Immigrants in the Sexual Revolution: Perceptions and Participation in Northwest Europe (Chapter summaries & bibliography) (original) (raw)
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This book focuses on the latter half of the twentieth century, when much of northwest Europe grew increasingly multicultural with the arrival of foreign workers and (post-)colonial migrants, whilst simultaneously experiencing a boom in feminist and sexual liberation activism. Using multilingual newspapers, foreign worker organizations’ archives, and interviews, this book shows that immigrants in the Netherlands and Denmark held a variety of viewpoints about European gender and sexual cultures. Some immigrants felt solidarity with, and even participated in, European social movements that changed norms and laws in favor of women’s equality, gay and lesbian rights, and sexual liberation. These histories challenge today’s politicians and journalists who strategically link immigration to sexual conservatism, misogyny, and homophobia.
This book: 1. Historicizes current European debates about the sexual politics of immigrants from Muslim-majority regions 2. Explores the centrality of sexual politics to European debates about immigration and integration 3. Challenges dominant theories linking immigration to sexual conservatism and misogynistic behaviour This book focuses on the latter half of the twentieth century, when much of northwest Europe grew increasingly multicultural with the arrival of foreign workers and (post-)colonial migrants, whilst simultaneously experiencing a boom in feminist and sexual liberation activism. Using multilingual newspapers, foreign worker organizations’ archives, and interviews, this book shows that immigrants in the Netherlands and Denmark held a variety of viewpoints about European gender and sexual cultures. Some immigrants felt solidarity with, and even participated in, European social movements that changed norms and laws in favor of women’s equality, gay and lesbian rights, and sexual liberation. These histories challenge today’s politicians and journalists who strategically link immigration to sexual conservatism, misogyny, and homophobia.
A tumultuous conference in Amsterdam, early 2011, on Sexual Nationalisms: Gender, Sexuality and the Politics of Belonging in the New Europe, bore witness to the academic and political thorniness of the issues at stake. The conference, organized by the Amsterdam Research Center for Gender and Sexuality (ARC-GS) at the University of Amsterdam and the Institut de Recherche Interdisciplinaire sur les enjeux Sociaux (IRIS) at EHESS in Paris, brought together more than 80 scholars and hundreds of participants to discuss the entanglements and convergences of liberal and progressive feminist and gay rights politics with anti-immigration policies in Europe. The Dutch case, in our view, provides quintessential examples of the sexualization of European anxieties about cultural and religious diversity. In no other country have discourses of gay rights and sexual freedom played such a prominent role.
Immigration and Sexual Citizenship: Gender, Sexuality and Ethnicity in Contemporary France
2012
This dissertation considers discourses bearing on the social dynamics of immigration and postcolonial diversity in contemporary France in light of their interconnections with issues of sexuality and assimilation. Synthesizing and building on recent work by anthropologists, sociologists and cultural theorists it explores the current debate over French identity-a debate that has to a considerable extent revolved around the impact of recent postwar immigration to France and the "integration" of immigrants on the cultural level, and of which a recent symptom has been the Sarkozy government's launch of a public national debate about "l'identité nationale" (national identity). Overall, my project focuses on the intermingling of the cultural and the political in cultural representations of immigrants and their descendants. Specifically, I consider the highly charged terrain of the representation of sexuality. In the discourse on laïcité (secularism) and integration, gender norms and tolerance of homosexuality have emerged as key components and are now often employed to highlight immigrants' "un-French" attitudes. I argue that, as French and immigrant identities have been called into question, sexuality has constituted a favored prism through which to establish the existence of difference. Through the study of cultural representations of immigration, I will explain how the potential of immigrants and their descendants to assimilate is often judged according to the "fitness" of their attitudes about sexuality. I will further argue that the successful assimilation of immigrants often follows a "required" phase of sexualization, in which the sexuality of the immigrant becomes his or her main marker, the primary factor through which the immigrant is intelligible, beyond other possibly relevant criteria. i
European Sexual Nationalism: Refugee Law After the Gender & Sexuality Critiques
In this lecture, I take stock of what the gender and sexuality based critiques of refugee law formulated over the past decades have achieved. I first address statistical issues. Then I address the question how law is being applied today, now the gender and sexuality critiques of refugee law have been incorporated in legal practice. I focus on the case of A.A. and others v Sweden about forced marriage, and on discretion reasoning in sexual orientation cases. Having done that, I will try to understand this reformulated refugee law by using the concept of sexual nationalism.
