Contesting Europe: A call for an anti-modern sexual politics

Abstract

In Western Europe, debates surrounding the integration of ‘Muslim’ women over the last decade signify the ways in which racialized notions of gender and sexuality have come to define acceptable and unacceptable ways of being European. Discourses concerning the wearing of the headscarf and ‘honour crimes’ are particular ways in which ‘Muslim’ genders are produced, condemned and held responsible for posing a threat to supposedly stable European values of gender equality and sexual emancipation. This article examines some of the interventions by feminist and gay activists Germany regarding the veil and so-called honour crimes, which reflect an increasing acceptance of the state’s escalating racialization processes on the part of activists. The article concludes that the very racialization of the category ‘Muslim’ needs to be examined not only in a postcolonial context but also how this process has emerged after 9/11 and the ‘War on Terror’.

Keywords

Europe gender integration Muslim racialization sexuality veiling War on Terror

Amid debates about Islam’s status within Europe, ‘Muslim’¹ women are becoming increasingly stigmatized, criminalized and marked for social and economic exclusion. In 2010, the French parliament banned face veils² in ‘hospitals, schools, government offices and on public transport’ in France. The report also recommended refusing legal residence and citizenship to people who show ‘visible’ signs of ‘radical religious practice’. In 2004, the French government had already introduced a ban on the veil in schools.³ In 2008, a precedent was set when a woman was denied citizenship because she wore the veil (Bennhold, 2008). But do these punitive measures really move gender (and sexual) emancipation and a democratic order forward? Even when these punitive measures are cloaked in discourses and policies of care (we must help them) and protection (we must protect our democratic traditions), I argue that the language and praxis of care are actually technologies of racialization, which have now been Islamicized to modify and expand the state’s arsenal of instruments through which newly naturalized populations can be disenfranchised (Bhattacharyya, 2008: 75; El-Tayeb, 2003). Indeed, if racialized policing of sexism (manifested for many in the practices of veiling and so-called honour crimes) is the answer to the modernist call to an emancipatory sexual politics, perhaps we should rethink feminist queer politics outside a modernist framework which is based on a racialized, neoliberal order.

This article argues that moral panics over ‘Muslim’ sexism and, by extension, homophobia, are less a reaction motivated by a concern for women and queers, or the integration of ‘pre-modern’ migrants. Rather, they serve as boundary markers in the reconstitution of a unifying Europe (see El-Tayeb, this issue). In the Western European debates on the integration of ‘Muslim’ women over the last decade, racialized notions of gender and sexuality have become central markers in the distinction between acceptable and unacceptable ways of being European, and in or outside of Europe. The headscarf and honour crimes debates in particular have been key sites in which ‘Muslim’ genders are produced, condemned and held responsible for posing a threat to supposedly stable European values and a democratic gendered order. In this, ‘Muslim’ femininities and ‘Muslim’ masculinities are being posed as complementary problems. The figure of the hyper-oppressed ‘Muslim’ woman arrives jointly with that of the primitive, patriarchal and criminally violent figure of the ‘Muslim’ man. This aberrant masculinity flexes its muscle by perpetrating brutality on women and queers, and is posited in stark contrast to the civility and tolerance of the universalized white masculine subject of Europeanness, as well as its minoritized equivalents in white feminists and white gay activists (El-Tayeb, 2003; Haritaworn, 2008; Petzen, 2005, 2008; Razack, 2004). In this article, I examine both (straight) feminist and gay investments⁴ in the care/criminalization of ‘Muslims’ as part of a political struggle for gender and sexual emancipation, a praxis based on saving ‘them’ from their culture and punishing them when ‘they’ don’t want to be saved.

This forces us to interrogate tropes of care and protection, and understand them in their genealogy of historical European racisms, which are reconstituted in a changing context of an integrating and globalizing Europe, whose enemy outside – and within – is increasingly identified as ‘Muslims’ (Haritaworn, 2011; Haritaworn and Petzen, 2011; Yıldız, 2009). As Yasemin Yıldız argues, the very formation of the category ‘Muslim’, both in its diverse postcolonial contexts, and in its particular formation after 9/11 and during the ‘War on Terror’, is highly productive:

The de-limiting function of ‘Muslim’ becomes clear when we consider what this designation enables. The subjects who are constituted in this transnational manner are suddenly situated in a new network of discursive associations invoked by the category ‘Muslim’ in the ‘West’. Today, these include September 11, the social order of the Taliban, the murder of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, or the controversy over the Danish caricatures of Mohammed. (Yıldız, 2009: 475)

Against the common enemy figured by this chain of gendered associations, a harkening back to a mythical white Europe becomes possible, where ‘Muslims’, ideologically and culturally linked to terrorists and violent criminals, have no past and no present. Indeed, they are stuck in the past: their backwardness and primitive patriarchy locates them in the anthropologically defined pre-modern era. Their temporal Otherness is then an eternal marker of the failure to integrate, the failure to become modern. As I have argued elsewhere (Petzen, 2008; Haritaworn and Petzen, 2011), they become the constitutive Others to the Enlightenment and its universal values, which include characteristics of modernity, social and scientific progress, the secular state and democracy, against which those racialized as ‘Muslim’ can then be compared and found lacking, or lagging behind.

