National Politics and Sexuality in Transregional Perspective

The Homophobic Argument

Achim Rohde, Christina von Braun, Stefanie Schüler-Springorum

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781472482648
• eBook ISBN: 9781317090007
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

National Politics and Sexuality in Transregional Perspective explores how modern identity politics around the world are gendered and sexualized in multiple ways. Constructions of the imagined collective "self" often contain references to a heteronormative order, whereas relevant internal or external "others" are often felt to deviate from this order through their gendered or sexual practices. By contrast, some Western countries have witnessed the evolution of LGBTQI-friendly discourses by certain political actors in recent years, often in the context of the post-9/11 culture wars.

This pathbreaking book focuses on perceptions of "self" and "other" in Europe, the Middle East and North Africa from a gendered perspective. It deals with anti-LGBTQI as well as LGBTQI-friendly aspects of modern culture and politics in countries within these regions, focusing on the functions such discursive markers play in nationalist and racist imageries, in discourses legitimizing class differences from the nineteenth century to the present day, including globalized discourses in the context of 9/11 and its aftermath. It shows that discourses on sexuality and gendered performances in everyday life often undermine the stability of such binary constructions, as they point to the multiplicity, ambivalence and the indeterminate character of individual and collective identities under conditions of modernity. Addressing contemporary identity politics both in a wider historical context and within a transregional comparative framework thus helps to discern differences and similarities between different world regions and serves to dislocate essentialized notions of cultural differences based on gender and sex. This book will appeal to those with an interest in Political Sociology, Gender Studies, and Globalisation.

Part I

Europe

1A post-progressive nation

Homophobia, Islam, and the new social question in the Netherlands¹

Paul Mepschen

Sexual democracy in the Netherlands

In recent decades, the Netherlands has witnessed a shift in the social location of gay politics as it relates to the rise of anti-multiculturalism in Europe (Bracke 2012; Jivraj & De Jong 2011; Mepschen et al. 2010; Wekker 2009, 2016). LGBTQIA rights and discourses are employed to frame Western Europe as the “avatar of both freedom and modernity” (Butler 2008, 2) but to depict its Muslim citizens, especially, as backwards and homophobic. In the words of the queer theorist Jasbir Puar (2007), who coined the term “homonationalism,” gay rights have been recast as an “optic, and an operative technology” in the production and disciplining of Muslim Others (see also Rahman 2014). Cases of homophobia among Muslim citizens are highlighted, treated as archetypal, and cast within Orientalist narratives that underwrite the superiority of European secular modernity. Homophobia is increasingly represented as peripheral in Dutch culture. Central to this process of representing Dutch culture is a political and social anxiety about the recent achievement of sexual democracy, that is, the extension of full civil rights to citizens who do not conform to heterosexual “normality.” As Fassin and Salcedo (2015) argue:

We live in societies that claim to define their own laws and norms immanently, from within, and no longer from above or beyond, through some transcendent principle (be it God, Nature, or Tradition). This self- definition extends to sex; indeed, sex has become a primary battleground in our societies as it raises the question of the limits of this democratic logic: Does it apply everywhere, to everything, or is sex an exception? This accounts for the political battles about sexual liberty and equality – from same-sex marriage to violence against women, sexual harassment, prostitution, and pornography. Sex becomes our ultimate democratic truth.

(2015, 1118)

Sexual democracy thus raises important questions concerning political democracy and citizenship in pluralistic societies. Sexual liberty is incorporated into a cultural protectionist discourse that associates it with secularism and liberalism, and pits it against the allegedly backward cultures and religions of post-immigrant citizens, especially Muslims. In commenting on the intellectual and activist travels of the concept of homonationalism, Jasbir Puar (2013, 337) argues that it is not simply a synonym for gay racism. Similarly, “sexual nationalist” denotes not an identity that scholars and activists can attribute to those with whom they disagree but, rather, a political lens through which many people view political and sexual dynamics in Europe and the United States. In this chapter, I analyze the discourse of sexual nationalism in the case of the Netherlands beyond its articulation in far-right or right-wing populist neo-nationalism. Sexual nationalism is, in my view, an element of a culturalist discourse that expresses a way of thinking that carves Dutch society up into distinct, internally homogeneous, and delimited cultures and represents autochthonous Dutch culture as a threatened entity that must be protected from the cultures and moralities of minoritized and racialized outsiders (Mepschen 2016, 23). However, I shall argue that important elements of this culturalist perspective on sexuality are also found in progressive circles, and they even play a role in shaping liberal and progressive subjectivities.

