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Anti-Muslim racism and the racialisation of sexual violence: ‘intersectional stereotyping’ in mass media representations of male Muslim migrants in Germany
Abstract
This article examines how German print media have represented male migrants with Muslim backgrounds in relation to mainstream society and the stereotypes drawn on and created, including that of the migrant Muslim man as a criminal and sexual perpetrator. Media reports about ‘lecherous refugees’ have risen in the wake of wider social controversies about the European refugee crisis and the consequences of welcoming over 1.5 million refugees from predominantly Muslim countries into Germany in recent years. Many of these reports reflect the Cologne New Year’s Eve 2016 sexual attacks by migrant men against German women. This study of German print media identifies a racialisation and ‘islamicisation’ of sexual violence and proposes the original theoretical concept of intersectional stereotyping to conceptualise the intersecting of religious, racialised and gendered patterns in media representations of male Muslim migrants. The research combines and extends the analytical frameworks of intersectionality and stereotyping to develop a new concept useful in media studies and beyond. The article provides a previously unexplored insight into racialised anti-Muslim stereotyping in German society in socio-political and historical context through the lens of print media.
... Experiences of stigmatization relate especially to their religion, but also to their nationality and ethnicity (Brettfeld and Wetzels, 2007: 364ff; Open Society Institute (OSI), 2010: 80ff). The experience of exclusion among people of Muslim heritage is exacerbated by the intersection of discriminatory narratives in the 'intersectional stereotyping' of Muslim migrant men (Wigger, 2019). ...
... While we will argue that the reporting of Cologne has increased media focus on migrant men as sexual offenders and criminals, such framing is not a new phenomenon. The stereotype of sexually threatening racialized others has been embedded in German history and culture for centuries and has played a major role in the history of Western racism and Orientalism (Hund, 2017;Wigger, 2017Wigger, , 2019. ...
... We will investigate this by examining their proximity and frequency in news media texts. This intersectional dimension of the analysis complements the qualitative strand of our research project, an in-depth qualitative thematic analysis of a smaller illustrative sample of articles, which was analysed within an original theoretical frame of 'intersectional stereotyping' combining Hall's concept of media stereotyping with the Black Feminist Intersectionality theorem (Wigger, 2019). ...
Controversy over immigration and integration intensified in German news media following Chancellor Merkel’s response to the refugee crisis of 2015. Using multidimensional scaling of word associations in reporting across four national news publications in conjunction with key event, moral panic and framing theories, we argue that reporting of events at Cologne station on New Year’s Eve 2015–2016 reframed debate away from terror-related concerns and towards anxieties about the sexual predation of dark-skinned males, thus racializing immigration coverage and resonating with a long history of Orientalist stereotyping. We further identify an increased clustering of ‘race’, gender, religion, crowd-threat and national belonging terms in reporting on sexual harassment incidents following Cologne, suggesting an increased criminalization of immigration discourse. The article provides new empirically based insights into the dynamics of news media reporting on migrants in Germany and contributes to scholarly debates on media framing of migrants, sexuality and crime.
... The Muslim "other" is often described and perceived as threatening, dangerous, radical, and sexually violent, which leads to heightened securitization and surveillance (Eskelinen et al. 2023;Rexhepi 2018;Taras 2013;Wigger 2019). These security concerns are given priority over human rights (M. ...
... Finally, within this larger discourse of "imported (Muslim) antisemitism", the renewal of the citizenship test continues the racializing anti-Muslim racist discourse of Muslims and Muslim immigrants as problematic regarding values that Germany and western Europe in general frequently have described as being representative of women's rights, sexual violence, security, and terrorism (Mouritsen 2012;Beck 2021;Vom Bruck 2008;Wigger 2019;Amiraux 2012). The citizenship test is, in this context, a governing tool to enforce the idea that the cultural and values-based differences manifested by unassimilated Muslim migrants are a potential, if not even real, threat to the well-being of the German citizenry (O'Brien 2016, p. 97). ...
Israel’s war on Gaza following 7 October 2023 has given birth to several political and social changes in European nations. According to the United Nations Report of the Special Rapporteur, Israel has used this moment to “distort” international humanitarian law principles “in an attempt to legitimize genocidal violence against the Palestinian people.” In the European context, this has led to European Muslims and non-Muslims, including organizations, institutions, as well as individual academics, politicians, and activists mobilizing and voicing their condemnation and demand their governments to do more towards peaceful and equitable solutions. However, this has been met with a strong reaction from European governing bodies. This paper situates this reaction within wider discourses on the European Muslim crisis. It begins with a systematic literature review on the so-called European Muslim crisis, followed by case studies on the United Kingdom and Germany on their respective changes to policies impacting Muslims in the post-October 7 contexa Regarding the literature review, this paper illustrates how this concept has three distinct, yet intersecting meanings: the crisis of European identity; the crisis of foundational ideologies of Europe; and an internal Muslim crisis that often leads to radicalization. Through the British and German case studies, this paper illustrates that October 7 has reinforced and strengthened the shift towards values-based citizenship and integration. This paper argues that through branding pro-Palestine protesters and organizations as extremists in the British context, and adding questions related to antisemitism and Israel in the citizenship tests in the German context, the Israel/Palestine issue has now become yet another yardstick to demarcate the European, civilized “us” vs. the Muslim “other.” In doing so, October 7 has escalated elements already present within the wider discourses of the European Muslim crisis.
... Media analyses also reveal the presence of a representational bias against Muslim and foreign perpetrators (Hestermann, 2019;Kearns et al., 2019) and attributional biases (Stürmer et al., 2019;Wigger, 2019;Wigger et al., 2022), which include direct attributions of deviant acts to the outgroup background. Inspired by these media analyses, previous work investigated whether this bias already had an impact on information search (Khosrowtaj et al., 2024a). ...
... Although the black sheep effect has so far been investigated at the level of the individual member , the present experiments build upon the observation that physical violence is often being attributed to an alleged Islamic culture (Stürmer et al., 2019;Wigger, 2019;Wigger et al., 2022). ...
Past research hints both at more extreme judgements of ingroup deviants and at attributional biases in the case of Muslims, immigrants and refugees. We examined two recently observed patterns in the context of intergroup violence: harsher judgements on the individual level (black sheep effect) and milder judgements on the cultural level when a perpetrator stems from the ingroup. We further investigated whether these patterns were affected by (a) the outgroup being salient (Experiment 1), (b) the comparison context (Experiments 2–3) and (c) participants perceiving the ingroup as high versus low in entitativity (Experiment 3). Experiments 1 (N = 437), 2 (N = 283) and 3 (N = 703) revealed the presence of robust effects on cultural level with participants treating the ingroup culture more leniently than the outgroup culture. Moreover, on the individual level, Experiments 2 and 3 found an overall black sheep effect that was especially prevalent in an intergroup context. Outgroup salience and ingroup entitativity did not affect participants’ judgements on individual and cultural levels. This protection of the ingroup both on an individual and on a cultural level may hint at a derogation of the outgroup. We discuss implications and insights for future research.
... Mainstream media in Germany partially contribute to the consolidation of intergroup boundaries and exclusion. For example, people with migration background are often represented in negative ways, with a focus on foreign aspects and on criminals (Christoph, 2012;Wigger, 2019), thus inhibiting the acceptance of integration (Wigger, 2019). Contrasting with this tendency towards negative representations are media portrayals which imply the inclusion of people with migration background in the conception of Germany. ...
... Mainstream media in Germany partially contribute to the consolidation of intergroup boundaries and exclusion. For example, people with migration background are often represented in negative ways, with a focus on foreign aspects and on criminals (Christoph, 2012;Wigger, 2019), thus inhibiting the acceptance of integration (Wigger, 2019). Contrasting with this tendency towards negative representations are media portrayals which imply the inclusion of people with migration background in the conception of Germany. ...
Proceeding globalization and the increase in global mobility entail that a growing proportion of people in economically developed countries have a migration background, so that cultural diversity has become an integral characteristic of many societies. Consequently, national identifications and attitudes towards immigrants are gaining importance in both international and intra-societal contexts. Previous studies revealed that in some countries, including Germany, national identification is associated with negative attitudes towards outgroups. In the present article, the interplay between national identification and intergroup contact is analyzed, with xenophobia as the criterion. The study is based on a cross-sectional survey amongst members of the majority population in Germany. It was predicted and found that the association between national identification and xenophobia is moderated by intergroup contact. There was only an association between national identification and xenophobia in participants with below-average or average levels of contact, whilst for those with above-average levels of contact, there was no significant association. Thus, the results point to the importance of contact experiences as a path to neutralize the effects of national identification on xenophobia, possibly by assisting in a redefinition of national belonging.