If the racialization of gender and sexual politics has often been described as an unfortunate instrumentalization of gay politics by European governments (e.g. Butler, 2008), this article will further disappoint any hope in queer and feminist innocence. As decolonial queer and feminist theorists have argued for quite some time (Ani et al., 2007; Çelik et al., 2008; El-Tayeb, 2003; Haritaworn et al., 2008; Petzen, 2008), such an investment serves to naturalize the whiteness of dominant gender and sexual politics, and the ways in which these have often been complicit in colonial and racist projects.⁵ In a similar vein, I examine interventions by feminist and gay activists in Germany regarding the veil and so-called honour crimes which demonstrate an increasing symbiosis with the state’s ever more punitive powers. White lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) activists and feminists have long chimed in with popular and official anti-Muslim sentiment by serving up further evidence of ‘Muslims’ failure (and refusal) of their responsibility to integrate, this time measured through the boundary markers of the ‘European’ values of modern sexual emancipation and gender equality.⁶ As we shall see, such strategies not only naturalize a modernist teleology of social evolution which is in a perfect (straight) line with the contemporary racist script of a Europe in which those racialized as ‘Muslim’ can only ever be late-comers. They also directly enact strategies that make ‘Muslims’ dispensable, and prepare them further for incarceration, displacement and deportation.

Enlightening European genders

Howard Winant describes how ‘Enlightenment thought evinced a deep preoccupation with racial difference, whose emancipatory meaning was continuously interpreted as setting limits on “natural rights” and thus justifying systems of rule founded in profound commitments to inequality and exclusion’ (2001: 28). The explications of racial difference that were so fundamental to the Enlightenment were inherently hierarchical – with Europeans on one end and ‘savages’ to be conquered and enslaved on the other. However, as Avtar Brah notes, the racist project was from the start an ‘essentialist narrative of sexualised difference’ (Brah, 1996: 156). As postcolonial theorists in particular teach us see (e.g. Ahmed, 1992; Lewis, 2005; McClintock, 1995; Said, 1978; Yeğenoğlu, 1998), the deployment of gender and sexuality in the invention of a civilized, mature Europe and its irrational, perverse, barbaric Others has a long history.

In other words, the veil and honour crimes, and their contemporary legal, academic and governmental formulations in laws regulating veiling, reports on parallel societies living in ghettos and stories of women locked in apartments with no contact with ‘Germans’, have a fertile history in European productions of the harem and other sites of ‘Oriental’ seclusion and deviant sexuality (El Guindi, 1999; Lewis, 1996; Yeğenoğlu, 1998). In this, the veil has been an especially productive symbol, in marking both the literal barrier that prevents the integration of the female ‘Muslim’ body into modern society and time, and ‘Muslim’ men’s hyper-oppressiveness which has more recently been dramatized through the trope of honour crime. In the early 2000s, the terms honour killing and honour related violence (HRV) made their first appearances in governmental vocabularies,⁷ and I focus on these examples in more detail later in the article. In a context of gender mainstreaming, institutionalization and professionalization, these studies of HRV served to Orientalize domestic violence to such an extent that it became near-invisible in majoritized families and cemented HRV as a marker of failed integration for migrant families. To juxtapose this with Sherene Razack’s analysis of honour crime, ‘Muslim’ communities are here seen as ‘unassimilable, duplicitous, tribal and prepared to sell their daughters into marriage and a life of continual rape’ (2004: 138). Yet the problem of honour, born in Orientalist fantasies of violently sexist ‘Muslim’ men who jealously guard the eroticized but chaste sexualities of ‘their’ women, has not been confined to the realm of state feminism. As we shall see later, it also became a central tenet of gay organizing in Germany, to the point where the biggest gay lobbying organization could reinterpret homophobia as the result of an ‘archaic understanding of family honour’ (LSVD, 2005: n.p.).

Veiling

A highly productive praxis of anti-Muslim racism is the veil. It has become part of the same archive of ‘failed Muslim integration’, narrated in similar rescue scripts. Yet as I shall argue, proponents of veil bans are actually preparing the ground for the social, political and economic exclusion of ‘Muslim’ women in particular.

