Christine M. Jacobsen

‘Reproachable Victims’? Representations and Self-representations of Russian Women Involved in Transnational Prostitution

The article investigates how the concept of victimhood is constructed within debates on transnational prostitution and trafficking, and how representations of victimhood intersect with representations of the person/self, class, ethnicity, gender and nationality. Using research findings based on observation and interviews with women from post-Soviet societies involved in prostitution in Norway, we discuss how the women embrace, resist or rework dominant representations of migrant prostitution and attendant notions of victimhood, as well as how they relate to multiple notions of the person/self, femininity and nation through their handling of the stigma of prostitution

troublesome threesome: feminism, anthropology and Muslim women's piety

This article critically addresses recent anthropological and feminist efforts to theorize and analyse Muslim womens participation in and support for the Islamic revival in its various manifestations. Drawing on ethnographic material from research on young Muslims engaged in Islamic youth and student-organizations in Norway, I investigate some of the challenges that researching religious subjectivities and practices pose to feminist theory. In particular, I deal with how to understand womens religious piety in relation to questions of self, agency and resistance. Engaging with Saba Mahmoods work on The Politics of Piety, this article suggests ways of understanding the young womens religious engagement that move beyond the confines of a binary model of subordination and resistance, coercion and choice. Grounding the discussion in ethnographic analysis of how young Muslim women in Norway speak about the ‘self’, I argue that critically revisiting feminist notions of agency, autonomy and desire, is necessary in order to understand the kinds of self-realization that these women aspire to. However, the article argues against positing Muslim conceptions and techniques of the self as ‘the other’ of liberal-secular traditions. Rather, I show how configurations of personhood, ethics and self-realization drawn from Islamic and liberal-secular discursive formations inhabit not only the same cultural and historical space, but also shape individual subjectivities and modes of agency.

‘Gaza in Oslo’: Social imaginaries in the political engagement of Norwegian minority youth

In the winter of 2008/09 thousands of people took to the streets of Oslo to demonstrate against the Israeli invasion of Gaza. Young people of visible minority and Muslim background were central actors in these demonstrations. The public expression of Muslim identities and symbols during the demonstrations along with clashes between some of the young demonstrators and the police fuelled the already polarized debate concerning the integration of immigrant youth and Islamic radicalism existing in the Norwegian public realm. Using data gathered through ethnographic fieldwork and web-ethnography we follow the engagement of youth from a multi-ethnic Oslo mosque both online and offline. In critical dialogue with perspectives on political contention and transnational political activism, we analyse this transnational mobilization in terms of the ‘social imaginaries’ that mediated engagement with the Gaza question: ‘the global Muslim imaginary’, ‘secular leftist internationalism’ and ‘integration nations’.

The (In)egalitarian Dynamics of Gender Equality and Homotolerance in Contemporary Norway

With their complex and historically shifting articulations of equality, sameness, and difference, discourses and practices related to gender and sexuality provide fertile ground for exploring the complex meanings and functions of egalitarianism. This chapter, first, examines the public debate in Norway through policy documents on gender equality, homosexuality, and citizenship. Through the analysis that follows, it shows how gender equality and sexual equality have come to be articulated as constitutive of Norwegian identity and as a societal value. This articulation of gender and sexual equality as part of Norwegian identity and as a constitutive value is produced in relation to the Other, either internal (immigrant, Muslim) or external (foreign, non-Western). The chapter argues that gender and sexual equality have become crucial to the understanding of Norwegian society as a “community of value”. The idea of the good citizen is anchored in ideas about the individual, autonomy, and equality and defined by the outside by the non-citizen and the failed citizen. Gender and sexual equality have become crucial to the production of Norway as a particular kind of national imagined community (Anderson, Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso, 1983), patrolling the borders of the national community and its citizenry and entrenching gendered and racialized differences between “us” and “them”.

‘Look into My Eyes’: Music, Religion, and the Politics of Muslim Youth in Norway

In this article we explore the role of music in shaping and publicizing religious and political subjectivities and belonging among young Muslims in Norway. The article discusses practices of producing and listening to music in light of theories about ‘counterpublics’ and their soundscapes, the religious and the secular, and majority-minority relations. Musical soundscapes produced and consumed by young Muslims, the article argues, give voice to experiences and sentiments that are marginalized within mainstream cultural productions, and articulate both consensus and dissensus with national political institutions’ concepts and norms.

Veiled nannies and secular futures in France

ABSTRACT This article focuses on recent French efforts to expand legal regulation of religious symbols to childcare. Controversies over ‘veiled nannies’ serve as points of departure for investigating laïcité – French secularism – through which religion is regulated. The investigation is based on fieldwork among Muslim women in Marseille and on the analysis of legal decisions, official documents, and media. The debates on whether to legislate on religious symbols in the domain of childcare reveal how the line between religion and politics, and private and public is continuously redrawn through state efforts to cultivate and govern (secular) Republican selves. Drawing on Agrama’s [2012a. Questioning Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty and the Rule of Law in Egypt. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press] conceptualisation of secularism as a ‘problem-space’, I argue that legal regulation of religious symbols institutionalises a ‘secular suspicion’ at the heart of efforts to imagine and govern French society and its future, a future in which Muslims increasingly find it difficult to imagine themselves.

gender, sex and religious freedom in the context of secular law

In this round table, leading scholars discuss questions about the relationship between religion and secularism and gender and sexuality, including why and how do discussions about religious freedom and secularism tend to coalesce around questions of gender and sexuality, and how can we conceptualise the relation between sex, gender, religion and secularism differently? What is the relationship between the legal and paralegal regulation of gender and sexuality and the regulation of religion?

Communicating Irregular Migration

This essay addresses the question of how irregular migration is framed in Western media from the location of the migration researcher. What challenges and dilemmas do media frames and practices of framing create for researchers’ participation in communicating research about irregular migration to the public? The essay is written in dialogue with topics raised by the articles in the special issue and seeks to supplement, and at times interrogate, its scrutiny of how irregular migration is covered in the news and received by the audience.