... Her interpretation ties to the discursive construction of Muslim migrant men in Germany as overly aggressive, sexually predatory and dangerous to society (cf. Wigger, 2019). This gender dimension is not limited to sound: Examples of participants taking part in smell walks and linking shisha smoke to masculinity show that there is also a gendered dimension to smelling. ...
In this paper, we reflect on the purchase of sensory methodologies to research urban diversity and the (re-)production of whiteness. In the social sciences, scholars commonly rely on visual methods, using the 'body as text' (Stoller, 1997). Based on more recent advances in urban and migration studies, we seek to move beyond this Eurocentric focus, by asking how urban diversity is experienced through sounds and through smells. How individuals experience sensory inputs such as sounds and smells, and how they make sense of them, feeds into processes of boundary making and boundary crossing. The urban space is a prime context to study such processes, given that cities' dense character and high diversity provide their residents with endless sensory stimuli. Based on sensory research in a highly diverse street in Berlin, we reflect on how smells and sounds contribute to creating hierarchies between (groups of) people, how they contribute to feelings of local belonging and home, or feelings of being out of place. We also reflect on the challenges of applying sensory methods. These refer to the relationship between participants' embodied experiences and how they made sense of those discursively in group discussions; and about the implications of doing research on a highly mediatized street. With our focus on micro interactions, the (re-) production of space, and diversity, our findings add to the emerging field of 'sensory urbanism'.
... Such behavior was represented by sexualized violence against women. Sexualized violence against women was chosen as a norm-violation, since it is a common stereotype about (male) refugees that they pose a greater sexual threat to women through violence and assault than (male) members of the ingroup (Kroon & van der Meer, 2023;Wigger, 2019). At the same time, liberal ideologies contain a commitment towards feminism, thus liberating women from patriarchal structures (Muchtar, 2010;Wendell, 1987) which are connected to sexist behavior (e.g., Valentine et al., 2014). ...
... Government policy that targeted whole Muslim populations as at-risk of "radicalization" (Abbas 2020;Kundnani and Hayes 2018) and press reporting on Islam and Muslims that represented them as a threat (Ahmed and Matthes 2017;Baker, Gabrielatos, and McEnery 2013;Poole and Richardson 2010) gave legitimacy to the far right while fringe Islamophobic groups increasingly became normalized in the US and Europe (Bail 2014;Berntzen 2019;Hafez 2014;Massoumi, Mills, and Miller 2017;Mondon and Winter 2017). Islamophobia also enabled far-right activists to present themselves as champions of women and LGBTQþ people (Fangen 2020;Farris 2017;Horsti 2017;Wigger 2019). ...
The rise of the far right has captured the attention of scholars across media studies, political science, and sociology. Digital technology played an important role in the rise of the far right and has deeply shaped this global movement. Focusing on research in Western societies (primarily Europe and North America), this review takes stock of how scholars in these three disciplines have studied the intersection of the far right and digital technology. The review introduces the problem of fuzzy collectivity to understand how scholars have made sense of the far right as an assemblage of increasingly complex networks of actors distributed across websites, alternative media, and platforms. Exploring solutions to the problem of fuzzy collectivity in the literature, the review proposes that far‐right engagement with digital technology should be conceptualized as a racial project engaging in metapolitics, a term used by far‐right ideologues that understands cultural movements to be prefigurative of political change. The review then explores the intersection of the far right and digital technology today, examining how it uses technology and the context of this use. The review then identifies pathways to reintegrate critical perspectives on racism in future research on the far right and digital technology.
... Moore, Mason, and Lewis (2008) reported that 36% of news stories about British Muslims were about terrorism. Wigger (2019) found them represented as criminals and sexual perpetrators. Merskin (2009) also adds that after the 9/11 attacks, different types of U.S. media characterized Muslims as monolithic evil terrorists and often referred to them using words like "demons" and "wanted: dead or alive." ...
This study uses a quantitative content analysis of memes and GIFs to contribute to the visual communication literature on digital user-generated visuals. To explore whether these digital user-generated artifacts reinforce or challenge common stereotypes of Muslim women and hijab compared with nonuser-generated media, the researchers analyzed 1,000 Internet memes and GIFs shared using the hashtag #Hijab following the 2019 Christchurch mosques attacks in New Zealand. The analysis reveals significant differences between memes and GIFs, both demonstrating general support for the hijab. Memes often employ humor and sarcasm, whereas GIFs focus on conveying positive emotions and direct engagement with viewers. In contrast to nonuser-generated media, which frequently presents Muslim women as oppressed, exotic, or radical, user-generated content predominantly depicts hijabis in more progressive, empowering ways. The findings suggest that user-generated visuals on digital media could significantly influence public perceptions of Muslim women by providing more nuanced portrayals. The study underscores the importance of examining memes and GIFs separately because of their distinctive content and communicative approaches, advocating for further exploration of their impact on societal discourse.
... Scholars have adopted the concept of gendered Islamophobia to analyze the multiple discriminations against Muslim women on the basis of their gender, race, ethnicity, and religion (Chakraborti and Zempi, 2012;Perry, 2014;Alimahomed-Wilson, 2020;Zempi, 2020). While the gender-sensitive lens has primarily served to describe the intersectional experiences of and impacts on Muslim women, it has also proved useful in understanding the gendered racialization of Muslim men (Selod, 2019;Wigger, 2019;Yurdakul and Korteweg, 2021). ...
Introduction
Social media has become a central part of everyday life, providing spaces for communication, self-expression, and social mobilization. TikTok, specifically, has emerged as a prominent platform for marginalized groups, providing opportunities for activism and representation. However, research falls short in examining the specific role of TikTok for Muslim women in Germany who face intersecting forms of marginalization. This shortcoming reflects a broader lack of research on the experiences of marginalized groups within TikTok’s logics and affordances, and what functions the platform fulfills for these communities. Against this backdrop, this study examines TikTok’s role as a platform for Muslim female content creators in Germany and its broader implications for marginalized communities. Our research is guided by the following questions: (a) What are the main themes and topics that are being brought forward by Muslim women content creators on TikTok? (b) What technical affordances do they use to communicate their content? (c) What functions does TikTok fulfill for Muslim women as an intersectionally marginalized group?.
Methods
We analyze 320 videos from 32 public TikTok accounts identified through snowball sampling. Data collection includes automated web scraping, manual transcription, and qualitative coding. This allows us to identify main topics, video formats, and content types to answer our research questions.
Results
Our findings show that Muslim women produce diverse content on TikTok, ranging from beauty and lifestyle to religious education and social justice. They shape the platform’s functionalities through creative use, while TikTok’s algorithm and virality logic drive creators to blend entertainment with personal content. The hijab emerges as a unique issue, framed within both political and fashion discourses. Overall, TikTok functions as a “third space” where Muslim women challenge mainstream stereotypes and offer alternative interpretations of their identity. While TikTok provides empowerment and visibility, it also exposes Muslim women to hate speech and harassment. The platform provides tools to counter these issues, but the underlying social hierarchies often limit their visibility, making TikTok both a site of empowerment and vulnerability.
Discussion
This study highlights the need for further research into the role of social media for marginalized groups, particularly across platforms, gender, and religion.
... As an intersectionally marginalized group-affected by factors such as religion, gender, and ethnicity and race due to the migration background of many members-German Muslims experience widespread discrimination and social exclusion (Di Stasio et al. 2021;Fernández-Reino et al. 2023;Lewicki and Shooman 2020). In addition, public discourses render German Muslims highly visible and associate them with various emotions, including fear (Schiffauer 2006;Wigger 2019). These dynamics add layers of complexity to the challenges faced by German Muslims as they navigate their multiple identities and search for belonging. ...
This study explores the representation of radical and anti-radical ideologies among German Islamic TikTok creators, analyzing 2983 videos from 43 accounts through qualitative content analysis. The results reveal two main content clusters: religious practice involving social/lifestyle issues and political activism around Muslim grievances. Victimization, found in 150 videos, was the most common indicator associated with radicalization and emerged as a source of political activism and subversive discourse. Overall, indicators of radicalism were scarce, suggesting that visible mainstream Islamic creators do not exhibit high levels of radical ideology. However, this also reflects a selection bias in the design of this study, which systematically overlooks fringe actors. In addition, religious advocacy was the most common topic (1144 videos), serving as a source of guidance and motivation, but was occasionally linked to sectarianism and rigid religious interpretations. Male creators posted more religious/theological videos; female creators posted more lifestyle videos. However, gender distinctions are limited due to the low representation of female creators (6). Some topics, such as the hijab, served as an intersection between religious practice and politicized narratives. This study highlights TikTok’s role in promoting diverse ideological views and shaping community engagement, knowledge sharing, and political mobilization within Germany’s Muslim digital landscape.
