Click:api602 forged gate valve
Kübra Gümüşay (2016).Wikicommons/re:publica/Gregor Fischer. Some rights reserved. The populist radical right party, Alternative
for Germany (AfD) has been working to get to the top of the party polls since
its foundation in 2013. Currently, it is the second strongest party in Germany,
with polls which estimate that if elections were held today, the AfD would
receive 18 % of the vote (ARD, 21 September 2018). In its climb in the
popularity stakes, AfD is forming a curious range alliances with political
leaders. In the traditional political spectrum, feminists are often placed at
the left end of the continuum. However, contradicting this, feminists and
women’s organizations in Germany have of late been entering into implicit or
unintended alliances with the AfD as they make common cause against the so-called
“Islamization of Germany”. We have identified three strategies of feminist and
far-right political actors that result in the articulation of overlapping goals.
Strategy one: public defamation
as a strategy of both the far right and German Muslim women
Seyran Ateş is a self-defined female imam, the
founder of a liberal mosque, and as a lawyer a long-standing fighter for
women’s rights in Germany. She appears frequently in the media, and in public
debates, and is well-known for her statements which aim to undermine what she
sees as the regressive, anti-women, anti-gay stance of German Muslims.
Based on the well-known proverb: “The enemy of
my enemy is my friend”, the German far right is showing its solidarity with women
like Ms. Ateş in the fight against so-called radicalization and political Islam
in Germany – or, against the ‘Islamization of Germany’. Ironically, in supporting Ms. Ateş’s political
stance in an open letter on its party website, the AfD aims to attract “native”
Germans who fear Islam, using a strategy earlier adopted by public
intellectuals as well as the Pegida movement (Patriotic Europeans against the
Islamization of the Occident/West).
As the far right shows solidarity with certain
women’s rights supporters to counter the so-called ‘Islamization of Germany’,
one common strategy is to work to prevent the public engagement of specific
Muslim women who are wearing headscarves by publicly defaming them. One of their
targets has been young journalist and self-defined “intersectional feminist” Kübra
Gümüşay, a German Muslim who wears a headscarf while being politically active.
In
a recent digital petition
platform, Necla Kelek, from the women’s organization terre des femmes and Seyran Ateş announced that they wrote a
petition together in order to remove Kübra Gümüşay from
a public panel on The New Mainstream –
Far Right Ideologies and Movements in Europe (17-19 September 2018) that
was part of the German Hygiene Museum’s exhibition on racism in Dresden. They claimed
that Gümüşay allegedly supported political Islam (in their words,
“orthodox-conservative Islam”) (Note that the organizers announced that the
accusations were unsupported in a public statement. They rejected this claim, and
included Gümüşay in the panel.)
Strategy two: “Saving
Muslim women from Muslim men”
Gender
equality stands as a litmus test for immigrant inclusion in Germany. It has
become an almost universally-held liberal value, central to current human
rights concerns and dominant in policy-making language. However, gender
equality is actually difficult to define, often deriving its meaning from the
context within which it is used. Gender
equality is actually difficult to define, often deriving its meaning from the
context within which it is used.
It
is exactly this open-endedness of the concept that makes it seem so useful in
political contestations: it signals a desire for liberation and freedom while
it can be used in exclusionary ways. Terre
des femmes (women’s earth), a non-governmental women’s organization in
Germany, is deploying exactly this ambivalence between liberation and
exclusion, in order to support an old-fashioned, homogeneous feminist agenda. Terre des femmes is the major women’s organization campaigning against
violence against women in Germany, as well as sex-work and human trafficking.
They represent a feminist voice that is attracting increasing representation
from immigrant women or men who promote anti-Muslim politics, such as Seyran
Ateş who we discussed above and sociologist Necla Kelek, who is on the
executive committee of terre des femmes.
Author of several books condemning the religious practices of Turkish
immigrants in Germany, Kelek openly supported politician Thilo Sarrazin, who
wrote two books on how Germany is ‘abolishing itself’ via the (alleged) threat
of Muslim immigration and Islamization. (Both books became best sellers).