In her book Colonial Fantasies, Meyda Yeğenoğlu argues that the ‘clear-cut and absolute division between the Western and Oriental, the foreign and native is the division created by Orientalist/colonial discourse’ (1998: 140). That is to say, while ‘Turks’, ‘Arabs’ and other ‘Muslim’ minorities in Europe are seen as resisting integration into modern European society, the distinction between East and West, modern and pre-modern, civilized and uncivilized, and the subsequent racism which precludes European ‘Muslims’ from belonging are inventions of the self-identified West. Yeğenoğlu’s focus is on the symbolic importance of veiling in Algeria and modern Turkey, but provides a crucial historical account of the veil as a ‘battle ground’, which is also an apt description of the political dynamics surrounding veiling discourses in contemporary Europe:

. . . it is the woman who disappears by being transformed into a battle ground. . . . It is the veil which becomes one of the most effective and convenient instruments of this battle. The visible cultural effects one can induce by veiling or unveiling woman makes it a convenient signifier for the contending parties to fight out their differences through manipulating this highly charged symbol. (Yeğenoğlu, 1998: 126)

A mainstay in colonial and postcolonial representations of the Other, the veil has again become the subject of enormous investment over the last decade. Within the context of a globalized ‘War on Terror’ and a transnational European debate over failed integration and multiculturalism, the moral panics over women’s rights, indexed by the veil, have been a highly productive praxis of anti-Muslim racism, which works to diagnose racialized communities as inferior and ‘cast them out’ of Europe (Razack, 2007). Thus, self-professed ‘women’s rights’ advocates have not shied away from actively preparing the ground for the social, political and economic exclusion of ‘Muslim’ women in particular. As Fekete (2009) and others have argued, these never-ending debates are ultimately at the political and ideological service of vilification and control. Besides shrinking and revoking citizenship and residency rights, extraordinary measures to ban the veil can be seen as part of ‘The creation of a separate criminal justice system for “Muslims” beyond the ordinary rule of law’ which has ‘arisen out of the expanded EU-wide definition of terrorism which no longer relates to just violent physical acts for political ends, but encompasses speech, thought and even “behaviour”’ (Fekete, 2009).

In addition to providing legitimation for the formation of a ‘Muslim’ non-citizen to be evicted from the scope of the law, the discourse on the veil has immediate impact on the material reality of women’s lives. As a result of legislation banning the veil, ‘Muslim’ women who choose to veil in Germany can no longer be employed as teachers in some states; they are thus actively discriminated and circumscribed in their social and economic rights. That the shutting of these doors has the potential to alienate veiled women and people ascribed as ‘Muslims’ from the so-called Mehrheitsgesellschaft (‘majority society’) should not be surprising. In 2003, well-known feminist leftists openly called on migrants from countries where men are ‘legally privileged over women’ to sign the article in the Basic Law (which serves as a constitution in Germany) that says women and men are equal. Violations of the article would result in the revocation of the residency permit for both men and women.

As many have pointed out before (e.g. El Guindi, 1999), the automatic equation of the veil with coercion and oppression is patronizing to women who veil by choice and consider it empowering. Refusing to understand that there are myriad motivations among women who veil infantilizes women and brands them as helpless victim without agency. ‘Muslim’ women who wear head coverings are perceived as either religious fanatics or oppressed victims with no minds of their own. This formation also serves to naturalize Germanness as white and Christian. It constitutes a departure from earlier attempts to support expressions of communal difference or hyphenable identities as part of a multicultural society.

In addition, the push to ban veiling also alienates secular, non-Sunni Muslims or people who are non-practising but identify as being culturally ‘Muslim’. They are often left with a choice of supporting a public ‘Muslim’ religious identity or an exclusionary ‘German’ one. There is no room for a differentiated understanding of the variety of Muslim practices, beliefs and identifications. Thus, the dichotomous categories of ‘Muslim’ and European, pre-modern and modern, uncivilized and civilized are reinscribed ad nauseum.

The Ludin case

One event that brings home these contradictions was the Ludin case. In 1998, German schoolteacher Fereshta Ludin went to court after her employers had told her she was not allowed to wear the veil as a teacher in a public school. In September 2003 the court ruled in her favour, but in 2004 the German Constitutional Court decided that if religious symbols ‘unduly influenced’ students, then states could ban them. Baden-Württemberg, the state where Ludin worked, subsequently did so, becoming the first state to ban the veil in schools in April 2004.

Yasemin Karakaşoğlu and Sigrid Luchtenburg note that for the Ministry of Cultural Affairs, the headscarf ‘was at variance with basic Christian values and constitutional secularism alike. As a symbol of backward, fundamentalist Islamic attitudes, it was viewed as opposing the principles of freedom of thought and of the equality of the sexes’ (2004: 44). They also note that the Federal Constitutional Court decision in September 2003 required that all religions had to be treated equally; therefore, if the intent of the new law had really been to neutralize any kind of religious influence on children, logic would have called for a law targeting all religious symbols, and not just a specific law banning the veil (Berlin would later implement such a law).