... Sexual citizenship has emerged as a critical area of scholarship to understand how state policies and legal systems have uphold a heteronormative national citizenship on the bases of homophobia and transphobia, and the resulting LGBTQ struggle for inclusion and recognition (Richardson, 2017;Sheller, 2012). With the formation of the 'sexual citizen-subject' as the claimant of rights in Europe (Held, 2023;Luibhéid, 2020;Luibhéid, 2023), the literature has expanded to show the use of ideals around sexual rights to produce and sustain the cultural/ civilizational divide between Europe and the Middle East, and to portray Middle Eastern migrants as 'dangerous' 'homophobic' and 'backward' while showing Europe as the centre of sexual liberation (Bracke, 2012;El-Tayeb, 2011;Puar, 2006;Sabsay, 2012;Wigger, 2019). The institutional experiences of queer asylum-seekers from the Middle East have calcified this dynamic with the emergence of a 'rescue narrative' (Bracke, 2012) showcasing 'vulnerable queer refugee' who needs protection from their own homophobic culture (Haritaworn, 2012;Murray, 2014;Saleh, 2020). ...
This article seeks to understand how staging, performing and re-narrating experiences of queer migration can be utilized to radically reimagine queer migrants’ subjectivities and politics in today’s Germany. Informed by ethnographic research conducted between 2020 and 2023, including 22 qualitative interviews with drag performers, I focus on the emerging scene of ‘migrant drag’ in Germany, informed by transnational histories of queer performance and border-crossing. Through acts of migrant drag, ‘building queer mountains’ appears as a queer migrant practice of finding alternative pathways to overcome obstacles that limit queer migrant subjectivities and to claim locality and stages for queer migrant politics beyond the normative scripts of sexual citizenship. Ultimately, ‘building queer mountains’ shows that sexual citizenship, sustained by (homo)normative sexualizations and hierarchical racialization, could be ‘crossed’ and reimagined through the collective and creative work of a community in search of alternative worlds.
... In contrast to the deficit stereotypes of refugees (Wigger, 2019), the data on Italy and With 26,000 clubs in five regional and 21 national associations, football offers unrivalled potential for integration in other sports, which has already proven its worth in the past in dealing with different migrant groups (Seiberth, 2012). At the amateur level, in particular, many clubs are involved in overall programs and initiatives for refugees and are committed to a welcoming culture. ...
In the aftermath of the never completely resolved ‘European refugee crisis’ and amid the ‘Russian invasion of Ukraine’ (as well as other emergencies around the world), this project examines the process of integration of athletes with a refugee background in football clubs across Europe. The project employs an instrumental case study of Germany and Italy, two countries with significant immigration of refugees and asylum-seekers. Drawing from 38 qualitative interviews conducted with different actors within the football system, data is analysed to specifically focus on the processes of both refugee players and football clubs. By applying socioecological theory and thematic analysis, the research explores the interactions with and for refugees amidst their pursuit of a football career in Europe. In doing so, the report evidences both barriers and facilitators for a successful and safe career pursuit, benefitting both football clubs and refugee players.
Success in sports depends on talent, social inclusion, appropriate support, hard work, and health, with refugee players facing additional physical, psychological, social and economic pressures. Resilience is crucial for refugee athletes pursuing an elite football career despite the burdens of forced migration. Football players with refugee experience have different biographies, mainly influenced by age differences in migration, geopolitical situations and gender.
Although football is fundamentally open, it is tough for refugees to become elite footballers. The lower professionalisation of women’s football is a further obstacle for women. Legal hurdles for refugee players are considered surmountable, but they are still an additional challenge. Football clubs have enormous potential for integration, but professional clubs face economic risks when recruiting refugees. Although openness and empathy prevail in football clubs, exclusion strategies, institutional discrimination, and the presence of right-wing groups pose fundamental problems for the integration of refugee players.
The inductive analysis of the data and its interpretation through the ecological system theory are applied to provide recommendations for optimising the inclusion of players with a refugee background in football clubs. The analysis identifies critical actors involved in the integration process and thematically highlights challenges and elements of success across the different environments of refugees. In this way, the methodological implications, positionalities, responsibilities, complications and ongoing necessities of studying elite football as a particular social and cultural space can be illuminated. The research results aim to support relevant sports organisations and actors in refugee aid in the integration process.
... Othering may be aggravated if refugees are characterized as useless (e.g., "welfare parasites") or as having different cultural and religious characteristics (e.g., "Islamization") than the perceived German norm (Himmel & Baptista, 2020;Tallarek et al., 2020). Moreover, the attribution of characteristics depends on the intersection with gender, with media portrayals in Germany reproducing racialized and gendered stereotypes (e.g., "lecherous refugees", "aggressive mob") (Wigger, 2019). Refugees from the Middle East in particular have been at the center of such negative stereotypes in Germany, leading to a deep divide between "us" and "them" in the population (Himmel & Baptista, 2020). ...
As a result of multiple traumas and stressors experienced before, during, and after migration, a significant proportion of refugees are at risk of developing mental health problems. If untreated, severe mental illness often persists for years. The detrimental impact of untreated mental health problems on affected individuals, their families, and communities underscores the importance of available and accessible mental health services for refugees. However, even in high-income countries with well-established mental health systems, there is evidence of a significant gap between the mental health needs and treatment for refugee populations. Several barriers to accessing mental health care for refugees in high-income countries have been identified in previous research and are summarized in this dissertation in an overview of systematic and scoping reviews. The studies conducted as part of this dissertation shed further light on relevant barriers and provide additional data on access to mental health care for refugees in Germany. Specifically, the studies encompassed detailed investigations of rates of mental health service use among refugees (Article 1) and relations with demand-side factors, such as the perceived need for treatment (Article 1) and explanatory models of mental illness (Article 2). In addition, the studies examined rates of mental health treatment provision to refugee patients (Article 3) and associations with supply-side barriers, including providers' perceptions of practical barriers (Article 3) and their attitudes toward refugees (Article 4). The findings demonstrate the importance of more comprehensive and contextualized assessments to provide robust information on indicators of mental health service use among refugee populations and to rigorously test prevailing assumptions about barriers to accessing mental health care. Furthermore, the current findings shift the focus from demand-side to supply-side barriers, highlighting the need to consider systemic factors and structural determinants, such as health policies and the role of mental health professionals as gatekeepers to care. In this context, our findings have important practical implications for promoting equity and efficiency in access to mental health care for refugees in high- income countries such as Germany.
... However, it was later revealed that some of this content had been available on the internet before the crisis at the Poland-Belarus border, suggesting an intention to portray all asylum-seekers and migrants as a threat. This involved associating Muslim or "oriental" asylum seekers and migrants with terrorism and sexual violence, in line with securitising and racialising narratives discussed in critical studies (Wigger 2019, Krzyżanowski 2020, Léonard and Kaunert 2022c. ...
... Making loose connections between a specific criminal case and initiatives targeting migrants as a group is not an idiosyncratic feature of this news article, but is a recurring discursive strategy in the Danish media, where individual incidents of sexual violence have been systematically generalised to all migrants and their descendants, thus creating the image of a homogenous migrant male collective with an uncontrolled, abnormal sexuality (Andreassen, 2007, p. 181). This is not unique to the Danish media landscape, of course; similar discursive tendencies have also been observed in other contexts (Wigger, 2019;Giuliani et al., 2020). What is particularly interesting for the purpose of this chapter is that the media typically portray rape and sexual assault as 'ethnic' problems tied to migrant men, rather than as broader societal issues caused by a more pervasive patriarchal structure that exceeds ethnic and national identification. ...
The aim of this chapter is to investigate the emergence of the characterological figure of the sexually abnormal male asylum-seeker in Denmark. For this purpose, we examine compulsory courses in Danish sexual morals. With the help of a Foucauldian discourse ethnography, we take a multi-layered approach that investigates media debates about the introduction of this educational provision, as well as teaching materials and classroom interactions in an asylum centre. Through detailed textual analysis, we demonstrate how the Danish national value of frisind, which can be roughly translated into ‘free-spiritedness’, does not lack normativity, as the word might suggest at first glance. Rather, the incorporation of free-spiritedness into the Danish nation-state project creates a rationale according to which this national value requires protection from foreign intruders and needs to be transmitted to anyone who wishes to become part of the nation. As such, free-spiritedness works as a regulatory tool that separates ‘true’ Danes from the Other. Within this logic, the male heterosexual asylum-seeker is not only cast as carrying unhealthy sexual behaviours from which the nation-state must be protected but is also presented as a potentially harmful species that must be socialised into proper behaviour.
