Rita Chin (U of Michigan)
"The Politics of Sexual Democracy in the New Europe."
In the last two decades, the question of integrating Muslim immigrants into the New Europe has increasingly been pursued through a debate about the role of gender and sexuality in Islam. Despite their different points of departure, controversies in France, Germany, Britain, Belgium, and the Netherlands have portrayed Muslim women as victims of a putatively backward, oppressive, and patriarchal religious tradition and set of cultural practices. A common thread running through these controversies is the assumption that Muslim gender relations offer a useful litmus test of Islam’s modernity and compatibility with European, liberal-democratic societies. In order for Muslims to integrate into the New Europe, according to this view, they must reject their traditional gender practices and embrace the norms of what sociologist Éric Fassin has termed “sexual democracy.”
My paper asks the following questions: How have gender, religion, and immigration converged in European political discourse? Why did this particular constellation emerge at this particular moment? And what kinds of conclusions does the fixation on gender and sexuality make possible?
"The Politics of Sexual Democracy in the New Europe."
In the last two decades, the question of integrating Muslim immigrants into the New Europe has increasingly been pursued through a debate about the role of gender and sexuality in Islam. Despite their different points of departure, controversies in France, Germany, Britain, Belgium, and the Netherlands have portrayed Muslim women as victims of a putatively backward, oppressive, and patriarchal religious tradition and set of cultural practices. A common thread running through these controversies is the assumption that Muslim gender relations offer a useful litmus test of Islam’s modernity and compatibility with European, liberal-democratic societies. In order for Muslims to integrate into the New Europe, according to this view, they must reject their traditional gender practices and embrace the norms of what sociologist Éric Fassin has termed “sexual democracy.”
My paper asks the following questions: How have gender, religion, and immigration converged in European political discourse? Why did this particular constellation emerge at this particular moment? And what kinds of conclusions does the fixation on gender and sexuality make possible?
Umut Erel (Open University, UK)
"Inherited Difference: Projects of Migrant Mothering."
As Europe is experiencing demographic changes of population aging and lower birthrates, the European Union is concerned about the sustainability of the economy, pensions and social care systems. While immigration is presented as one possible solution to this demographic development, it is often cast as potentially undermining social and cultural cohesion. It is against this backdrop that migrant mothers are being problematized as key figures who can enable or hinder their children’s integration into European values. This paper looks at how migrant mothers in London negotiate issues of identity, belonging and participation for themselves and their children. Drawing on research with Kurdish and Turkish mothers who are cast as ‘just outside’ of Europeanness in terms of their political, geographic and cultural identification, the paper explores their strategies of positoning themselves and their children. They experience forms of racialization as ‘Muslim’ or ‘refugee’, positioning them as ‘outsiders’. Indeed, the ascription of Muslim identity often serves as a boundary marker of Europe and its Others. The paper shows, however how the mothers’ own strategies are more complex than these dichotomous ascriptions and that they are enacting flexible forms of multilayered citizenship.
David Gramling (U of Arizona)
"Hysterical Postsecularism: Rhetorics of Indifference toward Islam in Europe and the US."
“BURN ALL WESTERN LITERATURE....onto a zip drive so I can listen to it while driving. “ #MuslimRage
“I'm having such a good hair day. No one even knows.” #MuslimRage
Though the concern of this meeting is mobilizing difference, I will focus on one particular kind of tactical difference: namely, a nondifference that has become a favored rhetorical and aesthetic reservoir for illustrating Islam since 2001. As such, the civic tactic of nondifferentiation isn’t a particularly new one, but its power to explain Islam to non-Muslims in the past 15 years has indeed been unprecedented, both in degree and in kind. Not only US American television series like Battlestar Galactica, Homeland, and Rubicon, but also the crowd-sourced twitter responses to Newsweek’s Muslim Rage cover story in Sept. 2012 have mobilized a rhetorical stance of nondifference between Muslims and non-Muslims, which I will call hysterical postsecularism.
The hysteria in this kind of postsecularism consists of the compulsion to depict Islam as either 1) functionally equivalent / practically isomorphic to or 2) optically indistinguishable from secular Christianity; it also consists however in the inability or unwillingness to differentiate between 1) and 2). Elsewhere I have called this aesthetic trompe l'oeil the “Huxtablization of Islam” (2012).