The Baden-Württemberg ruling is an instance of what legal scholar Kenji Yoshino (2006) calls ‘covering’ – the pressure to de-emphasize one’s ethnic, racial, sexual or other difference. He examines cases in the US where individuals have lost anti-discrimination cases that involved an obvious display of otherness, despite the prohibition of discrimination against particular groups. In particular, he highlights the cases of an African-American woman who was fired from her job for wearing cornrows, a Latino man who was taken off a jury because of his capacity to speak Spanish and a Filipina woman who was not allowed to speak Tagalog in her place of employment (Yoshino, 2006: 131). While the notion of civil rights for all is heralded as a cornerstone of a liberal democracy, Yoshino notes that it is not acceptable under current jurisdiction to ‘flaunt’ (2006: 76) markers of one’s race, ethnicity or sexual orientation. A similar fantasy of the intolerability of ‘flaunting’ was threaded through a speech regarding the Ludin decision delivered to the state assembly by the Minister of Education for the State of Baden-Württemberg, Annette Schavan, who accused ‘Muslims’ wearing the veil of a wilful refusal to integrate:

It is our Muslim co-citizens that advise us that the headscarf also stands for a particular interpretation of Islam in the sense of political Islam, in which headscarves can be connected to a political message and are seen as a sign of cultural exclusion that is increasing in Islam. The argument is thus primarily between Muslims and non-Muslims. (Schavan, 2004: 50)

Here, Schavan uses the authority of ‘authentic’ informants (our ‘Muslim’ co-citizens⁸) to act as unassailable sources of knowledge about Islam. Conveniently, these native informants are not named, nor is it clear in which ways they have imparted information (Individual meetings? Focus groups? Formal studies? Advisory councils?). This authentication nevertheless serves Schavan by legitimizing her claim that headscarves are, by flaunting difference, a sign of cultural exclusion – on the part of the excluded. Besides turning existing hierarchies on their head, this obviously ignores the plurality of views among ‘Muslims’ regarding the veil. It also constitutes an outright assault on a religious practice. The speech thus performs a marked ideological break between ‘Muslims’ and non-Muslims. Schavan continues in her analysis of the headscarf:

The headscarf as a political symbol is a part of the history of oppression of women; it can stand for an interpretation of Islam in the context of political Islam that is not compatible with the basic theme of equality of men and women. Therefore, it is not compatible with a constitutional value, which is anchored in our Basic Law. (Schavan, 2004: 51)

Ludin’s headscarf thus becomes synonymous with the history of oppression of women. Her legal struggle for employment is equated with a sinister political movement that seeks to throw us back into pre-modernity and threatens the very legal foundation of the country, whose very basis now seems to be gender equality.

Ludin’s case gained more attention when a prominent feminist stepped up to the plate: Alice Schwarzer, a paragon of second-wave feminism in Germany and publisher of the popular women’s magazine Emma (who later wrote another book on the veil, The Big Cover-up: For Integration, Against Islamism).⁹ In articles in Der Spiegel, and later Emma, Schwarzer accused Ludin of being a member of the outlawed Turkish nationalist organization Milli Görüş, which allegedly sympathizes with Sharia and Islamic law (concepts which were threatened as the possible future yet remained undefined). The daily tageszeitung reported on this exchange, in which Schwarzer accused Ludin as saying that ‘Muslim’ women were ‘pure’ and German women were ‘impure’ (Oestreich, 2003). Schwarzer’s white feminist engagement with Ludin belies a long feminist history where women (as well as trans and gender non-conforming people) of various positionalities in terms of race and class, sexual and gender identity, disability and North/South location have struggled hard in order to forge discursive and material spaces where hetero-patriarchal violence can be resisted in all its forms. Ludin’s case exemplifies the ways in which a particular kind of feminism is becoming hegemonic by investing in nationalist notions of monoculturalism, assimilationism and a re-whitened Germanness. As Ludin stated, no one was forcing her to veil – she just wanted to be able to practise her profession in peace and wear the veil at the same time. In the place of the fantasized patriarchal Other, the agent of Ludin’s patronage is indeed Schwarzer, who joins a long tradition of colonial feminism by telling the Other woman how to emancipate herself (Mohanty, 1986). As Lila Abu-Lughod notes, ‘Projects of saving other women depend on and reinforce a sense of superiority by Westerners, a form of arrogance that deserves to be challenged’ (2002: 789). Yeğenoğlu, too, shows how assuming a pedagogical position towards the Other woman has been a strategy for western feminists in particular to attain a ‘universal subject position’: ‘Allegedly, it is Western feminists who have, with their achievements of freedom, inspired and prepared the ground for the liberation of Oriental women’ (Yeğenoğlu, 1998: 101).

Ludin did challenge this arrogance in the form of an open letter, saying that the alleged quote about German women did not reflect her views or words, and that Emma had been trying to ‘foist [it on her] for years’. In addition, she stated that the ‘claims of Ms. Schwarzer, which connect me to the Turkish organization Milli Görüş – an organization closely watched by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution – and represent me as their “activist” are simply untrue’ (Oestreich, 2003). This exchange is a telling example of how difficult it is for ‘Muslim’ women to represent themselves and their viewpoints; they are blatantly misquoted or misrepresented, and must constantly refute charges of supporting illegal organizations and the Sharia. As Yeğenoğlu puts it, in the process the ‘Muslim’ woman ‘disappears’ and is unable to make her voice heard at all.