... All three tweet authors downplayed the discrimination that women in germany still experience and, for that purpose, invoked the racist-sexist discursive pattern of black or brown men as perpetrators of sexual violence. this pattern has a long transnational history, which has been described by scholars from many disciplines, to give some examples: from a sociological perspective by iris Wigger (2007Wigger ( , 2019, from the perspective of communication studies by tracey owens patton and Julie snyder-Yuly (2007), from psychology by Audrey K. Miller (2019), from gender studies by sujata Moorti (2002), from literature studies by Robert Nowatzki (1994) [Although the elements constituting the cologne event are vague and disparate, their messages seem clear and their truth value unquestionable: 'the refugees from the civil war(s) are dangerous to german women, the refugees need to leave '.] in her article, Dietze (2016) shows how racism and sexism are intertwined in the interpretation of the event and how the fight against sexism, and for gender inequality and homosexual rights is implicitly presented as successfully concluded in germany (or "the West" in general) by means of the re presentation of Muslim individuals and refugees as a danger to the emancipated german woman. especially examples 18 and 19 from my material used this pattern in the way described above by insinuating that women will be "discriminated against" (which can be translated into sexually assaulted) as a direct result of the immigration of Muslim and non-white individuals. ...
Gender-fair language is a contested topic in contemporaryGermany. Many reports on the introduction of language changes meantto reduce discrimination result in heated debates in print, online andsocial media.In this article, I qualitatively analyse a selected debate on gender-fairlanguage on Twitter to find out how excessive the language use is andwho makes use of what kind of excessive language. The time frame ofanalysis covers a critical discourse moment in 2018 during which theCouncil for German Orthography for the first time dealt with new gen-der-fair spelling variants. Since the Council, being the only official lan-guage planning institution for German, publishes the official regulationson orthography valid in schools and administrative bodies in Germany,its decision was highly anticipated and disputed.The analysed debate contained only a few argumentative exchangeson the topic. In general, it can be said that Twitter was mostly used to takea stance, not to engage in discussions. The overall style of the debate waspolemic and exhibited many and various instances of excessive languageuse, mostly by opponents of gender-fair language. This group made useof vulgar language, pejoratives and in some cases direct insults. Theyespecially questioned their adversaries’ mental health. Only a few pro-ponents used excessive language when they insinuated a lack of mentalcapacity in their adversaries.
... It was primarily opponents of the policy reform measure that emphasized gender. In doing so, we argue that opponents were strategically tapping into norms within Swedish society that have to do with gender equality as an overarching and widely-shared societal objective (Towns, 2002;Aggestam et al., 2019), as well as more general racist arguments that characterize male Muslim migrants as societal and personal threats (Wigger, 2019). In terms of conflict situations, the gender equality norm is especially visible (and, indeed, its objectives are overwhelmingly supported by conflict research; see Carpenter, 2005) in the form of policies and measures designed to ensure that the needs of vulnerable girls and women are explicitly identified, prioritized, and met (Aggestam & Bergman-Rosamond, 2016;Aggestam et al., 2019). ...
The Swedish policy known as Gymnasielagen, or the High School Law, allows for approximately 9000 refugees who arrived as unaccompanied minors, but had their asylum applications rejected, to receive permanent residency if employed within six months of completing their education. The outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic made it difficult for most young refugees to obtain long-term employment that quickly. A proposed reform to introduce the High School Law, which would have improved their opportunities for employment, was rejected after highly publicized debate among the political parties. This chapter details how this reform was framed by Swedish political parties throughout 2020 and 2021, using parliamentary transcripts, supplemented by news media and social media material. Two additional instances of refugee reception to Sweden are used as contrasting cases: that of Afghan refugees following the return to power of the Taliban in 2021 and that of Ukrainian refugees following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The analysis combines impressionistic approaches to interpretive policy analysis with the ideational turn in institutionalism and governance research. The chapter highlights that, while a crisis is, by definition, unexpected, context-specific policy legacies and hegemonic problem definitions determine who is viewed as worthy of policy reforms addressing their needs.KeywordsGymnasielagenHigh School LawMigration policyPolicy legaciesProblem definitionsUnaccompanied minorsSecondary education
... Media analysis has shown frequent negative terminology such as "illegal", "violence", "terrorist" used in this context [12,13,19]. Moreover, news reports have linked certain crimes or socioeconomic issues (e.g., the rise of unemployment) to immigration [9,68]. In contrast, in 2022, the humanitarian crisis at the EU border resulting from Ukrainians fleeing the war prompted a massive reaction of support by the western media and a great display of solidarity from the European public in particular. ...
... A negative framing of economically deprived nations, of course, carries the implication of maintaining global status hierarchies rooted in a colonialist past, and cultural distance can serve to maintain cultural dominance (Goldberg, 2006). In national contexts, in which race as a concept is absent from reporting, while groups are racialized along ethnic and religious lines (Wigger, 2019;Yurdakul & Korteweg, 2021), tracing underlying factors of ethnicist bias can aid in making the "absent presence" of racism visible (Balkenhol & Schramm, 2019). ...
News coverage plays a crucial role in the formation of attitudes toward ethnic and religious minority groups. On the attitudinal level, it is an established notion that individuals’ explicit and implicit judgments of the same groups can vary. Yet, less is known about the prevalence of implicit group judgments in news coverage. Focusing on a large variety of ethnic and religious minority groups in Germany, the present study sets out to fill this gap. We use semi-supervised machine learning to distinguish explicit and implicit stigmatization of ethnic and religious groups in German journalistic coverage (n = 697,913 articles). Findings suggest that groups that are associated with less wealthy countries, and with culturally more distant countries, face more stigmatization, both explicitly and implicitly. Yet, the data also show that groups associated with Islam and groups with large refugee populations living in the country of study are implicitly, but not explicitly stigmatized in news coverage. We discuss these and other resulting patterns against the backdrop of sociological and psychological intergroup theories and reflect upon their implications for journalism.
... This first framework-which (broadly) understands mediated criminalization as the construction and reproduction of criminalized subjects through media, and so in the self/Other definitional work of representation-has inspired a broad body of scholarship investigating the role of news media representations in criminalizing marginalized social groups, including asylum seekers and refugees (see Vezovnik, 2017), Muslims (see Umamaheswar, 2015;Wigger, 2019), protesters (see Leopold & Bell, 2017;Pérez-Arredondo & Cárdenas-Neira, 2018), and drug users (see Taylor, 2008). There is also a considerable and growing body of literature examining the role news and entertainment media representations have played in legitimizing the overpolicing and mass incarceration of Black people in the United States through the iterative symbolic articulation of Blackness with criminality (see Smiley & Fakunle, 2016;King, 2015; see also Davis, 1998). ...
This thesis makes an empirically grounded attempt to rethink the problem of ‘criminalization’— what it is, how it works, and the kinds of political work it performs—from the perspective of media culture. Informed by an abolitionist ethic, it explores the role played by news media in building, maintaining, and potentially transforming, the justificatory basis for different forms of security practice. More specifically, it investigates how journalistic representations of crime events work to negotiate, in and through public culture, the imaginative conditions of possibility for policing, incarceration, punitive deportation, and other strategies of so-called ‘crime control’. Its major theoretical contributions are a radically expanded understanding of what it means to culturally ‘criminalize’, as well as the ‘mediated security imaginary’ as a new critical heuristic for understanding the relationship between ways of communicating (in)security, on the one hand, and way of acting upon it, on the other. Together, these two contributions open new horizons (both scholarly and practical) for the cultural resistance of criminalization as an endemic, yet ultimately arbitrary, logic of contemporary social and political life. Empirically, these contributions unfold through a close analysis of one specific case of mediated criminalization: the construction of ‘African gang crime’ in and through the Australian press. Since beginning to arrive in Australia in significant numbers in the late 1990s and early 2000s, members of Australia’s Black African diaspora have been subject to persistent negative media attention, with news narratives focussing on perceived issues of juvenile delinquency and gang activity. The analysis approaches news media representations of ‘African gang crime’ events (both print and televisual) as sites of vulnerability politics, where different and sometimes conflictual accounts of social vulnerability struggle for public recognition. Deploying an ‘analytics of mediation’ (Chouliaraki, 2010) which combines granular multi-modal text analysis with the critical analysis of discourse (CDA), the thesis explicates how criminalization operates as a mediated politics of vulnerability across three key dimensions: first, through the negotiation of vulnerability as a political condition, or its constructed sense of “realness”; second, through the negotiation of vulnerability as a moral condition, or its constructed sense of “wrongness”; and finally, through the positioning of vulnerability as a practical epistemology of justification, or as a justificatory basis for different kinds of social practice. As the practices we have historically called criminal justice experience a moment of radical normative instability, this thesis argues that the mediation of criminality will have a critical role to play in determining its longer political legacy. To the wealth of political economy critiques of policing and prisons, the thesis accentuates ‘imaginability’ as an important critical horizon for our efforts to transform the practices through which we pursue safety and justice, and practices of mediated representation as crucial to how this horizon might be remade. Amid heated debates about the status of ‘the victim’ in contemporary political life, it also deploys a critique of mediated (in)security to consider the wider historical significance of a particular, premediated formation of white victimhood that expresses itself in a subjunctive mood: a victimcould, wherein it is the very possibility of injury (rather than the fact or the likelihood) that subverts the promises of whiteness in contemporary Australian life to position its subjects as ‘wronged’.