In an attempt to understand the power and performativity of Dutch sexual nationalism, I shall look critically in this chapter at my conversations with the liberal Muslim Ahmed Marcouch, an MP for the social-democratic Labor Party (PvdA), about homophobia, sexual liberty, and religion. Part and parcel of a broader research project on the culturalization of citizenship and the politics of “autochthony” in the Netherlands (Mepschen 2010; 2016a; 2016b), these conversations highlight a number of pivotal conundrums in the analysis of sexual politics in the Netherlands today. I zoom in on Marcouch’s political discourse because it represents broader developments in Dutch society. First of all, I understand it as an aspect of a broader post-progressive discourse in the Dutch Left; second, I see his discourse as representative of what the sociologist Justus Uitermark has called “civil Islam” (2012). While I focus, empirically, on a single case study, I place the case of Ahmed Marcouch in broader political and social developments in the Netherlands today: the culturalization of citizenship; the rise of a “new social question” surrounding immigration and migrant integration; and the transformation of the Left.

In recent years, scholars have pointed to the centrality of sexuality in constructing majoritarian Dutchness as secular, and the extent of secularization in Dutch society is indeed remarkable. In one generation, the Netherlands has transformed itself from one of the most religious societies in the world to one of its most secular (Van Rooden 2004; Verkaaik 2009). As secular ideologies and practices have grown increasingly important in Dutch cultural practices of belonging and identity, religious practices and ideologies have been framed as out of sync with liberal secular morality, as bastions of deviant cultural alterity. Muslims, or those with Muslim backgrounds, have been the most conspicuous targets in recent years of what Sarah Bracke refers to as “secular nostalgia,” in which certain groups are represented as trespassing on a secular moral landscape and distorting the perception of a unified, secular, and morally progressive nation (Bracke 2012; Mepschen & Duyvendak 2012; Wekker 2016).

Oskar Verkaaik and Rachel Spronk (2011) have advocated an anthropological, ethnographic approach to secularism and secularity. Their argument builds on the work of the feminist historian Joan Scott, who developed the notion of “sexularism” to describe the ways in which secularism plays out in the intimate spheres of desire, sexuality, and the body. Sexularism includes the assumption that secularism “encourages the free expression of sexuality and that it thereby ends the oppression of women because it removes transcendence as the foundation for social norms and treats people as autonomous individuals, agents capable of crafting their own destiny” (Scott 2009, 1). According to this perspective, secularism has broken the hold of tradition and religious particularism and ushered in an era of individualism, rationalism, and sexual liberation. Thus, secularism is understood in public discourse to be neutral and modern and, at the same time, intimately connected with gender equality and sexual freedom.

However, as Scott argues, such simple dichotomies between the religious and the secular and the traditional and the modern must be brought into question. For, secularism is not a sufficiently historical explanation for the “admittedly more open, flexible kinds of sexual relations that have gained acceptance in some countries of the West in recent years” (Scott 2009, 6). I agree. The explanatory relationship between secularization and the increase in sexual freedom cannot be taken for granted because other factors are at play. In other words, religion and secularism – faith and secularity – are not separate spheres. Rather than taking secularization “as the standard intrinsic to modernity,” the rise of secularity must be understood as redefining the place, role, and understanding of religion in society (Meyer 2012). For, the dominance of secularism and the secular nostalgia that construes religious people as cultural Others transform religious practices, emotions, and modes of binding (Meyer 2012; Beekers 2015). My analysis in this chapter of Dutch sexual politics demonstrates one way in which the relationship of religion and secularity has transformed in post-progressive times.

