Suchergebnisse

Weber contributes to the ongoing scholarly discussion about Islam in the West, demonstrating how current thinking about gender violence prohibits the intellectual inquiry necessary to act against such violence, and analyzes ways in which Muslim women participate in the public sphere by thematizing violence in literature, art, and media

Despite the recent wave of scholarship on intersectionality, as well as a surge in feminist scholarship on Islam in German feminist studies, feminist research has yet to adequately engage with the role of religion in intersectionality. In this article the author draws on the work of the Aktionsbündnis muslimischer Frauen in Germany to explore the possibility for incorporating religion and faith into intersectional frameworks, which requires attention to women of color theorizing in German feminisms, recognition of ways in which religions and forms of secularism have been racialized, and recognition of affective attachment to faith.

Fereshta Ludin's struggle to be appointed as a public school teacher while wearing a hijab received massive media attention in Germany, while the xenophobically motivated murder of Marwa el-Sherbini, who was eventually dubbed the "hijab martyr" internationally, elicited muted response. Yet interpreting the reactions to these two cases together reveals much about the existence of racism and Islamophobia in contemporary Germany. In this article I juxtapose the public discussions of these two cases to consider the potential for a critique of headscarf discourse. I suggest that interrogation of headscarf discourse is only possible by turning the very notion of critique against itself in order to interrogate the conditions of secularism.

In recent years several bestselling autobiographies in Germany have reinforced a discourse in which domestic violence in immigrant communities is attributed to a backward, Muslim culture. The media as well as the German state turn to authors such as Necla Kelek and Seyran Ateş as "experts" who claim the right to represent immigrant women's concerns, but their prominence obscures activists' attempt to end both domestic violence and forms of cultural racism. This article contextualizes these autobiographies in a larger discourse of modernity that presumes secularism serves to regulate violence. I then analyze the discursive strategies employed by Kelek and Ateş, and juxtapose their narratives with Fadela Amara's description of the French group Ni Putes ni Soumises (Neither Whores nor Submissives). I argue that the popularity of narratives portraying violence against women as necessarily and intrinsically a part of Islam functions to silence many activists of immigrant heritage, preventing effective activism against violence as well as productive alliances between groups fighting violence in multiple forms. (BMW)