... Media analysis has shown frequent negative terminology such as "illegal", "violence", "terrorist" used in this context [12,13,19]. Moreover, news reports have linked certain crimes or socioeconomic issues (e.g., the rise of unemployment) to immigration [9,68]. In contrast, in 2022, the humanitarian crisis at the EU border resulting from Ukrainians fleeing the war prompted a massive reaction of support by the western media and a great display of solidarity from the European public in particular. ...
The war in Ukraine seems to have positively changed the attitude toward the critical societal topic of migration in Europe -- at least towards refugees from Ukraine. We investigate whether this impression is substantiated by how the topic is reflected in online news and social media, thus linking the representation of the issue on the Web to its perception in society. For this purpose, we combine and adapt leading-edge automatic text processing for a novel multilingual stance detection approach. Starting from 5.5M Twitter posts published by 565 European news outlets in one year, beginning September 2021, plus replies, we perform a multilingual analysis of migration-related media coverage and associated social media interaction for Europe and selected European countries. The results of our analysis show that there is actually a reframing of the discussion illustrated by the terminology change, e.g., from "migrant" to "refugee", often even accentuated with phrases such as "real refugees". However, concerning a stance shift in public perception, the picture is more diverse than expected. All analyzed cases show a noticeable temporal stance shift around the start of the war in Ukraine. Still, there are apparent national differences in the size and stability of this shift.
... The terms "Arab" and "Muslim" are often used interchangeably in German media portrayals and public discourse (e.g., Shooman, 2012), and thus perceptions of both groups seem closely linked. Media depictions of Arabs and Muslims are mostly negative (e.g., Wigger, 2019), and focus on issues around safety threats and perceptions of cultural differences to mainstream society (Stürmer et al., 2019). ...
The present research assesses potential correlates of discriminatory police behavior, comparing police and civilian participants in a first person shooter task (FPST) as well as on various self-report measures of intergroup contact, intergroup attitudes, and ideological beliefs in three preregistered studies. Study 1 (N = 330), using a FPST with a short response window (630 ms), did not observe shooter biases in reaction times, error rates and signal detection parameters in neither police nor civilian participants. Study 2a (N = 290), using a longer response window (850 ms), observed a shooter bias in reaction times, error rates, and response criterion in both civilian and police participants. These shooter biases were largely driven by faster reactions, fewer errors, and more liberal shoot decisions for armed Arab (vs. White) targets. Study 2b (N = 191; 850 ms response window) closely replicated shooter biases in reaction times, error rates, and response criterion in a sample of civilian online participants. Across studies, we observed similar results in the shooter task for police and civilian samples. Furthermore, both police and civilian participants expressed anti-Muslim and anti-Arab attitudes across a variety of self-report measures. However, compared to civilians, police participants reported higher levels of anti-Muslim attitudes on some measures as well as higher levels of social dominance orientation, which might pose additional risk factors for discriminatory behavior. Lastly, while we observed reliable individual differences in self-reported intergroup attitudes, ideologies, and intergroup contact, none of these characteristics correlated with shooter biases.
... The terms "Arab" and "Muslim" are often used interchangeably in German media portrayals and public discourse (e.g., Shooman, 2012), and thus perceptions of both groups seem closely linked. Media depictions of Arabs and Muslims are mostly negative (e.g., Wigger, 2019), and focus on issues around safety threats and perceptions of cultural differences to mainstream society (Stürmer et al., 2019). ...
The present research assesses potential correlates of discriminatory police behavior, comparing police and civilian participants’ in a first person shooter task (FPST) as well as on various self-report measures of intergroup contact, intergroup attitudes, and ideological beliefs in three preregistered studies. Study 1 (N = 330), using a FPST with a short response window (630 ms), did not observe shooter biases in reaction times, error rates and signal detection parameters in neither police nor civilian participants. Study 2a (N = 290), using a longer response window (850 ms), observed a shooter bias in reaction times, error rates, and response criterion in both civilian and police participants. These shooter biases were largely driven by faster reactions, fewer errors, and less hesitant shoot decisions for armed Arab (vs. White) targets. Study 2b (N = 191; 850 ms response window) closely replicated shooter biases in reaction times, error rates, and response criterion in a sample of civilian online participants. Across all studies, we observed similar results in the shooter task for police and civilian samples. Furthermore, both police and civilian participants expressed anti-Muslim and anti-Arab attitudes across a variety of self-report measures. However, compared to civilians, police participants reported higher levels of anti-Muslim attitudes on some measures as well as higher levels of social dominance orientation, which might pose additional risk factors for discriminatory behavior. Lastly, while we observed reliable individual differences in self-reported intergroup attitudes, ideologies, and intergroup contact, none of these characteristics correlated with shooter biases.
... Othering may be aggravated if refugees are characterized as useless (e.g., "welfare parasites") or as having different cultural and religious characteristics (e.g., "Islamization") than the perceived German norm (Himmel & Baptista, 2020;Tallarek et al., 2020). Moreover, the attribution of characteristics depends on the intersection with gender, with media portrayals in Germany reproducing racialized and gendered stereotypes (e.g., "lecherous refugees," "aggressive mob") (Wigger, 2019). Refugees from the Middle East in particular have been at the center of such negative stereotypes in Germany, leading to a deep divide between "us" and "them" in the population (Himmel & Baptista, 2020). ...
Objective: A large proportion of refugees present with psychological disorders that require psychotherapy as first-line treatment. However, even in countries with well-established psychotherapy system, refugees continue to face barriers to care. Psychotherapists' attitudes toward refugees may also impede access to psychotherapy, as it is evident that stereotypes of health professionals contribute to health care disparities. However, little is known about psychotherapists' attitudes toward refugees. Methods: In a cross-sectional online study of N = 2002 outpatient psychotherapists in Germany (Mage = 54.48 years, 73.1% female), a vignette experiment was applied to examine differences in therapists' attitudes toward refugee patients from the Middle East and non-refugee patients. Subsequently, associations between attitudes and psychotherapists' characteristics (e.g., provision of treatment for refugees) were analyzed. Results: Results showed significant differences between therapists' attitudes toward refugee and non-refugee patients (ηp2 = .23), with more therapy-hindering attitudes toward refugee patients. Higher therapy-hindering attitudes were significantly associated with less frequent provision of psychotherapy for refugees. Conclusion: Our findings provide initial evidence that psychotherapists perceive refugee patients as deviant from the norm and that these divergent attitudes may relate to disparities in mental health care. To avoid such a process of othering, training for psychotherapists should question stereotypes toward refugees.
... Slovak Ethnology 3 70 2022 BOOK REVIEWS / BOOK ESSAYS e creation and dissemination of a stereotypical image of Muslim Arabs was confirmed, for example, in a study by Iris Wigger (2019) focused on the textual analysis of German magazines. Her analysis highlights that the researched publications spread a stereotypical image of Muslim migrants and Arabs as sexual aggressors and violators who pose a threat to women because male dominance is "a characteristic feature of Muslim migrants and is portrayed as a basic dimension of their religious beliefs" (Wigger, 2019). It is not surprising that Islamophobia began to grow in Western societies. ...
... Consequently, they face disparate and even discriminatory treatment. According to Wigger (2019), stereotyping and bigotrywherein persons of different cultures are homogenized based on their religious identitiesare amongst the most common forms of discrimination faced by minorities (Mitha et al., 2017;Bava, 2011). Newman and Krzystofiak (1998) investigate migrants' participation in many areas of their host communities, including these communities' social, economic, and political lives. ...