Though my interest in these discursive features derived first from American pop culture sources, the majority of this talk will focus rather on contemporary German (center-left) discourses of indifference toward Islam, in order to discover and characterize a few of its pragmatic and heuristic dispositions. What motivates writers and spokespeople in Germany (Muslims and non-Muslims alike) to portray Islam as a boring, culturally unspectacular set of unenviable and unfearable social functions, similar in their banality to the Christianities practiced (or unpracticed) in one’s own Swabian suburb? What aspects of Euro-Islam discourses are predicated on this kind of nondifference? Is a rhetoric of nondifference the same—in essence or effect—as one of assimilation, or does this distinction depend on who is deploying the rhetoric and when? Who, and which communities, are offering critical counter-models to this disposition of nondifference? What historically corrective discourses—anti-Orientalism, critical anthropology, and radical secularism, for instance—have made hysterical postsecularism difficult to analyze or identify thus far?
Petra Kuppinger (Monmouth College)
"How to Become a Foreigner: Gender and Nationality in Germany."
Much has been said about the “integration” of migrants and in particular Muslim migrants into European societies. Can Muslims be “good” citizens? Is Islam compatible with liberal democracy? What do Muslims need to do to become citizens? In this paper I will look at a different but crucial facet of these debates and related social transformations. I introduce Ulrike, an ethnic German woman in her thirties, who converted to Islam almost 20 years ago and started wearing a himar in the public sphere a few years later. Ulrike lived the first decade as a Muslima in a city in eastern Germany and then moved to a city in the west. I analyze some of Ulrike’s exemplary experiences in the public sphere (both east and west) that illustrate how she is frequently defined out of the nation by way of her appearance. Simplistically she is sometimes treated as “the” Muslim woman, a supposedly alien and certainly downtrodden person. I examine random public encounters that range from the physically aggressive, verbally offensive to plain ignorant. Deconstructing these experiences, dialogues or conversations, I demonstrate how in popular discourse the link between Islam and foreign is deeply rooted. This link between Islam and foreign is not coincidental to Ulrike’s experiences, but reflect broader definitions of the nation and gendered national belonging. These definitions remain central in media debates and political discourses to do with Islam and Muslims.
Chantal Nadeau (U of Illinois)
"Courage, Queers, and a Post-Immunity Politics: A Comparative Perspective."
This paper examines how the recent invocation of “courage” in queer legal battles signals an important shift in contemporary queer politics in Europe and North America, a shift from an immunitary to a post-immunitary form of politics.
The language of courage is necessarily one invoking a public and the public. It is a form of public recognition and a form of resistance to traditional political allegiances. When the language of courage is used in queer legal battles, it dislocates pride as the modus operandu for change – i.e., for “equality.” With this dislocation, what we witness is not the self-referentiality attached to ‘identity’ (sexual and/or political) but rather a necessarily public form of recognition of risk-taking that gestures toward the other(s). Citizenly and soldierly, courage enables one to be admired and acknowledged socially and politically. Further, because it is not self-referential, courage gives space for non-queers to stand up without being suspected of queerness themselves. Courage provides, then, a means of resistance to a queer contagion.
In this context, the rubric of courage signals the death of the queer subject who is, by definition, outside of the frame of the social or political norm. We can see anticipation of this death implicitly in the anxious objections to homonormativity by queer scholars such as Lee Edelman (No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive) and Jasbir Puar (Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times). The death of the queer subject creates the conditions for the emergence of a new form of political subject, of a no-longer-queer subject who has been incorporated into the body-politic. At the end, courage speaks to a moment of post-immunity, i.e. when the immunitary inoculation has taken hold of the public and “queer” becomes in turn an innocuous category—and therefore no longer queer.
Damani Partridge (U of Michigan)
"After Diaspora, Beyond Citizenship: Non-Citizen Youth Politics in Contemporary Berlin."
Youth have been at the center of recent uprisings and revolutions not only in Egypt and Tunisia, but also in Spain, Greece, London, Paris, and now also in Istanbul. In the midst of what some have been describing as a global trend against austerity measures, high youth unemployment, and a lack of democratic accountability, Germany has been relatively quiet. Why? While many might argue that this is because of Germany’s economic strength, amongst so-called “foreigners” who live in Germany, the unemployment rate is double that of the normative German public (Focus 2012). According to a recent report by the Federal Government Commissioner for Migration, Refugees and Integration, this has been the case for the past 20 years (Ibid). In recent years, unemployment for “Turkish/Turkish-German” youth in the German capitol, Berlin, has reached rates close to fifty percent (Partridge 2012). Furthermore, according to a recent study by the Social Democratic Party affiliated Friedrich Ebert Foundation, far right wing sympathies are on the rise in the former East Germany (Spiegel 2012). Given these trends, why has there not been a major uprising amongst “postmigrant” youth in Germany? What kinds of political strategies are young people using for their social inclusion and how do these strategies apply to other global contexts? To what extent is the relative silence due to the historical forms through which democratization has emerged in Germany compared to countries such as France, England, or the United States?
Additional abstracts coming soon.