On
6 March 2018, terre des femmes organized
a film-viewing for Women’s Day whose main theme was
to teach refugees about gender equality. Around five hundred people were in the
audience, filling a cinema in central Berlin. During the panel discussion, the vice
director, Inge Bell, was moderating four speakers, one of whom was an elderly
Iraqi man who spoke only in Arabic. The Iraqi man said that the biggest problem
in his country was that women are treated as slaves and that he did not want
his daughter to be a slave. He concluded his speech with the declaration, “We
need to be liberated.”
The
discussion finished with applause from the audience. Inge Bell the moderator,
turned to the Iraqi man with a question on whether the film they had just
viewed helped to transfer “our values” to immigrants – our values standing in for gender equality. Christa Stolle, the
federal leader of terre
des femmes, then presented each of the participants with a copy of Brochmann and Dahl’s
book on women’s anatomy Viva la Vagina (2018), including the Iraqi man who
smiled shyly at the audience.
Feminists engaged with terre des femmes in previous years have
made tremendous inroads into formal politics, positioning themselves as the guardians
of gender equality. But they are also coopted into a colonial language of
“saving Muslim women from Muslim men”, which aligns them with the far right and
denies agency to women who do not agree with their kind of feminism. Thanks to
this current political stance, some of their members and supporters have left terre des femmes in protest.
We see a further iteration of this “saviour” discourse, in the last decade,
which is accusing Muslim women as being “perpetrators” of ‘Islamization in
Germany’, as shown in the first strategy, above.
Strategy
three: evoking German nativism by creating moral panic
This strategy is the most explicit alliance
between feminism and far-right politics, as it appeals directly to a large
voter base of both the radical and extremist right. In January 2018, a group of
self-defined feminists founded the120 Dezibel (120 Decibels) campaign, which
they introduced as a “genuine outcry” (wahre Aufschrei). In the summer of 2017,
its leading actor, Paula Winterfeldt, stated at a rally held by the extremist right
Identitäre Bewegung (Identity
Movement) in Berlin that she
yearned for a return to the “good old days” when German women carried
“deodorant spray instead of pepper spray in their bags”. The group’s founding
members now invoke this increase in everyday sexism against German women by
calling themselves 120 Dezibel, the volume level of pocket alarms. For them, both
pepper spray and 120-decibel pocket alarms symbolize the alarming risks of
everyday sexism to German women since Northern African and Muslim refugees
crossed the German border. German chancellor Angela Merkel’s inauguration of a German
‘welcome culture’ in late summer 2015 triggered the rumour that white German women
are at an increased risk of violence. For instance, the far-right monthly
Compact magazine headed its February 2016 issue, “Fair game woman: The bad
ending of welcome culture”.
The radical right AfD and other extremist right
actors have subsequently spread the 120 Dezibel campaign via their online
channels. The AfD politician Leyla Bilge, a convert from Islam to Christianity,
claims
to have emigrated from Idil (Turkey) in 1974 because Muslims were violently
chasing Christians (in the pre-election period of the 1974 local elections the
Aramean mayor of Idil was killed, allegedly by supporters of the Muslim
contender).
Reflecting the alliance strategy of coopting women
who can claim first-hand experience as Muslims (even when converted or
atheist), Bilge organized a Women’s March on February 17, 2018 in Berlin. She states
that ‘the German’ has to be shaken into a rage against “the deluded elites”
(media and politics) if the German nation (read: women) is to be protected from
Muslim men. In this way, the 120 Dezibel campaign speaks to and very much
reflects an overlapping populist discourse from the German far right, about the
need to counter morally inferior elites in the name of the general national
will. For them: German borders need to be sealed against any further entry of
Muslim or North African immigrants and the internal ‘invasion by Islam’ halted
immediately, if German women are to be safeguarded from Muslim men who pose a
serious pollution threat to the pure German Volkskörper
(the pure German body).