This article explores Muslim migrants’ economic and political contributions to Jayapura, Papua, as well as the tensions that have emerged therein. Through observation, interviews, and a review of the literature, it investigates the influence of Muslim migrants on Papuan life, as well as Muslim migrants’ use of economic means to ensure their survival in the face of significant pressure. Although indigene – migrant relations have ebbed and flowed over time, Muslim migrants have not only influenced society through open communication and interactions with their peers, but also contributed to the social, economic, and political advancement of Papua. As such, this article recommends that future research should investigate how different elements of Papuan society recognize each other and work cooperatively and progressively towards achieving a better future.
This study examines how political ideology shapes attribution processes, focusing on how liberals attribute undesirable behaviour by a minority outgroup member they support. It was investigated whether, depending on the actor's group membership, the strength of norm violation affects attribution biases and emotional and punitive reactions. Two experiments (N1 = 180, N2 = 276) showed that participants were more likely to attribute a refugee's (vs. a non‐refugee majority group member) norm‐violating behaviour to external rather than to dispositional factors. Contrary to our hypotheses, the strength of norm violation did not have the expected effect on the difference in dispositional attribution between groups. Regarding emotional reactions, liberals exhibited more sympathy and less anger and desire for punishment towards a refugee compared to a majority group member. Furthermore, the findings suggest that the strength of the norm violation may influence anger and desire for punishment. When the norm violation was severe, participants expressed similar levels of anger and desire for punishment towards both actors, whereas there was a significant difference between group memberships when the norm violation was weaker. These findings provide a foundation for future research on how values and beliefs shape interpretations of others' actions, enhancing our understanding of intergroup attributions and the cognitive underpinnings of social judgements and biases.
This research comparatively examined coverage of the 2015 Syrian refugee crisis and 2022 Ukrainian refugee crisis in five elite American daily papers. The study employed quantitative content analysis and was guided by framing theory. Findings suggest that newspapers were more likely to humanize Ukrainian refugees than Syrian refugees, and to frame Syrian refugees as threats and aggressors. The paper discusses the implications of the findings in light of past research into anti-Muslim media discourse. ARTICLE HISTORY
This paper aims to meta-synthesize films for future research on displacement and exposure to human rights violations in cinema. With a purposive sample of eleven films, the focus was on basic human rights violations and impoverishment caused by war-related displacement. The article provided spatial diversity through the thematization, and meta-synthesis of films produced on the topic in different countries. In the selected films, displaced people were often traumatized by material and emotional poverty and human rights violations. However, in most countries of migration, discourses on refugees have been developed with the claim that they cause unemployment and cheap labour. Therefore, the research explored not only the humanitarian injustices suffered by refugees but also whether the voices of non-refugee groups experiencing poverty and unemployment are heard. According to the findings, these films often focused on displaced people, with insufficient dialogue with local people, especially those living in poverty. In an assessment, it was observed that the selected films generally lacked a solidarity ground for refugee and non-refugee vulnerable social groups who are directly and indirectly subjected to human rights violations as a result of fleeing war.
Public representations exercise great power over the future of individuals and places. They can orient perceptions and decisions by building narratives articulating particular interpretations of social and territorial dynamics. These narratives inform public agenda-setting, highlighting issues and suggesting priorities of intervention. The public representations of multicultural neighbourhoods produced by the media usually emphasise the exceptional characteristics of areas with a high concentration of immigrants, depicting diversity as a threat. These stereotypical representations cast people with migrant backgrounds in a homogenising light, often focusing on the supposed negative behaviours and presence of men while ignoring women and girls. While men become hyper-visible, migrant women remain invisible and unacknowledged as relevant social actors. By linking the literature on the stigmatisation of multicultural neighbourhoods and the marginalisation of women in the social and urban domain, the chapter describes the case of the multicultural neighbourhood of San Siro (Milan, Italy), where women’s narratives of solidarity and mutual care struggle to be recognised as alternative representations of highly stigmatised places and communities.
With a focus on the post‐2015 period in the western and northern regions of Europe, the research examined here shows prominent media discourses of othering, threat and deservedness of migrants. This spatial and temporal frame lends itself to the study of how discourses reflect the impact of the so‐called ‘refugee crisis’ in these regions of Europe. Since there was also continued immigration related to increased opportunities for work, education, quality of life and family togetherness which have long brought migrants to these European countries, examining the research in this period allows us to discover how these discourses might distinguish between different migrant experiences. There is some evidence for the differentiation of certain types of people of migration background in the media discourses, despite a strong tendency to stereotype and essentialise regardless of the actual background of migrants or their descendants. Another key aspect in the research to date is how professional versus participatory media can be compared in the discourses of migration they reproduce, and how these different types of media play a role in society. The article ends with a call for a more intersectional perspective on migration which incorporates critical perspectives on racialisation, and further examination of the voices of migrants in the media.
Narratives of racialized sexual violence—specifically, where a dominant-group woman faces harm by a man outside the dominant group—have long been a staple of American political communication. Past scholarship has examined how these threats prime racial resentment among White Americans; less is known about their gendered effects. I present an original survey experiment comparing racialized sexual threats with racialized threats that are not gendered or sexual. Both evoke racial resentment. Compared with solely racial threats, however, racialized sexual threats also make benevolent sexism salient for a range of democratic outcomes. Moreover, I find distinct effects by respondent race and gender, as men and women of different racial identities are situated differently vis a vis racialized sexual threats. To demonstrate that the gendered/sexualized impact of these appeals extends to real-world campaigns, I conclude with an analysis of candidate support in the 1988 presidential election. The 1988 race saw one of the most notorious examples of racialized sexual threat in modern American politics in the “Willie Horton” ad, aired on behalf of the Bush campaign. Even with the limited measures available in that year, I find that sexism played an important role in shaping Americans’ political views.
When it comes to Muslim representational practices in European cities, fears, criticism and scepticism emerge in the public discourse. The aim of this paper is to investigate how Muslim places of prayer are negotiated. By means of a multi-method approach we investigate how Muslim places of prayer in Leipzig become visible. We further question the media’s role in local negotiation processes. The analysis shows that the diverse Muslim places of prayer rather resemble as ‘backyard mosques’ due to financial and structural hurdles as well as conflict avoidance. However, some interviewees explain their satisfaction with the places of prayer, which are places of migration and thus social networks, especially for the first generation. Due to its East German past, Leipzig is experiencing a partly catch-up debate regarding the arrival of Islam through migration. However, religion as culture is giving-way to individual local practices of representation of diverse Muslim people that could be picked up more strongly by the media.
This article examines how concepts of gender and sexuality are increasingly being mobilised as symbolic values in Danish immigration politics. The Danish national self-perception rests on an idea of widespread tolerance, especially regarding gender and sexuality. However, understandings of gender and sexuality as represented in Danish immigration discourse draw clear boundaries between insiders and outsiders. As of 2017, Danish asylum centres introduced compulsory teaching of so-called ‘Danish sexual morals’ as an attempt to prevent sexual violence by educating asylum seekers in sexual conduct. Based on fieldwork conducted in a language and culture class at an asylum centre, the analysis demonstrates how the teacher simultaneously reproduces and challenges concepts of differing national sexualities as they appear in the teaching material, and how the students push back against culturally specific conceptualisations of gender and sexuality by offering personal narratives countering those ascribed to them in the stereotypical representations.
This article explores how the experiences of queer migration shape and inform racialisation, and how racial categories, such as ‘whiteness’ and ‘non-whiteness’, are employed by queer migrants from Turkey in relation to their narratives of belonging and non-belonging in Germany. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Berlin between 2018 and 2022, I aim to show how racism is ambiguously attached to migration and sexual difference, and how ideas of racial difference enable queer migrants to form political collectives and make their experience intelligible to themselves and others. Instead of approaching racialisation as an all-or-nothing finality, the participants often use narratives of non-belonging to distance themselves from the public majority (defined as ‘heterosexual’ and ‘white’) and employ hybrid minoritarian identities, such as ‘queer people of colour’, to translate their difference to other queer migrant and racialised groups in Berlin.
This chapter investigates young Muslims’ expression of multiple identities, with various indicators of identity studied. The chapter’s thematic analysis revealed a complex expression of identity among young Muslims including a strong sense of individuality in each respondent. Interview responses brought forward subthemes of multiple expressions of identities. Instead of belonging to one temporal space or social category, it was evident that most, if not all, had dynamic ‘layers’ of identity. Through analysis of each of the subthemes found in interviews, the chapter finds that not only are migrant identities plural, and display elements of connection with homeland, country of origin, faith, and gender, but there is also a clear difference in their expression of identity depending on the experiences they have had with feeling welcomed and included in their Western home.KeywordsIdentityNationalismMulticulturalismMuslim youthWestHomeland
Compared to their male counterparts, refugee women exhibit low employment rates in many countries. Discrimination by recruiters is a possible explanation for this phenomenon, but there is so far little direct evidence on this. This study addresses this gap. We develop a set of hypotheses about the effects of gender and family status on refugees' labor market integration and then test these hypotheses using data from an original survey experiment administered in 2019 to online panels of recruiters in three major refugee-receiving countries (Germany, Austria, and Sweden). We find that recruiters in fact prefer female over male refugees across different job types, all else equal. However, we also find evidence of a disadvantage connected with motherhood among refugees. Overall, our findings raise doubts about the relevance of discrimination as an explanation for the employment gap between male and female refugees.
