P. Mepschen

Sexual politics, orientalism, and multicultural citizenship in the Netherlands.

Sexuality features prominently in European debates on multiculturalism and in Orientalist discourses on Islam. This article argues that representations of gay emancipation are mobilized to shape narratives in which Muslims are framed as non-modern subjects, a development that can best be understood in relation to the ‘culturalization of citizenship’ and the rise of Islamophobia in Europe. We focus on the Netherlands where the entanglement of gay rights discourses with anti-Muslim politics and representations is especially salient. The thorough-going secularization of Dutch society, transformations in the realms of sex and morality since the ‘long 1960s’ and the ‘normalization’ of gay identities since the 1980s have made sexuality a malleable discourse in the framing of ‘modernity’ against ‘tradition’. This development is highly problematic, but also offers possibilities for new alliances and solidarities in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered and questioning (LGBTQ) politics and sexual and cultural citizenship.

Populism, sexual politics, and the exclusion of Muslims in the Netherlands

The discourses framing Islam as deviant and problematic for Europe described in Chapter 1 have had a loud expression in the Netherlands, where political leaders and public figures have reconfigured what had been values of universal liberal citizenship into national values of cultural distinctiveness: “Dutch values” versus “Islamic values.” Some analysts join these public figures in arguing that “multiculturalism” was once the Dutch national model and is responsible for weakening Dutch values by adopting a soft position on Muslims and Islam.In this chapter we examine the Dutch case as a particularly visible instance of a European exclusivist “neocultural” framing of migrants as outsiders who must either completely assimilate into or be actively excluded from the “modern” moral universe. We use the term “neoculturalism” to identify a form of cultural protectionism, representing the world as divided into different, inimical cultures, and to distinguish this way of thinking from forms of cultural relativism. Muslim citizens have become the most conspicuous objects of this neoculturalist discourse, portrayed as backward, intolerant, and incongruous with European secular modernity.

The Nativist Triangle: Sexuality, Race and Religion in the Netherlands

This chapter offers an innovative analysis of Dutch nativism by looking at the intersection of race, religion and sexuality. In the Netherlands, we argue, nativism exercises its exclusionary power through this triangular construction of alterity. Sex talk in the Netherlands constructs a number of distinct racio-cultural others: Muslim citizens (in particular, girls and women) are portrayed as anachronistic remnants from an age of sexual oppression that Dutch society is deemed to have left behind, while ‘black’ sexuality alternates between the exotic and the abject. While nativist discourse may seem rigid in its division of Dutch society into ‘autochthones’ and ‘allochthones’ the appearance of rigidity, we argue, derives precisely from nativism’s situational flexibility. The idea that there are two neatly delimited camps is produced by the ability of nativist discourse to switch registers on a dime, strategically shifting between invoking race and culture/religion.

Gewone mensen. Populisme en het discours van verdringing in Amsterdam Nieuw West

The social analysis of European populism lacks ethnographic attention to agency and to the symbolic meaning of populist constructions in people’s everyday lives. This paper offers an ethnographic analysis, starting with an understanding of populism as a perspective on the world: frames or schemas for perceiving, interpreting and classifying society. The paper focuses on the perspectives of ‘autochthonous’ (native, white) residents in a socially and ethnically mixed neighbourhood in Amsterdam New West. I show how plans for the demolition and restructuring of the neighbourhood opened up the symbolic space for the articulation of a discourse of displacement in which people construed and articulated a ‘self-understanding’ in antagonistic relations with ‘others’: elites and sometimes (post)migrants. The analysis of this local discourse of displacement offers insight into the crisis of representation and voice in a postfordist society, and therefore into the deeper structures of Dutch populism.

The Culturalization of Everyday Life: Autochthony in Amsterdam New West

By focusing on what I call the ‘culturalization of everyday life’ in a neighbourhood in Amsterdam, this chapter examines the dialectics of urban super-diversity. Rather than understanding super-diversity in terms of an increasing ‘normalcy of diversity’, I argue that the contemporary global city is characterized by a ‘dialectics of flow and closure’ where increasing heterogeneity goes hand in glove with an ever more powerful focus on locality, belonging and identity ‘fixture’. In the Netherlands today, a great deal of energy is invested in fixing, controlling and freezing identities. Dutch culturalism is a mode of controlling and fixing identity. The resulting focus on autochthony is a process of boundary-making between those who belong and those who are construed as guests or strangers.

Sexual democracy, cultural alterity and the politics of everyday life in Amsterdam

ABSTRACT 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.