This article explores the experiences of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) migrants from Central and Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union in Scotland. Drawing on interviews with 50 migrants, the article focuses on the experiences and aspirations which they articulate as being part of 'a normal life', and analyses them within broader conceptual understandings of security and 'normal-ity'. We first examine how normality is equated with an improved economic position in Scotland, and look at the ways in which this engenders feelings of emotional security and well-being. We then explore how more positive experiences around sexuality and gender identity are key to a sense of emotional security – i.e. of feeling accepted as 'normal', being visible as an LGBT person but 'blending in' rather than standing out because of it. Finally we look at the ways in which the institutional framework in Scotland, in particular the presence of LGBT-affirmative legislation, is seen by participants to have a normalising effect within society, leading to a broader sense of inclusion and equality – found, again, to directly impact upon participants' own feelings of security and emotional well-being. The article engages with literatures on migration and sexuality and provides an original contribution to both: through its focus upon sexuality, which remains unexplored in debates on 'normality' and migration in the UK; and by bringing a migration perspective to the debates in sexuality studies around the normal-ising effect of the law across Europe. By bringing these two perspectives together, we reveal the inter-relationship between sexuality and other key spheres of our participants' lives in order to better understand their experiences of migration and settlement.
Sexual citizenship and migration in a transnational perspective
2016
This working paper is based on a lecture given at the Summer School “Multiple Inequalities in the Age of Transnationalization”, June 23-27 2014 at Goethe University Frankfurt. In it, I explore the linkages between sexuality and migration and aim to show that instead of deeming them a narrow subfield of migration studies, thinking through these linkages has much wider implications for different fields, including post- and decolonial queer studies, the study of race and sexuality, the study of citizenship and state projects of inclusion/exclusion, and for work that attempts to ce-center the predominant knowledge production focused on the Global North
Sexualities, 2016
Many of the mentioned works map the late socialist and postsocialist histories underlying key aspects of present sexualities and sexual politics. Yet despite the tremendous recent growth of scholarly literatures expanding our knowledge of the history of sexuality in general, as well as specifically in Europe (both insightfully reviewed by Herzog 2009 and 2013, respectively), the importance of excavating the older histories of sexuality which have shaped Europe's postsocialist present, and its thinking about sexuality and its personal, social, and political significances, has been, as Herzog (2013) notes, relatively neglected. Recently emerging scholarship is beginning to direct attention to such concerns, as new and important studies on sex work under late Habsburg rule (Stauter-Halsted, 2011; Wingfield, 2011), sexual intimacies in East Germany (McLellan, 2011), and queer urban life in late 19thand early 20th-century Budapest (Kurimay, 2012) demonstrate. Much of the balance of research on the history of Eastern European sexualities, however, has focused on Russia and the Soviet Union (e.g. Engelstein, 1994; Healey, 2009; Naiman, 1999); the specific roots of sexual regimes elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe still require further investigation. Moreover, while since Foucault, science has been seen as central to the meanings and effects of both modern concepts of sexuality and modern biopolitics more generally, and histories of sexual science have been powerful analytical and theoretical tools for thinking about sexuality as personally, socially, and politically consequential in both Western Europe and the West's colonial encounters, surprisingly little attention has been paid to its presence and implications in scholarship on Central and Eastern Europe sexualities. As Stauter-Halsted and Wingfield (2011: 216-217) note, despite the fact that Central and Eastern Europe were at the very center of scientific and legal research on sex and sexuality in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the study of sexuality and its science in the region is 'still in its nascent stages.' Here too, important work is beginning to emerge (Kos´cian´ska, 2014a; Lisˇkova´, 2013; see also the special May 2011 issue of the Journal of the History of Sexuality edited by Stauter-Halsted and Wingfield). Yet, as already mentioned, much current research has focused on Russia and the Soviet Union (e.g. Healey, 2009; Kowalski, 2009) at the expense of Central and Eastern European sexual-scientific histories. In addition, the critical potential that science can have for not only naturalizing sexual identities and relationships and their social and political meanings, but for the linking of these naturalized meanings to their lasting effects on the borders of Europeanness and modernityand thus their significance for present tensions over sexuality between Europe's East and West-remains to be fully examined. We believe, however, that the role of science as discourse and practice is critical to fully understanding Central and Eastern European histories of sexuality and their legacies. Histories of