Since Trump came to power, he has undertaken a series of executive actions meant to threaten and terrorize a multitude of 'others': immigrants, Muslims, women, African Americans, Native Americans, ...transgender people. The defensively aggressive strategies of deportation, walls, and internal violence aim to define who belongs within the U.S. national territory and protect a threatened white masculinity which is portrayed as both victim and victor. Women and allies have been at the forefront of voicing opposition to Trumpism by organizing one of the largest marches in U.S. history on the day after inauguration and continue to resist through strikes, demonstrations, and other actions. They are raising their voices against the walls, hatred, and deportations embedded in the global turn to the right and attempting to embrace an intersectional feminism that recognizes racial, ethnic, religious, class, and other differences. Yet, in the protest signs and the embodied experience of the 21 January march itself, there were also spiraling redefinitions of what it means to be woman, what it means to be 'American,' and whether that is an aspirational goal or the terms of nationalist exclusion, settler colonialism, and imperial feminism. Intersectional feminism does not come easily and its challenges are manifest in some of the iconic symbols of the women's movement - from the Muslim Woman in the U.S. flag hijab to pink pussy hats. We find spaces of protest fraught but crucial sites of for forging forms of solidarity that are radical in their feminist formulations.
Full text
Available for:
BFBNIB, NUK, PILJ, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK
In the midst of the current global turn to the right, striking resonances across oceans emerge: strongmen and their allies point to specific and vivid tales or images signaling demographic shifts as ...signs of danger. These could be lesbian farmers (supposedly) staging a takeover of the US Midwest, tales of virtuous headscarf-wearing women under attack by secular men (in Turkey), or of Muslim Romeos luring Hindu women to convert (in India). In each of these cases, the story lodges in the body and takes on a life of its own, inspiring fear and devotion, and centering the need for a heroic rescue. Here, we argue for the need for feminist engagement with political narratives about population change and point to the important work that fantastical stories focused on demographically based fears have done for the recent rise of right-wing politics in the United States, India, and Turkey. We refer to these stories as demographic fever dreams to emphasize their simultaneous obsession with demography and detachment from demographic data. Our analysis shows that demographic fever dreams deploy gendered tropes to create a narrative of vulnerability for dominant groups in relation to a takeover by religious, racial, and sexual others. Attending to the discursive constitution of demographic fever dreams in media and by political leaders in each context, we examine how they effectively invoke populist fears and identify which bodies become threatening and which ones need protection. We show that Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Donald Trump in the United States, and Narendra Modi in India have all deployed an imaginary of an authentic nation under threat—whether that is racialized as the white working class in the United States or given religious inflection as authentically Sunni in Turkey and authentically Hindu in India. This imaginary becomes a fetishized group under threat from all manner of others threatening demographic destruction. In each of these instances, we argue that figures with political power use a vivid and fantastic fiction to amplify, imagine, and obscure demographic patterns of migration, birth, or mortality so as to consolidate political power or to dismiss and undermine class tensions and create fictitious communities of homogeneity. Thus, demographic fever dreams effectively produce a rationale for strongman masculinity and contribute to the retrenchment of nationalist values.
Recent calls for new geographies of religion draw attention to how religion shapes the formation of subjectivity. Focusing on pious Muslim women's new veiling practices in Istanbul, I chart possible ...geographical analyses not only of religion but also of secularism as the two phenomena intersect and compete with one another in complex and often contradictory ways. I approach veiling as a gendered embodied spatial practice that reveals the intertwined production of bodies and subjectivities. Social meanings, the wider political context and spatial regimes that govern everyday life, as well as individual experiences, shape the production of corporeal piety. For the case I analyze, the hegemonic ideology of secularism, the highly politicized issue of veiling, and the informal and formal restrictions on the headscarf all come into play. This analysis offers new insights about the geographies of the body, subjectivity, and the city by highlighting the significant role religion and secularism play in their production.
Full text
Available for:
BFBNIB, DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
The concept of post-secularism has come to signify a renewed attention to the role of religion within secular, democratic public spheres. Central to the project of post-secularism is the integration ...of religious ways of being within a public arena shared by others who may practice different faiths, practice the same faith differently, or be non-religious in outlook. As a secular state within which Sunni Islam has played an increasingly public role, Turkey is a prime site for studying new configurations of religion, politics, and public life. Our 2013 research with devout Sunni Muslim women in Istanbul demonstrates how the big questions of post-secularism and the problem of pluralism are posed and navigated within the quotidian geographies of homes, neighborhoods, and city spaces. Women grapple with the demands of a pluralistic public sphere on their own terms and in ways that traverse and call into question the distinction between public and private spaces. While mutual respect mediates relations with diverse others, women often find themselves up against the limits of respect, both in their intimate relations with Alevi friends and neighbors, and in the anonymous spaces of the city where they sometimes find themselves subject to secular hostility. The gendered moral order of public space that positions devout headscarf-wearing women in a particular way within diverse city spaces where others may be consuming alcohol or wearing revealing clothing further complicates the problem of pluralism in the city. We conclude that one does not perhaps arrive at post-secularism so much as struggle with its demands.
