campaigners.

Locating violence in lived experiences: personal impact and sacrifice

In addition to the misrepresentation of the campaign, the campaigners alleged instances of physical violence at the hands of security forces during their ‘pool actions’. While ‘pool actions’ were intended as playful, non-violent demonstrations aimed at drawing attention to their campaign, Lila's account suggests that the reaction could be aggressive and violent:

They [police officers] came at the swimming pool with their guns in their hands like we were robbing a bank or something, and we just spent an hour in front of the swimming pool screaming at each other basically, and they told us sexist things, Islamophobic things, they laughed at us, they took our IDs, and they didn't want to give them back. So that was pretty harsh, especially that we have people in the situation who are 16.

Over the course of the campaign the impact on the women was significant and required personal sacrifice. A sense of psychological angst and disbelief emerged from the accounts of the campaigners as seen from Awa below, especially when they compared their sacrifice against what seemed to be a modest request for adjustments to the swimwear regulations.

The more I think about it, the more nonsense I think there is in the situation and the angrier we are, because we’re like, seriously? We’re still fighting for this right, to go to the swimming pool? We’re not even talking about being President or something. No, just the swimming pool.

As the next section reveals, the group countered the opposition and violence by using strategic tactics of resistance.

Strategic resistance: making connections, seeking legitimacy and transcending labels

Faced with an overwhelming amount of criticism, pressure, and hostile representation of their campaign, ACG deployed strategies of resistance including countering the othering practices that were an attempt to isolate the group. Lila explains how ACG was involved in making connections with feminist groups and NGOs to change perceptions and acquire support:

We’ve have a lot of different meetings with other NGOs, […] they are not Muslim but they are feminist which means that we can have this in common, that we are fighting for the same thing, and that gave us a really good spot and a legitimate spot in feminist associations in Grenoble, […] there was a march against all the violence against women, and we took part […] and we were the ones shouting the loudest, […] and we had tons of messages after that from people saying, ‘We saw you at the march, that was amazing. I love that you are here […], we are together. If you go back to the swimming pool, tell us, we will come.’

These connections are not simply about an expanded base of support but establishing a sense of legitimacy and belonging. This quality emerges strongly in further data from Lila which also signals the possibility of transcending labels:

What they told us is that we are legitimate to call ourselves feminists even if we’re Muslims, because that's really something that is not obvious for everyone.

The inclusiveness of the campaign is also apparent in the campaign posters (Figure 1) which call on the municipal government to allow all swimmers to choose their own swimwear and to ‘open the pools for all’. The ‘for all’ is also further highlighted through the gender-neutral use of ‘pour toustes’ and the slogan ‘moncorps, monchoix, monmaillot’ at the bottom right.

However, just as these connections were being forged, the continual pressure and othering practices through media and political discourse served to isolate the group and had a significant impact on the lives of the campaigners, as Anekou recounts:

To have people against us in our community to whom we have to explain our fight […] because these people think we just want to go swimming with men who wear tight swimsuits. That was ultra-tiring.

Despite this criticism, the core members of the group remained committed to their principles and used strategic resistance by drawing on the power of humour and contact with the general public.

Figure 1. To the mayor of Grenoble: ‘Open the pools for all’, ‘Let us choose our swimwear’. (Photograph: Collins).

Strategic resistance: humour and street engagement

ACG's resistance was sustained by humour and direct street action which at times resembled arts activism. When faced with a lack of dialogue from the municipal government early in the campaign, the group constructed a ‘fake’ swimming pool directly in front of the town hall with aqua blue matting, inflatables, and other swimming paraphernalia which they entered wearing a variety of swimwear (See Figure 2).

Figure 2. Municipal Pool (Photograph courtesy of ACG).

Similarly, to engage directly with citizens of Grenoble, ACG organised a stand in the city centre where they posed the question, ‘Quel est ton maillot de bain idéal?’ (What's your ideal swimsuit?) and invited passers-by to draw their ideal swimming costume with marker pens and papers laid out on tables (see Figure 3).

Figure 3. ‘Quel est ton maillot de bain idéal?’ (Photograph courtesy of ACG).