Calling themselves, “The daughters of Europe”, the
120 Dezibel campaigns speak to an anti-Muslim discourse by creating public fear
of Muslim men as criminals, while simultaneously promoting a victimized Muslim
women stereotype. Their supporters tweet #No Hijab Day in German social media: “(there)…are
still imprisoned in Iran women who defend themselves against forced veiling.
Real solidarity would mean taking off the headscarf for a day.”
While 120 Dezibel is appealing to German young
women who connect to the world through social media, Ring Nationaler Frauen (the National Women’s Circle), the extremist
right National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD)’s women organization, try to
bring back German nativism by referring to Trümmerfrauen,
women who worked in the rebuilding of Germany after WWII. A number of the AfD’s
2017 federal election posters reduce women’s task to the topoi of reproduction,
sexuality (as channeled via the liberal freedom of nudity as opposed to
illiberal Islam), and nativist diversity (German regional folklore and history).
Indeed, a look at the AfD party programme finds women’s issues associated with
opposition to the headscarf, gender ideology and quotas, and reproduction
framed as activism against ‘misled feminists’ who value working women, yet
devalue the traditional family, i.e. women who deliberately chose to care for
their family as housewives.
On the extremist right end of the spectrum, we find
accounts that essentialize women even further, by referencing their Germanic roots.
This includes a romantic remembrance of Germanic times before Christianization,
entering from ‘the Orient’, invaded the Occident (middle and northern Europe).
Allegedly, Christianization infiltrated an Oriental women’s silencing culture into
Germania. Such a view postulates that native women are images of the Germanic
(female) god Frauja, powerful though
loving wives and mothers who defend Germania “with shields and swords”. As
such, it is unsurprising that the far right’s recent invocations of German
women’s past largely circle around the myth of the Valkyrie – Germanic (Nordic) women generally portrayed as
powerful, white, blonde and tall.
Interestingly, radical and extremist streams of
the German far right unite in an exclusionary oscillating between civic
(liberal values-based) and nativist (ethnically-based) nationalism when
addressing feminist politics, while the extremist right tends to revert to
nativism more frequently. The third strategy focuses on the perceived
victimization of white German women but then returns to anti-feminist tropes of
women as carers of the nation, while asking them to recall their actual power
as ethnic descendants of Frauja. If
they accepted their Germanic roots, white German women would care for their
‘traditional family’ as loving mothers and wives, while defending the nation’s
survival as their husbands’ comrades.
Together, the sense of Muslim ‘pollution’ as a social threat combined
with a female power exclusive to ‘us natives’, facilitates intense feelings of
the need to act now, based on a ‘German’ value system or ethnic culture
that celebrates Germany’s (and German
children’s) festive rebirth.
German
Muslim women reclaim feminism
German Muslim women have initiated a number of ways
of countering these strategies. Journalist Kübra Gümüşay, the subject of the
petition that aimed to prevent her from speaking out against the far-right, is
an example of a new generation of young German Muslim women who disrupt the
connections made throughout anti-headscarf arguments, in which feminism
provides both a clear-cut analysis of the headscarf as oppressing women and a
clear-cut solution, namely that it should be banned. She is not the only German
Muslim woman who combines her religiosity with a new understanding of
Germanness, a feeling of being at home in Germany, that is not based on blood
or ancestry but based on civic participation to German society.
Young German Muslim women like Gümüşay publicly
confront feminists who claim a homogeneous understanding of feminism for
themselves, without paying attention to other forms of feminism. For example, the
high-brow German weekly newspaper, Die
Zeit reported in 2011 that Saliha Kubilay, a young Muslim woman, asked
veteran German feminist Alice Schwarzer during a public discussion at a
university: “Where in the feminist movement did you stop progressing so as to
fail to grasp to this day that Islamic feminism has been long present in Germany?”.