Artikel ini hendak menjelaskan tentang dinamika pendampingan di daerah rawan konflik agama. Konflik dengan tendensi agama seringkali muncul di daerah yang memiliki diaspora etnis dan agama yang beragam. Hal ini pula yang terjadi di Desa Sidomulyo Kecamatan Pronojiwo Kabupaten Lumajang, sebuah daerah dengan keragaman agama yang cukup merata. Pendampingan dilakukan untuk mewujudkan harmonisasi agama dengan pendekatan perubahan kesadaran dari masyarakat (grassroot). Pendampingan masyarakat menggunakan pendekatan Participatory Action Research (PAR). Dimana dalam keselurahan proses pendampingan dari penelusuran problem hingga pemecahan masalah bersifat partisipatif. Hal ini memungkinkan harmonisasi agama terjadi dengan didahului oleh perubahan kesadasaran dan keterlibatan berbagai stakeholders dalam proses pelaksanaannya secara partisipatif. Dari hasil pendampingan didapati kesimpulan bahwa dalam mewujudkan harmonisasi agama masyarakat menggunakan dua pendekatan yakni melakukan kegiatan kebudayaan secara bersama dan kegiatan sosial secara bersama-sama. Kegiatan yang dilakukan secara bersama-sama antara lain kenduri desa, pawon urip, pembentukan kelompok seni Gita Iswara Campursari dan kemah lintas agama yang direncanakan bersama dengan Forum Komunikasi Umat Beragama.
Bakery Jatta migrated from The Gambia to Germany during the so-called ‘refugee crisis’. Today, he is a professional soccer player and plays for Hamburger SV. His story has been widely reported in mass media. This article explores the question ‘How did German newspapers report on Bakery Jatta?’ based on a discourse analysis of a catalogue of 270 German newspaper articles published between 2016 and 2019. The articles included in the catalogue cover five major topics: Jatta’s performance; his biography; contract and transfer; legal issues, and expressions of solidarity for or of hostility toward him. The media reporting spanned three phases, which saw Bakery Jatta’s media portrayal mutate from hero to anti-hero. Bild served as the forerunner in this transformation, with the other newspapers following the tabloid’s lead. The reporting on Bakery Jatta exemplifies, echoes and connects different discourses on the ‘refugee crisis’ and on soccer’s integrative power.
What stories do states tell about themselves and their neighbours, and how are these narratives challenged? This study takes the case of the European ‘refugee crisis’ of 2015-2016, a period of hostile relations between Russia and the European Union, to examine the vision of Europe disseminated by Russian state-controlled media, and the alternative offered by independent media. It analyses 609 news reports on the ‘refugee crisis’ from state-controlled broadcaster Channel One and 181 news pieces from the independent web-based outlet TV Rain. Adopting the strategic narrative framework proposed by Miskimmon, O’Loughlin and Roselle (2013), this study both provides new detail on the narratives found on Russian state-controlled media, and asks the previously unresearched question: how do independent media outlets react to the dominant narratives seen on state broadcasters? It uses a grounded theory approach to elaborate new findings on the behaviour of independent media. The importance of independent media has traditionally been understood in terms of its ability to hold government to account, but the findings of this study suggest independent media can also act as a watchdog and corrective to state-controlled media. This study thus contributes to the literature on both strategic narratives, and media theory.
– EMPIRICAL RESEARCH
The so-called ‘refugee crisis’ was a highly mediatised event. Despite being considered an important engine for integration, the representation of sport within the media coverage on the ‘refugee crisis’ has never been scientifically reviewed. With the intention of closing this research gap, the present article explores the question: ‘How do German newspapers represent sport in the context of the ‘refugee crisis’?’ To answer this question, 1,840 articles were analysed using a template analysis and interpreted on the basis of foucauldian discourse theory. The analyses focussed on the discourse strands identified within six main themes: (1) Construction of the refugee athlete; (2) Refugees as threats or victims; (3) Engagement of the sport system; (4) Sport facilities as shelters; (5) Integration of refugees in/through sport; (6) Sport as a charitable purpose. The analysis of these strands of discourse shows that the sport theme is deeply embedded in that on the ‘refugee crisis’, but not bound to its development. While sport has the paradoxical potential of both oppressing and empowering individuals, this article focusses on how the sport-related discourse strands support the reproduction of cultural hegemony. Towards the discourse strands, the German press often drawn a distinction between the generous German ‘self’ and the powerless refugee ‘other’.
This paper seeks to draw on the tools of Ernesto Laclau’s theory of discourse, hegemony and populism as well as recent Essex School work on populism to examine the discourse of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and, in the process, come closer to a more systematic understanding of nature and limits of right-wing populism as well as the interplay and distinction between populist and non-populist discursive logics more generally. The paper situates itself in the context of existing Essex School work that has distinguished populism from institutionalism—and, more recently, from nationalism —in terms of either the length of the equivalential chain or the centrality of “the people” as nodal point in addition to the degree of antagonistic division between “people” and “power.” Building on this latter strand in the recent work of Yannis Stavrakakis and others, this paper proposes a formal distinction between populism and reductionism as internal to Laclau’s theory of populism. Reductionism, it is argued, tends to reduce “the people” onto a differential particularity that sets a priori limits on the equivalential chain as opposed to constructing it as a tendentially empty signifier attached to an open-ended chain—producing a tendential closure of the equivalential chain and thus undercutting the primacy of the logic of equivalence that is fundamental to Laclau’s understanding of populism and subsequent Essex School applications of it. It is argued that predominantly ethno-, cultural- or nativist-reductionist discourses may nonetheless deploy a populist logic of partial openings in the equivalential chain, especially through the selective equivalential incorporation of sexual or ethno-linguistic minorities against a common (often “Islamic”) constitutive outside. This is demonstrated empirically in a discourse analysis of the AfD and its development from a “competition populism” into an ethno-culturally reductionist conception of “the people” coexisting with partial openings in relation to the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community and Russian-Germans in the Berlin context in particular.
This article discusses the debate on sexism that flared up again as a consequence of the moral panic after the sexual assaults by young migrants and refugees during the New Year's Eve celebrations 2015/2016. I introduce the concept of ethnosexism in order to approach an existing yet currently aggravated conceptualization of migration as a 'sexual problem'. This adds an intersectional dimension to the concept of sexism. I then consider the 'sexually dangerous muslim refugee' as a figure of defense against migration and analyze its function in feminist and liberal attitudes for narratives of western superiority.
Short Version is published in the print version of the Journal 2:1, 2016
Through interviews with Christian and Muslim women in Norway, Spain and the United Kingdom, this book explores intersections between religion, citizenship, gender and feminism. How do religious women think about citizenship, and how do they practice citizenship in everyday life? How important is faith in their lives, and how is religion bound up with other identities such as gender and nationality? What are their views on 'gender equality', women's movements and feminism? The answers offered by this book are complex. Religion can be viewed as both a resource and a barrier to women's participation. The interviewed women talk about citizenship in terms of participation, belonging, love, care, tolerance and respect. Some seek gender equality within their religious communities, while others accept different roles and spaces for women. 'Natural' differences between women and men and their equal value are emphasized more than equal rights. Women's movements are viewed as having made positive contributions to women's status, but interviewees are also critical of claims related to abortion and divorce, and of feminism's allegedly selfish, unwomanly, anti-men and power-seeking stance. In the interviews, Christian privilege is largely invisible and silenced, while Muslim disadvantage is both visible and articulated. Line Nyhagen and Beatrice Halsaa unpack and make sense of these findings, discussing potential implications for the relationship between religion, gender and feminism.