This is not to say that there is no public support for women who wear the headscarf. For example, many prominent figures both white and people of color, signed a statement by Marielouise Beck, Minister for Migration, Asylum Seekers and Integration. The title of the statement was ‘Religious plurality instead of forced emancipation!’ and was also signed by Barbara John, the former Commissioner for Foreigners Affairs in Berlin and Rita Süssmuth, the President of the German Bundestag (Beck et al., 2004).¹⁰

While the statement called out for differentiating between Islam and fundamentalism, and made clear that for many ‘Muslims’, the headscarf and emancipation are not contradictory, these arguments were made only after the introduction had conceded that ‘headscarves, veils and burqas are instruments of oppression of women and undeniable political symbols for Islamic fundamentalists.’ The text then proceeds ‘The scarf on the head of a woman can, therefore, be a political symbol’ (Beck et al., 2004: 86; emphasis in original). Thus, it seems the authors felt comfortable coming out against a ban on headscarves only within a context that acknowledges the possible evils of Islam: ‘We know about the antidemocratic, anti-Semitic and misogynistic currents of Islam, which do not fit our picture of humanity and our understanding of emancipation and modernity. On the question of the importance of the system of values which provide the foundation for our basic rights, there is no room for negotiation’ (Beck et al., 2004: 86).

In a move that following Rey Chow might be characterized as coercive mimeticism (2002: 107), the Turkish Union of Berlin-Brandenburg (Türkische Bund in Berlin-Brandenburg, or TBB), one of the strongest lobbies for those minoritized as Turkish¹¹ in Berlin, reacted sharply to the letter. In tune with its conception of itself as an organization following the precepts of modernization and westernization set out by the secular Turkish Republic, it also reflects the majority German discourse on the imperative of banning the veil. In a press release regarding Marielouise Beck’s position on the veil, the TBB wrote that:

. . . if, as the signatories admit, headscarves, veils and burqas are ‘instruments of the oppression of women and undeniable political symbols’, then this naiveté, exactly in this moment of increasing fundamentalist activities, is incomprehensible. If, as the signatories maintain, women in the diaspora seize upon the headscarf in order ‘to mark their Otherness’, the question arises why these women seize the weapon of the fundamentalists. The answer is given by the signatories themselves: ‘in order to document a difference in understanding of modesty and virtue vis-à-vis the host society’.

The TBB press release ends with a plea for the banning of religious symbols in public service: ‘The demand for equality cannot mean that the values of the Basic Law, that are neither German nor European, but rather universal values, become emptied of meaning’ (TBB, 2003).

German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble echoed this sentiment from a dominant white perspective. Reciting the toxic linkages of secularist and assimilationist ideology that pervade public discourses throughout West Europe, he added that ‘Muslims’ had not gone through the Enlightenment in the same way that Christians had, and that this was further hindered by the growth of ‘parallel communities’ (Bilefsky, 2007):

Politicians should not deal with headgear of men and women. But the burqa is different. . . . You can’t see the eyes of someone, and that is the opposite of what we believe communication should be like. Integration requires communication, and we don’t want to isolate each other.

Schäuble’s reaction to the veil is starkly reminiscent of Yeğenoğlu’s description of the colonial observer. ‘The veil resists the gaze and results in a loss of control’. To Yeğenoğlu, this simultaneously gives rise to a potential for resistance. In the Algerian context, the

. . . strong adherence to the veil should thus be seen in the context of resistance to colonialism. The veil came to signify not only the Algerian people’s refusal to subscribe to the dictates of French mandate and thereby to colonial subjugation, but also ‘their will to affirm their radical and irreducible difference from the Europeans, their resistance to any attempt to make them deny their own way of life and their desire to defend their besieged identity. . . . Since, within the colonial imagery, the veil was constructed as symbolizing Algeria’s refusal to reciprocate, ‘all attempts at assimilation have taken the discarding of the veil to be their primary objective’. (Yeğenoğlu, 1998: 43)

By putting Yeğenoğlu’s observations of colonial Algeria in conversation with the German situation, I am not arguing for an equation of these two, very different contexts; rather I want to point out, as others have done before (Popal, 2007), that the veil may be used as an identity marker and symbol of resistance against anti-Muslim racism. Veiling practices in contemporary Germany may also signify a ‘context of resistance’, and the more women are coerced to remove the veil, the more it is likely that they will remain attached to it. The efforts on the part of activists and politicians to make women discard the veil, and signify the veil as inimical to ‘European’ culture, meanwhile, must be understood as not merely an insistence on cultural assimilation; they are in fact efforts to eschew ‘Muslims’ from the social order.

Domestic violence vs honour crimes

The concept of honour crimes, as I introduced earlier in the article, has become an integral part of the debates on ‘Muslims’ and integration. HRV has become a subject of scientific and governmental study as well as a new source of funds for NGOs specializing in women’s rights. In fact, NGOs often play a major role in developing governance techniques for the state by providing reports and other ‘scientific’ information to legitimate government sanctions against perpetrators of HRV. For example, the German organization Terre des Femmes defines HRV as ‘a form of violence against women and girls which occurs within strongly patriarchal structured families and societies’ and which is legitimated through a sense of honour and carried out by male relatives. Because this definition would probably fit the pattern of many domestic violence cases, HRV is further defined as requiring ‘a predominantly traditional code of honour in society’ (Böhmecke, 2005: 4). While the term ‘predominantly traditional’ remains undefined, it repeats an already established link between violence and pre-modernity, which serves to racialize perpetrators as those who are per definitionem outside of modern Europe.