Kubilay argued that Schwarzer’s brand of feminism ignored the diversity of
feminist perspectives in Germany. In doing so, Kubilay showed how
postcoloniality inflects Germany’s feminist debates. By claiming the feminist
frame as her own, Kubilay suggests that feminism is not in the gift of white western
women, but that there is a synergy between immigration, postcolonialism and
feminism in Germany. People of color, Muslim women and others are claiming
feminism for themselves. But they are often confronted with public defaming, as
well as active protectionist and exclusionist strategies to prevent Muslim
women from public participation in democratic events. People of color, Muslim women and others are claiming feminism for
themselves.
In her public struggle as the first woman to
bring the headscarf debate before the German Constitutional Court in 2004, a
history teacher Fereshta Ludin, offers yet another take on feminism, arguing
that she did not fight to wear her headscarf, but for self-determination over
her own body. She claimed her own liberation, refusing to be emancipated
through a governance feminism that equates uncovering with freedom. Such varied
articulations of feminism, postcoloniality and wearing headscarves do not
resonate with an anti-Muslim or anti-Islamization feminism. See the veteran
feminist Alice
Schwarzer’s magazine Emma, which
publishes articles associating headscarf-wearing women with radicalization and
political Islam and ridiculing their feminism. In fact, Übermedien, a media-watch
magazine, reported
that this magazine’s readership had become increasingly far-right.
Headscarves
The headscarf continues to be the piece of
cloth over which ‘whose feminism is right?’ battles are fought. Betül Ulusoy, a
legal scholar who was denied an internship at the reception desk of a Berlin municipality
because of her headscarf, is frequently asked why she still wears it. She
denies doing so because she is a true-believer, or because her family is pressuring
her to wear it. She frames her argument instead in the classic terms of feminist
liberation: "This means that a woman must decide for herself, whether she
wears a mini skirt or a scarf. This decision is then neither negotiable nor
evaluated by outsiders. It is her freedom alone." (Ulusoy’s Blog).
Contrary to the common media hype in Germany that Muslim women are wearing
headscarves because they are pressured by their families to do so, Betül shows
us that wearing the headscarf means her self-determination over her body as a
woman. This controversy, denying employment to Betül Ulusoy in a municipality
in Berlin state because of her headscarf, does not only appear from the outset
as a controversy between religion and secularity, but also reverberates with
the fundamental question of whether women have self-determination over their
bodies in Europe.
Betül Ulusoy und Riem Spielhaus diskutieren, 2015. Wikicommons/re:publica/Gregor Fischer. Some rights reserved.This controversy reverberates
with the fundamental question of whether women have self-determination over
their bodies in Europe.
The colonial gaze
Women’s embodiment continues to be hotly
contested in these struggles over feminism, liberation, and who get to stand
for being German. Long-standing colonial tropes of unveiling women as
liberation are clearly powerful in German debates. Many have argued that the
nudity of colonialized women served as a spectacle for the European public
during the colonial era; currently, in the German media, uncovering women is
celebrated as a sign of Muslim women’s integration into a gender-equal European
society. Women’s embodiment continues to be hotly contested in these struggles
over feminism, liberation, and who get to stand for being German.
As Michigan anthropologist Damani Partridge
argues, in the German context, wearing headscarves is placed in sharp contrast
with female nudity and sexual accessibility in public. Such a contrast is displayed in
advertisements (the nude model ads in the subway stations that Partridge
analyzes) and election campaigns in 2017, where the AfD posted gigantic posters
of young slender women with tiny bikinis walking on the beach throughout the
country with the slogan: “Burkas? We stand for Bikinis!”