•The project of post-secularism hinges on the form of pluralism in the public sphere.•Findings are based on focus groups with devout women in Istanbul in 2013.•Respect mediates relations with others across public/private spaces but has limits.•Devout women may be uncomfortable with other lifestyles (alcohol) in shared spaces.•Post-secularism is not an achieved state but a project, a struggle with its demands.
Full text
Available for:
GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK
The concept of encounter has long been central to a cosmopolitan ethos in which coming together in urban public space is expected to yield tolerance and pluralism. More recently scholars have ...reworked this concept to account for not only what is potentially transformative in encounters but also how encounters are conditioned by and productive of relations of power and inequality. Our study contributes to this reworking, and to feminist critiques of space and politics, by centring the spatiality of encounter in the entanglement of neighbours. Drawing on our focus group research (2013–2016) with Alevis and Sunnis in Istanbul and Malatya, we argue that difficult questions of difference, responsibility, and power come to the fore in neighbour relations. While our study underlines how Sunni supremacism and Alevi precarity are constituted in the everyday lives of neighbours, we also find that there is a transformational potential in these encounters that is not fully (re)absorbed into structures of Alevi–Sunni difference. We argue that, across the blurry boundaries of home and neighbourhood spaces, the unbidden intimacies of living in proximity (the drift of smells and sounds, the lines of sight that connect balconies and windows, the presence of neighbours at the thresholds and in the spaces of each other's homes) mean that encounters between neighbours both fuel and trouble the marking out of what is shared and what is separate, what is tolerable and what crosses a line. Our study thereby advances an understanding of the space of encounter, the making of difference, and the political and ethical significance of this entanglement.
Short
Our study advances an understanding of the space of encounter, the making of difference, and the political and ethical significance of this entanglement. Drawing on our focus group research (2013–2016) with Alevis and Sunnis in Istanbul and Malatya, we argue that questions of difference, responsibility, and power come to the fore in encounters between neighbours. While our study underlines how Sunni supremacism and Alevi precarity are constituted in the everyday lives of neighbours, we also find that there is a transformational potential in these encounters that is not fully absorbed into structures of Alevi‐Sunni difference.
Full text
Available for:
BFBNIB, DOBA, FZAB, GIS, IJS, IZUM, KILJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBMB, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
The headscarf continues to be a highly charged political issue in Turkey where it is often understood through the prism of the opposition between so-called Islamists versus secularists. My work ...brings together feminist scholarship on the politics of everyday space and recent rethinking of the categories of secularism and religion. I begin by situating this politicized debate in the everyday material contexts of the public square, the street, and the mall. By introducing popular culture (notably the film Büşra) and my own fieldwork on the veil, I argue that the headscarf represents the intersection of politics of place and individual agency in a way that renders ideological debates contingent on everyday practices. Reducing the headscarf to a sign of Islamism fails to take into account the ever-shifting meanings of this object across time and space. The differences within and between the everyday urban sites I examine reveal much more complex, often contradictory, and discontinuous geographies of secularism and Islam. This analysis reveals a multiplicity that belies attempts to delineate clearly bounded spaces, subjects, and ideologies, one that is intimate and political.
Full text
Available for:
BFBNIB, NUK, PILJ, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK
In this paper, we critically approach the idea of “saving Muslim women” by examining two prominent judgments by the Supreme Court of India and their attendant debates: Mohammad Ahmed Khan vs. Shah ...Bano Begum and Others 1985 AIR 945, popularly known as the Shah Bano judgment and Shayara Bano vs. Union of India And Others WP(C) No.118 of 2016, popularly known as the Triple Talaq (divorce) judgment. Using the frameworks of feminist geopolitics, femonationalism, and feminist geolegality, we analyze the debates around the Shah Bano and Triple Talaq judgments, looking at how the state employs and often usurps the narrative of gender equality and women's rights for its own purposes. We highlight how laws ostensibly for the protection of Muslim women (and the discourses that surround them) have the effect of strengthening the Hindu nationalist state, and furthering masculinist state building and territory making. By focusing debates on the categories of Muslim men and women, the law becomes a means to resolve the “problem” of Muslims in India.