Lila explains how this direct engagement with the members of the public was also instrumental in the collection of over 2,000 signatures appealing to the municipal government to make changes to the pool regulations:

Every week at least two of us were out in the streets getting signatures, talking about the petitions, talking about the fight. That was super exhausting but that was really necessary because at the end […] we got more than 2,000 signatures for our petitions.

These actions allowed the campaign to gather support and influenced the local government to become increasingly open to changes in swimwear policies. This culminated in a municipal government discussion and vote on May 16, 2022.

‘Movie night’ and the Council of State: a temporary victory

By May 2022, progress had slowly been made through continual pressure on the municipal government which eventually decided to hold a live streamed discussion and vote over changes to the swimwear regulations in Grenoble. Despite the tension surrounding this significant moment, ACG organised a gathering in an arts facility to celebrate the event with food, speeches, and singing while the municipal debate was simultaneously projected to a large audience of ACG members, supporters, and the press. The exuberant environment was in-keeping with the ethos of the group's activities over the course of the campaign as expressed by Lila:

We chant, we laugh together and people come by [and ask], ‘What's going on there’? And then they join us, and they stay because that's a nice evening.

At the announcement of the relaxation of the restrictions on swimwear by a vote of 29–27 the audience erupted. However, Lila notes how the group's huge sense of relief and achievement was later tempered by the knowledge that this was likely to be only a temporary victory:

If we win somewhere, we have to lose somewhere else. So basically, we’re winning now in the Municipal Council, but we’ll probably lose before the judge [of the Council of State].

While it would be inaccurate to describe the Council of State's ruling the following month on June 14, 2022 as the final significant moment for the campaign, it occurred near the end of our study and it represented a form of resolution. The ruling was largely reported as a defeat for ACG and the Grenoble municipal government's decision to relax regulations. For example, on 21 June, 2022, France 24's headline read: ‘Top French court upholds ban on ‘burkini’ swimsuits in Grenoble's public pools’. However, beneath these headlines was a much more complicated ruling. The item of swimwear that was still not allowed was what some referred to as the ‘skirt’ or an extra layer of clothing over a primary swimsuit. Figure 4 provides a visual representation of the new regulations. That the court's ruling allowed some opponents of ACG to openly proclaim victory, was unlikely to be accidental.

Challenging mere tolerance and questioning interculturality

Throughout our engagement with the participants, we were acutely aware of their frustration over the way in which the campaign had been covered. However, towards the end of the focus group, one of the participants (Awa) expressed similar scepticism about the relevance of interculturality for understanding the debate in Grenoble. This was a salient moment for us as researchers as it encapsulated the potential harm that could be done by framing the debate (even if this was not our intention) as an ‘intercultural clash’ between two incompatible cultural systems or as an ‘outside cultural group’ requesting that their practices be respected. Earlier Awa had made a similar salient point which challenged the labelling and single story of both the group and the type of swimwear which they wanted to wear:

Muslims in general are seen as a homogeneous bloc in French [but] there are as many ways to be a Muslim woman as there are Muslim women, as many ways to dress differently. Such claims are never the same for another group. (Italics added)

Awa then pushed this critique further by interrogating the relevance of interculturality to the debate all the while (perhaps unknowingly) exhibiting the principles of interculturality through her open stance:

Figure 4. The current Grenoble regulations for swimwear.

But I actually wonder a little bit if it's interculturality, actually, because it annoys me that in fact, in France, we are trying to say that […]. And in fact, I do not feel intercultural when I am French and Muslim. […] It is not normal that we consider it [the desire to choose one's own swimwear] as something foreign or something that we should tolerate […] when, in fact, it is in the Constitution.

Awa contends that the desire for bodily autonomy is not an alien or ‘foreign’ act driven by a singular homogenous cultural group that should merely be ‘tolerated’, but one which should be a basic right for all in an open and plural society. Her scepticism regarding how interculturality can be mobilised resonate with Dervin and Simpson's (2021, p. 9) likening of interculturality to a problematic chameleon which can change colours and ‘lead to racist/discriminatory judgements about others’ under the guise of discussing ‘cultural differences’.