In May 2011, Sıla Şahin became the first
Turkish-German film actress to pose nude in Playboy. Deutsche Welle (2011),
Germany’s international broadcaster, asked whether this was the ultimate act of
integration, and Şahin responded that she was, indeed, liberated by posing nude
(“Breasts with Migration Background” Die Zeit, April 19, 2011). Playing on this
desire to witness women’s unveiling, Fereshta Ludin’s autobiography was
entitled “Enthüllung der Fereshta Ludin” (The Unveiling of Fereshta Ludin,
2015). On the cover, she pretends to take off her headscarf. Şahin’s appearance
in Playboy and Ludin’s cynical book cover bring home to us how the colonial
gaze on Muslim women remains a dominant trope that resonates well with the
general public.
Women’s organizations in Germany play a very
important intermediary role in strengthening the far right’s strategies in the
unveiling regime. In some ways, they play the role of mediating between two
worlds; those who argue for strengthening a nativist German public
understanding of women’s rights, such as the radical right politics of the AfD
and those who are arguing for a diverse German feminism, which includes Muslim
women with and without headscarves.
Breaking down the cooptation – Inclusion and #No Excuses
The perverse alliance of feminism and the far
right clearly fails to address major ongoing relevant issues: 1) the historical
colonial and exploitative relations between the global North and the global
South – the destruction, appropriation in colonial and neocolonial contexts,
the political support by the global north of corrupt political regimes in the
global south, as well as the export of weapons that sustain highly destructive,
never-ending wars; and 2) the ongoing, unaddressed, racialized sexism and
sexual violence perpetrated by immigrant and nonimmigrant alike across European
societies – violence against women, children, members of LGBTQI communities,
heteronormativity, sexism, and gender inequalities.
Following Deniz Kandiyoti’s (2016) plea in openDemocracy
for understanding
violence against women in its larger political context, feminism’s
cooptation by the far right must be situated within the critical historical
moment that finds us caught up in the debates on immigrant and refugee
integration in Europe. A further question to ask is how anti-Muslim racism must
be linked historically to other forms of racism and colonialism if we are to
make sense of the alliance between feminism and the far right. Only through
such a political framework will we be able to fully grasp the relations between
contemporary racism and sexism and then to challenge them.
Alternative
feminisms
Alternative forms of feminism should be
strengthened, and encouraged to create spaces of equity and inclusion in
Germany. A good example of this is the Internet campaign #aufschrei (outcry) started by a young
feminist, Anne Wizorek and her friends in
2013. Similar to #metoo, the campaign
started as a response to the everyday sexism they experienced in German
society, calling on women to break their silence against sexist comments
in Germany.
Anne Wizorek, 2014. Wikicommons/re:publica/Sandra Schink. Some rights reserved. But their public statements were downplayed by
German men, including the previous German president, Joachim
Gauck, who labeled their campaign against sexism “Tugendfuror” (literally, “virtue furore”),
an obscure word which may be interpreted as hysteria,
thus downplaying sexism and violence against women in German society, and playing
up women’s over-emotionality.
Building on Wizorek’s 2013 #aufschrei campaign, journalist Kübra Gümüşay, along
with several other prominent intersectional feminists from various fields, started
a new internet campaign, #ausnahmslos (without exception). Gümüşay pointed out that while there
is violence against women in Muslim communities, German society should be able
to discuss this violence against women without resorting to the racializing
discourse of the far right.
Such a racializing discourse commonly
stereotypes Muslim men as violent criminals and Muslim women as submissive
victims, and more recently, portrays Muslim women as the agents of Islamization
of Germany. What Gümüşay suggests is that everyone should be treated as though
they are already full members of German society, including being punished for
sexual violence and including having the right to protection from such
violence, regardless of ethnic or immigrant background.
The #ausnahmslos
campaign thus called for full participation, with the rights and
obligations of native citizens being extended to immigrants and refugees. The
question is whether these campaigns and strategies will outweigh the increasing
power of the implicit and explicit alliances by far-right actors and certain
anti-Muslim German feminists.
Note:
This paper was previously presented at the Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center
for International Affairs Conference on “Populism and Democracy” at Tuft University’s European Center in Talloires,
France, 15-17 June 2018. We thank the conference organizers and participants
for their feedback.