A post-progressive nation

The analysis of sexual nationalism brings into focus the “dynamics of power” at work in discussions in the Dutch civil sphere about the integration of immigrant communities and the nation’s moral and sexual order (Uitermark 2012). The culturalist position is dominant there (Uitermark et al. 2014), and the pundits of culturalist politics see themselves as rebelling against the entrenchment in public administration and political debate of a leftist and relativist approach to cultural diversity and integration (Prins 2004; Uitermark et al. 2014). Policies pertaining to minorities have traditionally been the province of moderately left-leaning pragmatists who have tried to deal with integration issues as pragmatically as possible through a combination of paternalism and management (Uitermark 2012). By taking a managerial approach focused on regulation, dialog, and conflict resolution, they attempted throughout the 1990s to prevent the politicization of these issues. It is against this sort of pragmatism, and an alleged lack of political debate on immigration and integration, that culturalists, from Frits Bolkestein in the 1990s to Fortuyn, Hirsi Ali, and Wilders in the 2000s and 2010s, have rebelled.²

Culturalists have emphasized the so-called “Judeo-Christian” roots of Dutch and European, society and the need, in light of the growing presence of Muslims, to guard these roots with tough stances on immigration, Islam, and integration (Van den Hemel 2014; Geschiere 2009b). In the eyes of culturalists, the presence of Muslims in postcolonial Europe marks the end of the secular contract. They ground their post-secular appeal to Judeo-Christian roots precisely on the notion that particular religious values are needed to safeguard society from the practices and ideas of minoritized Others, especially Muslims (Van den Hemel 2014, 28). It is through this dynamic that Dutch culturalist nationalism, in its various articulations, has appropriated some of the central achievements of the progressive and radical politics of the recent past: for example, women’s and lesbian and gay emancipation, secularism, and individualism.

This is not to say that culturalists have a purely instrumental view of these progressive values or, as Oudenampsen (2013) seems to suggest, that progressive principles play only a minor role in the neo-nationalist project. Oskar Verkaaik (2009, 91), for instance, reports that lesbian and gay emancipation was the subject most discussed in the naturalization ceremonies that he studied. Still, I agree with Oudenampsen that it is important to understand the essentialism underlying the nationalist construction of Dutch society. Cultural nationalists abstract liberal achievements in gender and sexual emancipation from the processes in which they were embedded and understand them not as products of an ongoing contingent, historical, progressive social struggle but as inherently Dutch. That is to say, they naturalize them. Therefore, Oudenampsen argues, Dutch neo-nationalism should be called “post-progressive”:

While progressive values are assimilated in post-progressive discourse, the ideal of progress itself is discarded. The idea of a fluctuating but persistent progression on the field of social equality and civil liberties has been replaced with cultural essentialism: progressive values are given a static quality, they are seen as ingrained in Dutch culture, something that must be conserved, and defended from threats from without.

(Oudenampsen 2013)

This essentialism with respect to progressive politics plays an important role in the politics of citizenship. The growth in popularity of sexual nationalism relies on neoliberal constructions of subjectivity, and it seems to me that post-progressive sexual nationalism has become possible exactly because of the neoliberal emphases on individual autonomy and responsibility, choice, and personal advancement. Indeed, Willem Schinkel and Friso van Houdt (2010) have argued that the amalgamation of neoliberalism, nationalism, and cultural assimilationism is a new form of governmentality, which they call “neoliberal communitarianism,” a mode of governing populations and a process of subject-formation that is simultaneously individualizing and homogenizing and that is grounded in the entanglement of a number of historically progressive values – for example, individual autonomy, secularism, free sexual object-choice – which are represented in communitarian, nationalist terms. In short, this sort of discourse focuses on the formation of an exclusionary community of individualized and individually responsible people who are made into “lean” consumer-citizens (Sears 2005).

Post-progressivism, therefore, is neither conservative nor progressive but must be seen as part of a neoliberal project of producing individually responsible subjects. Alan Sears (2005) has used the notion of “lean citizenship” in arguing that it is no coincidence that in a large number of Western countries lesbians and gays have won full citizenship in the current neoliberal period, which is marked by a transformation from a Fordist welfare state to a post-Fordist “lean state” that prioritizes market morality. While not denying the power of political mobilization or the importance of patient and resilient social struggle, Sears has pointed out that neoliberalism has made a certain amount of sexual freedom possible, as the state moved away from established practices for the ethical and cultural formation of the population while enabling a market rationality and morality that frames human relations and human needs in terms of individual agency. Market rationality, in other words, often undermines conservative moralizing (Drucker 2015, 228). Peter Drucker notes that middle-class lesbian and gay identities, anchored in consumption and embodying the liberal values of self-fashioning, autonomy, and individual freedom, are not at odds with market rationality and morality.

As such, the ascent of neoliberalism has been...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: National politics and sexuality in transregional perspective: The homophobic argument
• Part I Europe
• Part II Middle East/North Africa
• Index