About
38
Publications
4,513
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
182
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
Additional affiliations
August 2007 - present
August 2007 - present
Publications
Publications (38)
This article examines the role of Europe as gift in Lioret's Welcome (2009) and Peren's Die Farbe des Ozeans (2011) by focusing on gestures of welcome extended by white European characters to undocumented migrants. In both films, these gestures include gifts, in the form of money, shelter or skills taught, that play an important narrative role, but...
In this article I trouble the terms of hospitality and guest, as well as of east and west, in relationship to Islamophobia. In particular, I consider the graphic novel Im Land der Frühaufsteher, by Paula Bulling with sections written by Noël Kaboré. By focusing specifically on the notion of hospitality, I suggest that any narrative of racisms east/...
In this article I propose the notion of precarious intimacies as entry point into the representation of the political in Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s work. Through an analysis of Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn, I explore intimacies as sites of transformation and political potentiality in the novel, as spaces that nurture political solidarities and spaces in...
The perceived crisis triggered by the current refugee influx highlights the contradiction at the heart of human rights discourse. Modern humanity has been constructed as both European and as universal; the racialized "Other" against whom the "modern human" disturbs this construction by laying claim to human rights from the very heart of Europe. The...
This article revisits ways in which white feminist German studies scholars are implicated in the circulation of and replication of whiteness. It begins with an exploration of the problems of notions of “inclusion,” even as diversity work remains important. Problems that frequently emerge in conversations about whiteness, race, and diversity are the...
Muslim women’s digital activism exists in complexly racialized visual contexts. This is exemplified in the journalism and activism of Kübra Gümüşay, who first gained public attention as the purportedly first “hijabi columnist” in Germany. This essay draws on her series “50 Thoughts” as an entry point into her digital activism. I suggest that Gümüşa...
Despite the recent wave of scholarship on intersectionality, as well as a surge in feminist scholarship on Islam in German feminist studies, feminist research has yet to adequately engage with the role of religion in intersectionality. In this article the author draws on the work of the Aktionsbündnis muslimischer Frauen in Germany to explore the p...
This article examines the discourses of forced prostitution that circulated in the US and European media and government publications in the context of the soccer World Cup in 2006. This analysis of the public discourse around prostitution reveals two themes: concerns about immigration and border security, and representations of gender binaries that...
The celebrations of the “multicultural” German national soccer team for the 2010 World Cup and the subsequent declaration of the failure of German multiculturalism reveal complex constructions of national belonging and of postnational identity constructions, and affective ties to the idea of Europe in twenty-first century Germany. Within what appea...
In 2002 I attended a play based on the life of Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Die Deutschlandtür geht auf und gleich wiederzu [The Germany-Door Opens and Closes Immediately] at the Prater, a small experimental stage associated with the Volksbühne on Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz in Berlin. The Germany-Door humorously highlights the paradoxical nature of the character...
The immense and ongoing attention received by Sürücü’s murder stands in stark contrast to coverage of the xenophobically motivated murder of another Muslim woman, Marwa el-Sherbini, in a German courtroom in 2009. The incident began when el-Sherbini, wearing a hijab, asked Alex Wiens to make space for her three-year-old son on a playground swing. He...
In 2007, a German judge denied a woman an expedited divorce with the words, “The exercise of the right to corporal punishment does not constitute an extreme hardship according to federal law” (Kirschstein; Oswald). The 26-year-old woman filing for divorce had been the victim of domestic violence and death threats at the hand of her husband; under G...
In 2012, Necla Kelek, a German feminist of Turkish heritage, who has become notorious for her positions on Islam and Turkish integration into German society, gave a talk that elicited the following response on the satirical blog AggroMigrant. The blog entry laments the rudeness of somebody who arrives late but preaches German punctuality, and then...
In the early 2000s I presented work examining Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s various engagements with German literary tradition in her own literary texts, at several academic conferences. Inevitably, the conversation during the question-and-answer periods turned to the headscarf debates, despite the fact that this had nothing to do with the work at hand. As...
In 2005, 23-year-old Hatun Sürücü was standing at a bus stop in Berlin when her youngest brother, Ayhan, shot and killed her. This act not only tragically ended Hatun Sürücü’s life but also led to a new chapter in representations of Islam and violence in Germany and Europe. Her death sparked massive national and international attention, accompanied...
In the ten photographs that make up Iranian artist Shadi Ghadirian’s 2006 series Ctrl+Alt+Del, a black-clad woman’s body disappears into the black background against which she is photographed, preventing any sense of depth or perspective within the image. Only her face, hands, and feet—those parts of the body traditionally considered “naturally” vi...
Fereshta Ludin’s struggle to be appointed as a public school teacher while wearing a hijab received massive media attention in Germany, while the xenophobically motivated murder of Marwa el-Sherbini, who was eventually dubbed the “hijab martyr†internationally, elicited muted response. Yet interpreting the reactions to these two cases togethe...
Emine Sevgi Özdamar's work reveals and challenges two dominant images of the immigrant woman in circulation in Germany. When she superimposes the images of the headscarf and the cleaning woman, she reveals the often hidden intersections of representations of the veiled immigrant woman and her role in the German service industry. As ‘the Other’ with...
In recent years several bestselling autobiographies in Germany have reinforced a discourse in which domestic violence in immigrant communities is attributed to a backward, Muslim culture. The media as well as the German state turn to authors such as Necla Kelek and Seyran Ateş as “experts†who claim the right to represent immigrant women’s c...
Students and scholars of literature in Germany after 1945 have a useful resource in Tom Cheesman's accessible new book. Cheesman seeks to trace the development of "Turkish German literature" from a literature of migration to a literature of settlement via an analysis of Turkish German novels. Equally important, however, for the book's conception is...
Drawing on transnational feminist cultural studies and Gayatri Spivak's notion of "planet-talk," this article reconsiders the questions posed to textual figures of immigrant and minority women. Assumptions of Western cultural superiority have limited the focus of scholarship addressing immigrant women's economic and political positionings in German...
As the current debates about the headscarf in Germany and France
demonstrate, “Islamic” veils and headscarves garner attention for
minority women in Europe to an unparalleled degree.2 For centuries,
Islamic veils and headscarves have served as powerful symbols in
Orientalist discourse, functioning as markers of the Oriental woman’s
supposed erotici...
Christa Wolf's fictional narrative, Kassandra, originally delivered as one of the Frankfurter Poetik Vorlesungen in 1982, has since achieved worldwide readership. In the process, Kassandra has been torn from the original contexts of the other four lectures, the Voraussetzung einer Erzählung, which combine autobiography, theory, and criticism. Criti...
Projects
Project (1)
The Digital Feminist Collective is a research commons gathering projects on digital feminisms that together ask after the future of feminism and feminist activism, the meaning and limits of global feminist solidarity, creativity, and transnational collaboration. The projects offer strategies for scholarly political work in the digital and non-digital world by opening up different ways of crafting connections, communities, and discourses.