Full text
Available for:
GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK
Mosques in Europe have been at the center of (geo)political debates about terrorism, radicalism, and the integration of Muslim communities. Mainstream EU political leaders and pundits often express ...suspicion of the transnational connections of Muslim populations and Islamic organizations in Europe, portraying mosques as foreign territories and mosque communities as vulnerable to foreign influence. At the same time, studies on how Middle Eastern states use mosques as foreign policy instruments also depict mosque communities as simple receptors of influence. Both approaches erase or flatten mosque communities’ dynamism, heterogeneity, and critical agency in relation to the geopolitical projects of their ancestral countries and the European countries where they have made their home. More specifically, we focus on mosques affiliated with DITIB, a Turkish-Sunni religious organization in Germany, and demonstrate how mosque communities develop a critical stance towards both German and Turkish states’ attempts to domesticate mosque spaces. Drawing on interviews and participant observation conducted between 2016 and 2018 in Germany and Turkey, we trace how mosque members respond to state projects and engage in everyday counter-geopolitical practices to make mosque spaces their own. Through a feminist geopolitical analysis, our grounded focus on DITIB mosques illustrates how mosque communities negotiate and dismantle geopolitical projects rather than accept or implement them wholesale. While posing a challenge to Islamic organizations’ geopolitical construction as passive territories under foreign influence, this study also suggests a more robust conversation between geopolitics of religion scholarship and feminist geopolitical theories.
Full text
Available for:
GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
The forcible separation of child migrants from their parents following the Trump administration's April 2018 announcement of a “zero tolerance” policy became a spectacle of the terrorization of ...immigrant communities (Briggs, 2018). This intimate and racialized violence is foundational to US nationhood, with global implications, given the resurgence of the far-right. Geographers have engaged with the nation as an affective and embodied project. We augment this scholarship with theorizations of anti-Blackness, settler colonialism, and queer kinship to suggest that anti-migrant narratives service a white nation-state by projecting fear and apathy toward racialized others. We begin from the premise that US nationalism depends on the marginalization of non-whites and non-heteromen through settler colonialism, racial capitalism, imperialism, and exclusionary immigration policies. We contribute to recent geographic scholarship on the operations of whiteness by attending to how territory and nation are constituted through the racialization of kinship. We argue that one way through which the (white) US nation-state is territorialized is the mechanism of denying childhood and kinship to racialized peoples in the name of “protecting” the white family. Performative apathy and cruelty enacts the border onto racialized bodies, excluding migrant children and families from the nation, and sanctions violence by naturalizing their subordination in a racial hierarchy. Discriminately applied to migrants traveling with children, the “zero tolerance” policy departed from previous practice of keeping families together. Instead, adults were jailed, while children were housed in makeshift camps run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement (such as a converted Walmart in Texas). Family separation is part of the “Border Spectacle,” in which asylum-seekers are produced as bogus migrants and migrants are created as an “illegal” class of people deserving expulsion (De Genova, 2013; de Vogue & Kopan, 2018), even as it is the Trump administration's policies against migrants and asylum-seekers that have been demonstrated to be illegal. In May 2018, as photographs of children crying in cages circulated, Jeff Sessions, then Attorney General, defended the policy: “If you are smuggling a child then we will prosecute you, and that child will be separated from you as required by law … If you don't like that, then don't smuggle children over our border” (Rhodan, 2018). The discourse of “smuggling” not only recalls racialized tropes of coyotes trafficking children across borders, but also breaks the bond between parents and children by describing parents as the “smugglers” of (what cannot then be) their own kin. Thus, vulnerable migrants, even children, are refigured as a national security threat to justify the violence of family separation. This policy perversely recognizes the importance of family ties by seeking to destroy them in the name of deterring migration, sending a clear message that for some families, there is no security in the US. The separation and subsequent demarcation of some kinship ties as “ineligible” (relegating some children to the foster care system) and the callous failure to maintain careful records connecting parents and children are manifestations of racial violence as policy—a policy that denies migrants’ humanity by denying their right to kinship. In references to policies that have targeted Native and Indigenous children, the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association has described the separation of these children at the border as “a new stolen generation” (Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, 2018). Consider the lead plaintiff in the class action suit filed by the ACLU (de Vogue & Kopan, 2018). Ms. L and her daughter, from the Congo, arrived at a border port of entry and declared they were seeking asylum. Four days later, border patrol asked to speak to the six-year-old daughter alone. Ms. L. could hear her daughter shouting for her help as Ms. L was informed she would be detained in San Diego and her daughter taken to Chicago. Her lawyer explains: The government walked in, and even though everyone knew that they were separating children as what they believed would be a deterrent for future people coming, they came in and said, “Well we took the little girl away for her best interests.” And we said, “Really? Why is that? Why is it in the best interest this child to be whisked away?” And they said, “Well, by the time the mother got here from the Congo, she no longer had all her papers, so we couldn't be sure it was actually the mother” (Interview with Scahill, 2018) After a legal battle, DNA test, and seven months of separation, the mother and daughter were reunited (de Vogue & Kopan, 2018). Videos of reunifications, showing children's trauma in their affectless avoidance of crying parents, are performatively shrugged off by Trump administration officials as a small price to pay for protecting the nation. A form of torture for children that will cause lasting damage, these separations are a component of a suite of Trump's family-targeting policies, including those intended to end so-called “chain migration.” We see historical precedent for this policy in the removal of Indigenous children and in slavery's destruction of Black familial ties. We raise three points to consider in contextualizing this crisis, and conclude by pointing to ways this analysis might be productive beyond the US case.
Full text
Available for:
GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK, ZRSKP
PDF