Categories, cultural imaginations, and integration: engendering epistemic violence

The discrepancies revealed between the complex, varied, and rich lives of the participants, along with their multiple motivations for the campaign, starkly contrast reductive media depictions illustrating the power of discourse in categorising groups such as ‘Muslim women.’ These categories can be fuelled by cultural assumptions which, in turn, give license to epistemic violence in the form of othering and silencing. What is particularly disquieting is that this process occurs both invisibly and yet in plain sight. It manifests, for example, in media coverage and newspaper headlines, which lack interest in presenting a nuanced vision of the world or what Dervin terms ‘diverse diversities’ (Dervin, 2015). Instead, they are oriented towards a differentialist bias and cultural blocks (Amadasi & Holliday, 2017), that serve ideological agendas and economic interests. This underlines the group's inability to influence the narrative about their own lives, reinforcing the reality that disadvantaged communities often bear a personal price from media misrepresentation. This concern is highlighted in a Reuters Institute report (Arguedas et al., 2023) identifying five issues misrepresentation issues, including ‘bias towards negative topics and framing, treatment of groups in a biased manner, divisive framing that stokes conflict, use of harmful or limiting stereotypes, and absence of certain voices from coverage’.

At the surface of the debate in Grenoble were differences, seemingly minor contrasts in approaches to swimwear. However, for the campaigners, these distinctions represented a profound shift in how they approached being together in water. What was also significant were the narratives that emerged around these differences. These narratives denied the possibility that preferences for alternative swimwear could be shared by different groups, or that the motivations behind these preferences could be diverse. Perceiving the request for a change to pool regulations as emanating from a single homogenous group motivated by religious restrictions falls into the trap of seeing it as a threat to both national identity and cultural practices, pitting ‘our’ way against ‘their’ way of being in pool space.

It is significant that despite online comments posted about the campaigners suggesting they build their own pools or leave France, the group persisted in campaigning for the right to exist among others in a shared space. Their campaign recognised the importance of giving visibility to other ways of being and they continually asserted their presence in physical spaces through pool actions and street campaigns. While it is acknowledged that some level of cohesiveness is necessary within any social grouping and that regulations governing dress and appearance are commonplace, this does not necessitate hostility towards difference. Being together should not ‘entail receiving nothing from the other’ (Yohannes et al., 2024, p. 502) nor reducing the other to mere ‘like-us’ (Levinas, 2011 as cited in Yohannes et al., 2024, p. 502). This shifts us away from the attempt to minimise or erase differences, toward a more radical openness where difference is respected for everyone (Rancière, 2007, p. 99).

While the controversy over swimwear regulations may seem to be easily filed under the category of ‘identity politics’, this case encapsulates how micro tensions which are inherent in shared spaces and macro tensions associated with political discourse can further divide society. These fractures are underpinned by viewing differences as threats and this position is counter to the principles of many working in the intercultural field. This underlines the need for intercultural practice to continue to be underpinned by an ethical and philosophical orientation that is not simply tolerant or blandly open to differences, particularly in the neoliberal sense, but one which is vigilant against forms of epistemic violence which discriminate and silence other ways of being.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Haynes Collins

Haynes Collins is a lecturer in Intercultural Studies at the University of Leeds where he teaches Intercultural Studies at the undergraduate and postgraduate level. His research falls broadly into the category of intercultural communication/studies and he is specifically interested in how institutional and media discourses mobilise the concept of culture and interculturality to serve ideological agendas.

Souad Boumechaal

Souad Boumechaal is a dissertation supervisor of intercultural communication at the University College London. She is specifically interested in the cultural politics of English language teaching in postcolonial North African contexts. She completed her doctoral research in Applied Linguistics at the University of Leeds. Prior to this, her BA and MA qualifications in the Didactics of English Language Teaching were attained from Abdel Hamid Ibn Badis University, Algeria. Since obtaining her Ph.D. in 2021, she occupied various research and teaching positions at the University of Leeds. She also held a postdoctoral research assistant position for the project ‘Artificial Intelligence Tracing of COVID-19 Misinformation Flow’ funded by EPSRC.