“Go Where You’re Celebrated, not Tolerated:” An Ethnographic Study of Amsterdam’s 2013 Gay Pride Parade (original) (raw)
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The sexopolitical landscape of the Netherlands has changed considerably over the last few years. From a country with a liberal reputation, it has become illiberal in many respects. This is a development I will discuss in this chapter by focusing on attitudes towards homo/sexual issues. It must, however, be made clear that this development is strongly connected with anxieties about national identity, and in particular about immigration. There is a great fear that 'new Dutch', and especially Muslim citizens, reject some Dutch norms, including the principle of equality for men and women and for hetero and homo citizens. At the same time,
Sexual democracy, cultural alterity and the politics of everyday life in Amsterdam
Cultural and religious alterity, associated with postcolonial and labour migrants and their descendants, has become a matter of growing contention across Europe. Various scholars have discussed the situation in the Netherlands as exemplary of European anxieties about national cohesion and cultural homogeneity in which culturalized and racialized conceptions of the nation and its Others are central. Mepschen examines how these public discourses and politics are played out in the context of a pluri-ethnic, working-class neighbourhood in Amsterdam New West. Taking an ethnographic approach, he points to the ways in which ‘white’ Dutch citizens—imagined and construed as autochthonous, literally ‘born from the Earth itself’—come to recognize themselves in, identify with and appropriate the images and rhetorics that circulate within culturalist, autochthonic symbolic economies. Following up on his previous work, Mepschen focuses here on the role played by discourses surrounding sexual liberty and LGBTIQ rights in these dynamics. Continuing with an ethnographic approach, he foregrounds the complex interplay of religion, secularism and sexuality in the ‘making’ and ‘doing’ of autochthony in an everyday, local context, a complexity that is lost in much of the existing analyses of Dutch multiculturalism.
The Dutch Homo-Emancipation Policy and its Silencing Effects on Queer Muslims
Feminist Legal Studies, 2011
The recent Dutch homo-emancipation policy has identified religious communities, particularly within migrant populations, as a core target group in which to make homosexuality more 'speakable'. In this article we examine the paradoxical silencing tendencies of this 'speaking out' policy on queer Muslim organisations in the Netherlands. We undertake this analysis as the Dutch government is perhaps unique in developing an explicit 'homo-emancipation' policy and is often looked to as the model for sexuality politics and legal redress in relation to inequalities on the basis of sexual orientation. We highlight how the 'speakability' imperative in the Dutch homo-emancipation policy reproduces a paradigmatic, 'homonormative' model of an 'out' and 'visible' queer sexuality that has also come to be embedded in an anti-immigrant and specifically anti-Muslim discourse in the Netherlands. Drawing on the concept of habitus, particularly in the work of Gloria Wekker, we suggest that rather than relying on a 'speakability' policy model, queer Muslim sexualities need to be understood in a more nuanced and intersecting way that attends to their lived realities.
Is This What Equality Looks Like? How Assimilation Marginalizes the Dutch LGBT Community
Using the Netherlands as a case study, this article explores how increased social acceptance of and legal protections for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people impact their lives. The author draws on in-depth interviews with nine LGBT people to argue that the danger of acceptance is invisibility for those who assimilate and marginalization for those who do not conform to assimilationist discourses, such as transgender individuals and other gender nonconformers. Utilizing Butler’s theories of normalization and Goffman’s theories of stigmatization, the findings also show that assimilating into homonormativity can generate feelings of shame and fear. The author concludes that new approaches in dismantling heteronormativity and seeking equality are needed in order to achieve genuine acceptance for LGBT people.