Another influential model for prevention and solutions to HRV in Europe is The Resource Book for Working against Honour Related Violence, published in Sweden in 2003. It defines HRV as ‘a form of violence against girls and women. . . . Honour related violence is one of the darkest aspects of strong patriarchal traditions and of failed processes of intercultural meetings’ (The Resource Book, 2003: 9). Poor immigrant families are described as especially at risk for ‘HRV’ ‘since they, instead of opening up to the new society, tend to cement their patriarchal traditions, and to pass these values and attitudes on to their sons and daughters, who will then have problems in adapting to a democratic society with gender equality as a core value’. Patriarchal violence is thus turned into an essential property of migrant culture, passed on seemingly genetically to children, and alien to the democratic gender equality that surrounds it.

Here, the definition of HRV remains fairly nebulous as an ‘aspect’ of incommensurable and unintegrable Otherness. Nevertheless, the linking of patriarchal traditions and failed interculturality is highly fertile. It enables us to locate the source of the violence in a deficient (foreign) ‘culture’, while rendering western women seemingly immune from being ‘victims of their culture’ (Narayan, 2007: 85). HRV is thereby Orientalized as an especially insidious kind of violence, which has nothing in common with ‘normal’ (‘European’) violence against women. This constitutes a radical break from earlier violence-against-women movements, movements associated with second-wave feminism, which scandalized hetero-patriarchal violence as a basic reality pervading many women’s lives. The redefinition of domestic violence as a property of ‘their culture’ can thus be read as a normalization of ‘our’ domestic violence, which now appears harmless and negligible in contrast to the hyperbolic patriarchy of other (i.e. failed) cultures. This also serves to legitimate a shift in funding structures, where HRV has emerged as the key issue of an anti-violence movement which mobilizes resources and allies that would not otherwise be available for violence prevention.

In this, it does not seem to matter that there is no knowledge base on HRV outside these culturalist assertions: the German writer of an EU report on honour killings concedes that official statistics on HRV do not exist, and cites a UN figure of annual 2000–5000 incidences in 14 countries (Böhmecke, 2005). This lack of statistics on HRV is in stark contrast to the well-documented prevalence of domestic violence in general. For example, in 2003 the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth reported that 42 percent of women over the age of 16 experienced psychological violence and 40 percent reported that they had experienced physical or sexual violence. Twenty-five percent of all women resident in Germany experience physical or sexual violence from partners.¹² Normally, these statistics would merit recognition of a public health crisis, yet they are completely absent in news reports on domestic violence, including those concerning ‘Muslims’.

Considering this context of Orientalizing and alienating violence in racialized families and communities, it may not come as a surprise that the event which became the quintessential honour killing in the Germany, the murder of Hatun Sürücü in Berlin in 2005, was never debated within a framework of domestic violence. It was a case that became instead a discussion about Muslim patriarchy and failed integration due to the impossibility of sexual emancipation for Muslim women.

Gays and feminists unite

White feminists have played a central role in inserting the veil and honour crimes into public debates on ‘Muslims’ and integration, and the Sürücü case was a perfect opportunity for gay rights activists to co-opt and instrumentalize a discourse that had already helped bring the marginalized subject of women’s rights positively into the public mainstream. The patriarchal tradition of honour related violence, as a property of the racialized, thus become the main obstacle holding both straight women and queers back from their rights to sexual and gender emancipation.

Hatun Sürücü’s story fit well with a typical modernist teleology of what a ‘Muslim’ woman’s emancipation should aspire to and yet fails at: having been forced to marry she sheds her veil and her marriage in order to become an emancipated woman. Her death allegedly at the hands of her family was rescripted not as an extraordinary event but as an already predicted outcome of the trajectory of a Muslim women’s life in contemporary Europe. This narrative became a rallying point for many in a context which had already begun to identify Islam as the cultural barrier hindering integration.

A week after the murder, Germany’s most prominent gay and lesbian lobbying group called for a rally at the site of the shooting. This heralded a new union of the gay and feminist interest groups which increasingly aligned at the political right. The Lesben-und Schwulenverband in Deutschland, or LSVD, was of interest to me due to their ongoing involvement with queer migrants and their integration to European gaydom. I have written about their growing investment in the figure of the ‘homophobic migrant’ at length elsewhere (Petzen, 2005, 2008; Haritaworn and Petzen, 2011) and will only briefly allude to this history here. In this article, I would like to stress that the organization’s newfound concern about honour crimes and violent ‘Muslim’ masculinity enabled it to perform its commitment to the liberation of women by teaming up with outspoken women’s rights activists. By inserting itself into a consolidating debate on migration and Muslim patriarchy, and cashing in on a growing anti-Muslim sentiment, the male-dominated LSVD was able to move mainstream gay rights as a wider social problem into public discourse (Haritaworn and Petzen, 2011). Haritaworn describes the new alliance thus:

Feminists, long ridiculed as hysterical man-haters, and queers, traditionally criminalized and pathologized as promiscuous perverts and threats to the family and nation, have suddenly been declared part of an Occidental tradition of ‘women’ and ‘gay-friendliness’. (Haritaworn, 2008: 6)

The LSVD has invested significant resources in order to align itself with a gendered ‘tradition’ and ‘core values’ of women’s emancipation, and develop expertise in the key areas of migration and integration. In 1999, the LSVD opened the MILES Centre, or Centre for Migrants, Lesbians and Gays (Zentrum für Migranten, Lesben und Schwule). The centre sponsors several racialized queer organizations, whose stated goal is to help migrants with the coming out process and provide other services to them. The urge to help in fact reflects a typical patronizing power imbalance. Even the title of the organization reflects what Fatima El-Tayeb calls the ‘polarity between implicit majority lesbians and gays on one hand and the implicit heterosexual “foreigners” on the other’ (El-Tayeb, 2003: 134). This anti-intersectional dichotomy is needed to legitimize the integration mission of the organization, because ‘a recognition of the permanent blending of both categories would mean the giving up of an authoritative position (the homosexuality, that will be explained to the migrants)’ (El-Tayeb, 2003: 136). It is significant, of course, that mainstream gay and lesbian organizations are offering ‘integration’ services at all. In the scramble for legitimacy and funding, white gay and lesbian organizations in Europe are racing to offer themselves as experts with gender equality and integration ‘competences’, which are vital in the project to civilize foreigners. Not only does this lend legitimacy to their remit as NGOs (a legitimacy which could never be achieved, say, by a fight against rather than for the strictures of marriage, nor by focusing political energy on working against discrimination of trans people by LGB people, or for supporting queers who suffer from poverty). Besides political power, this also gives the organization access to a new source of income from state, national and European funds supporting integration projects.

The LSVD participation in the media spectacle following Sürücü’s murder reflects the organization’s increasing investment in producing new sexual knowledges of ‘Islam’ in the quest for new sources of political capital. On 22 February, an undated press release appeared in a pop-up window on the MILES website. It was a call for a memorial rally to be held that day at the site of Sürücü’s murder:

This crime is not an isolated incident. Increasingly, serious violent crimes against women who want to free themselves from oppressive marriage and family structures are coming to light. They are abased, abused and beaten. The motive of these crimes is often an archaic understanding of family honour that excludes a self-determined life of women, or also of lesbians and gays. The criminals are usually the fathers, brothers or sons, who are often supported, pressured or hidden by other family members.

We cannot and do not accept this. It is necessary to have social solidarity and union against violence that is used openly. It must be made clear to the perpetrators that they have committed a crime; they are the enforcers of a falsely understood concept of honour. It must be signalled to the victims that they will receive sympathy, social help and support – the earlier the more helpful. It is necessary to vehemently and openly contradict moral arguments that rationalize violent crimes.

For these reasons we are calling out for a vigil on the scene of the crime. Together we want to demonstrate, that those affected by these violent crimes can be certain of our support and social solidarity. (LSVD, 2005)

The press statement was signed by several well-known politicians, not least Marielouise Beck, the same politician who had supported Muslim women’s right to veil.¹³ Although the LSVD had succeeded in obtaining high profile Turkish names for their list of signatories, there was one notable exception: the Turkish Union of Berlin-Brandenburg (TBB). The original press release led readers to infer that they were an organizing partner of the call for the vigil by including their name in the press release. In fact, it turned out that this was not the case, and the TBB quickly put out a press release expressing their astonishment that two members of their Board had been listed as signatories without permission (TBB, 2005).¹⁴ By the day of the vigil, the reference to the TBB had been removed from the LSVD website. When criticisms of the LSVD appeared in the media, its spokespeople defended themselves by declaring that they had waited for others to take action, but since no one had done anything, they had felt forced to act themselves (am Orde, 2005).

In an online documentation of the event, the LSVD outlined the reasons why it was interested in holding the vigil in the first place:

When we called for this vigil we were actually asked, what do lesbians and gays have to do with this crime? We were speechless at this question. For years we have struggled in solidarity with women for an autonomous life and so that their own life trajectories would be accepted. (LSVD, 2005)

However, one might easily ask where, when and how the LSVD had been working for women and lesbians, as the organization is dominated by men and usually develops programmes that cater to non-trans gay men. As I have written with Esra Erdem and Jin Haritaworn, ‘The Association’s sudden interest in the fate of Hatun Sürücü contrasts with its traditional indifference towards women, migrants and victims of domestic violence in lesbian or gay relationships and communities’ (Haritaworn et al., 2005).¹⁵

Another link between the gay lobbyists and feminists was Seyran Ateş, a writer, lawyer and activist who has appeared on numerous LSVD discussion panels and takes a hard line on questions of integration. A week after the vigil, the local daily tageszeitung published a page-long interview with Ateş entitled ‘Multiculturalism is irresponsible’. The interviewer was Jan Feddersen, a journalist with close ties to the LSVD. To cite from the interview:

JF: What do you see in Turkish communities that others don’t see or don’t want to see?

SA: That the idyllic impression is deceptive. That in Berlin, in Kreuzberg, for example, the colour only comes from Germans, not from Turks themselves. The Turkish culture there is gray.

JF: Do you feel threatened?

SA: Of course. Every [Turkish] woman in the West, who refuses the wishes of her family, is threatened. She always has to watch out. Intolerable, but that’s how it is. (Feddersen, 2005)

The interview presents an exchange of provocative questions and responses which shocked many in their unabashed oppressiveness. Yet this is only one example of the media’s promotion of a woman of Turkish/Kurdish parentage echoing sentiments more closely associated with a conservative white German outlook. In the years since, the exceptional migrant who has escaped from her oppressive culture and can now act as a mouthpiece for racist discourse has become a central figure in gendered scripts of Germanness. More recently, sociologist Necla Kelek supported the German Central Bank board member Thilo Sarrazin¹⁶ after his contentious interview with Lettre International in autumn 2009, during which he proclaimed that Turkish immigrants were only good for selling vegetables, and that they continually produced girls with headscarves, and that they wanted to conquer Germany with a higher birth rate. For both conservative political elites as well as many feminists, women of colour such as Ateş and Kelek have become ‘the migrant woman [who] becomes the site of transnational desire for Western eyes who seek in her the formulation of the authentic native informant’ (Desai, 2004: 33). Needless to say, other ‘Muslim’ feminists who are not willing to support these points of view rarely make it into popular media outlets.

Conclusion

Whose interests and agendas are served by the crusade to save ‘Muslim’ women? Gayatri Spivak’s oft quoted observation that colonialism is scripted as white men saving brown women from brown men, first formulated in order to describe the context of colonial India, can help us to understand the sexual politics of saving brown women and queers from brown men in the middle of Europe. As Sherene Razack notes, ‘the policing of Muslim communities in the name of gender equality is now a globally organized phenomenon’ (2004: 129).

The patronizing discourse on the disempowered ‘Muslim’ woman is aggravated by the fact that few ‘Muslim’ women are able to participate in defining the parameters of public discourse on feminism, sexuality, domestic violence and other issues. In this article, I have attempted to examine ‘the hyper-visibility of the Muslim woman’s body’, in majoritarian discourse, which, in Razack’s words, renders it ‘virtually impossible [for Muslim women] to name and confront the violence that Muslim women’ experience (2004: 130). This both makes it extremely difficult for ‘Muslim’ women to participate in the formulation of emancipatory political discourses outside a context of victimization and racialization, and downplays the political work they do under different political identities, be it as anti-racist migrants, feminists, lesbians of colour, sex workers and trans people.¹⁷ In addition, robed within a discourse of care and preservation of democracy and modernity, ‘Muslim’ families are exposed to a variety of punitive and disciplinary measures for alleged transgressions of sexual emancipation.

In the dominant script provided for the ‘Muslim’ woman, she must make a choice between being a devout ‘Muslim’ on the one hand and participating in a western-style democracy on the other (see also El-Tayeb, this issue). This choice, however, is an artificial one which itself inscribes the nation as non-Muslim. Banning the veil or denouncing Islam as the cause of domestic violence will only further entrench unequal power relations, obscure racist and neocolonial feminist and gay lobbying practices, and create divisive fissures where strength is needed. Making honour crimes and veiling the focal points of ‘Muslims’ and migrant women’s lives serves to deflect attention away from the more pressing issues of a racialized neoliberal order which is based on structural disparities affecting income, health care, education, incarceration and life expectancy. In fact, the discourse on ‘Muslims’ is a vital tool in the demarcation of a racialized class that is, as Avery Gordon notes, put aside for social death (2008: 651).

An ironic effect of this misguided activism is that violence and discrimination against more privileged people, such as non-disabled white, middle-class women or gay non-trans men, also become eclipsed and thus more difficult to address, since they are understood as having completed the work of their own emancipation (even while these promises remain empty). This has long been the case, for example, in anti-domestic violence work, where activists have had to struggle to get the point across that domestic violence occurs with the same frequency in all social, economic, sexual and ethnicized groups. If energy and resources are continually focused on projects which Orientalize violence against women as a ‘Muslim’ phenomenon, what other forms of violence – not only domestic violence but also structural racism, state surveillance, incarceration and the increasing disregard and contempt for the growing number of people living in chronic economic precarity as a result of neoliberal restructuring – are erased from the public political agenda? What might a gender politics look like that does not rely on an understanding of the emancipatory, which is itself based on a modernist teleology that is inherently based on white supremacy and will always exclude people not racialized as white? It seems to be worth exploring what an anti-modern queer feminism would look like.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I am indebted to Jin Haritaworn for the unflagging support for this project and for putting immense time and effort into providing detailed comments and feedback.

The dissertation on which this article is based received a research grant from the Berlin Programme for Advanced German and European Studies.

Notes

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