To better understand the public portrayal of minorities, we propose a new and systematic procedure for measuring the standing of different groups that relies on the tone of daily newspaper headlines containing the names of minority groups. This paper assesses the portrayal of Muslims in the British print media between 2001 and 2012, focusing especially on testing scholarly propositions that Muslims are depicted in a systematically negative way. We compare the tone of newspaper headlines across time and across newspaper type and compare the portrayal of Muslims to that of Jews and Christians. We do not find support for arguments that Muslims are consistently portrayed in a negative manner in the British media as a whole. However, our data demonstrate that headlines in right-leaning newspapers are more negative than those in left-leaning newspapers, and that Muslims are consistently portrayed more negatively than Jews and frequently more negatively than Christians. These findings thus offer a more nuanced understanding of British newspaper portrayals of Muslims than exists in the contemporary scholarly literature.
The 'Black Shame' campaign used stereotypical images of 'racially primitive' , sexually depraved black colonial soldiers threatening 'white women' in 1920s Germany to manufacture widespread concern and generate panic about the presence of tens of thousands of occupying French troops from colonial Africa on German soil. The campaign, which originated with the German government, quickly developed a momentum of its own and became an international phenomenon, spanning the political divide and incorporating figures from the Left and Right, trades unionists, Christian groups, women s organisations and key public figures including Edmund D. Morel and Bertrand Russell. It had followers throughout Europe, the US and Australia and was promoted through the modern media. The author here explores the ways in which the racial, sexual, class and national stereotypes that fuelled the campaign interrelated and reinforced one another, creating 'interlinked discriminations'.
Comparisons of anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim sentiment (the latter also known as ‘Islamophobia’) are noticeably absent in British accounts of race and racism. This article critically examines some public and media discourse on Jewish and Muslim minorities to draw out the similarities and differences contained within anti-Semitic and anti-Muslim sentiment. It provides a rationale for focusing upon the period of greatest saliency for Jewish migrants prior to the Second World War, compared with the contemporary representation of Muslims, and identifies certain discursive tendencies operating within the representations of each minority. The article begins with a discussion of multiculturalism, cultural racism and racialization, followed by a brief exploration of the socio-historical dimensions of Jewish and Muslim groups, before turning to the public representation of each within their respective time-frames. The article concludes that there are both hitherto unnoticed similarities and important differences to be found in such a comparison, and that these findings invite further inquiry.
Stereotyping stands in need of serious re-appraisal. This book provides a critical assessment of the concept and its use in the social sciences, considering its theoretical basis and historical development and linking these closely to the concept of the Other. As the first sustained book-length treatment of stereotyping in either sociology or media and cultural studies, the text embraces such key topics as nationalism and national identity, gender, racism and imperialism, normality and social order, and the figure of the stranger in the modern city. It is genuinely interdisciplinary, moving between sociology, social psychology, cultural history, psychoanalysis and postcolonial theory, and offers an indispensable examination of the roots of prejudice and bigotry in modern societies.
Mit der Kölner »Nacht, die alles veränderte« ist einiges in Bewegung geraten. Vielleicht sind Bewegungen auch nur sichtbarer geworden. Feministische Anliegen finden zwar verstärkt Gehör, doch dies ist eng verwoben mit neuen Rassismen und der Kulturalisierung sozialer Ungleichheiten. Eine der hier auffälligsten Paradoxien ist die Mobilisierung von Gender, Sexualität und einer Vorstellung von Frauenemanzipation durch nationalistische und fremdenfeindliche Parteien sowie durch konservative Regierungen zur Rechtfertigung rassistischer bzw. islamfeindlicher Ausgrenzungspolitiken. Wollen wir dagegen verstehen, wie unsere gesamte Lebensweise in Kategorien der Über- und Unterordnung gefasst ist und wie diese feinen Unterschiede Handeln, Einstellungen und Gefühle aller bestimmen, dann gilt es, Sexismus, Rassismus und Heteronormativität nicht als voneinander unabhängige soziale Teilungsverhältnisse zu untersuchen. Die Analyse komplexer Wirklichkeiten erfordert ein Nachdenken, das die wechselseitige Bedingtheit verschiedener Differenzen in den Blick nimmt.
Die Entstehung der »Islamophobie« wird gemeinhin als Folge des jüngsten radikalen Islamismus gesehen. Demgegenüber belegen kultur- und sozialwissenschaftliche Analysen, dass antimuslimischer Rassismus bereits lange vorher verbreitet war und in politischen, kulturellen und alltäglichen Diskursen der »westlichen Kultur« verwurzelt ist. Im Unterschied zu interreligiösen Dialogen, die sich bemühen, »das Fremde« zu verstehen und damit der »Islamophobie« begegnen wollen, kehrt dieses Buch die Perspektive um. Der Blick auf »die Anderen« dient als Ausgangspunkt der Betrachtung - nicht, um »das Fremde« zu verstehen, sondern um das »Eigene« reflektieren zu können. Mit Bezug auf postkoloniale und poststrukturalistische Theorien wird die Präsentation »des Islam« als hegemonialer Diskurs analysiert. Demnach ist die Dichotomie zwischen »Islam« und »Westen« eine Konstruktion, die beide essenzialisiert. Sie hat sich historisch entwickelt und transformiert, ihr kommen in politischen Konstellationen unterschiedliche Bedeutungen zu, ihre Facetten sind Teil des kulturellen Wissensbestandes »des Westens« über »den Orient« bzw. »den Islam«. In ihrem Alltag vermitteln sich den Subjekten die Bedingungen und Bedeutungen des »Islamdiskurses« als kulturelle Repräsentationen, die ihnen Sichtweisen und Interpretationen anbieten, nahelegen oder erschweren. In diesem Möglichkeitsraum setzen sich die Subjekte aktiv mit der kulturellen Hegemonie auseinander und positionieren sich darin.
This book explores the ‘Black Horror’ campaign as an important chapter in the popularisation of racialised discourse in European history. Originating in early 1920s Germany, this international racist campaign was promoted through modern media, targeting French occupation troops from colonial Africa on German soil and using stereotypical images of ‘racially primitive’, sexually depraved black soldiers threatening and raping ‘white women’ in 1920s Germany to generate widespread public concern about their presence. The campaign became an international phenomenon in Post-WWI Europe, and had followers throughout Europe, the US and Australia. Wigger examines the campaign’s combination of race, gender, nation and class as categories of social inclusion and exclusion, which led to the formation of a racist conglomerate of interlinked discriminations. Her book offers readers a rare insight into a widely forgotten chapter of popular racism in Europe, and sets out the benefits of a historically reflexive study of racialised discourse and its intersectionality.
Bei dieser „Kleinen (Heimat)Geschichte des Rassismus“ handelt es sich um das erste Buch überhaupt, das die Entwicklung des Rassismus gezielt aus deutscher Perspektive beleuchtet. Der Herausbildung des an Hautfarben orientierten Rassismus wird dabei ebenso nachgegangen, wie dem Antisemitismus, Antiislamismus, Antislawismus, Antiziganismus und eugenischem Denken.
Erst im Verlauf des europäischen Kolonialismus entstanden Formen der Herabminderung, die mit bestimmten Hautfarben verknüpft waren. Sie mündeten schließlich in die von der Aufklärung entwickelte Rassentheorie, wobei deutsche Denker eine bedeutende Rolle spielten. Nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg wurde das Rassedenken durch antikoloniale Bewegungen, Bürgerrechtskämpfe und schließlich durch Vernetzungen im Rahmen der Globalisierung zwar diskreditiert, die Entwicklung des Antisemitismus, der als Fremdenfeindlichkeit bezeichnete Rassismus gegen Migranten und schließlich der Antiislamismus zeigen jedoch, dass damit der Rassismus nicht am Ende ist, sondern sich wieder verstärkt jener kulturellen Elemente der Diskriminierung bedient, die er schon in seinen Anfängen benutzt hatte.
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 sexualized violence reported in Cologne on New Year's Eve fed into racialized fears of refugees and immigrants promoted by groups on the radical right, even as racialized fears returned to mainstream discourses. Critical responses to the racism of the radical right unfortunately also participate in racialized discourses by resorting to "Europe" or "European values." This analysis suggests the need to consider Europe as a field of power, one in which the contestation over what Europe is or should be results in concrete, racialized disparities in access to social mobility,education, or public agency. A project for racial, gender and economic justice requires the thinking of Europe as an ongoing project of world-making.The call to revisit or reclaim "European" values cannot succeed here. Nor can a response to the new right (or the newly normalized racism of the center) allow the new right to determine the parameters of debates about possibilities for the future.
This wide-ranging and accessible book examines race in relation to social divisions such as ethnicity, gender and class. It provides a major new approach to studying the boundaries of race, and will be of interest to students of sociology, ethnic studies and gender studies. © 1992 Floya Anthias and Nira Yuval-Davis. All rights reserved.
Islamophobia bundles religious, ethnic and cultural prejudices together even though a narrow definition of the term flags religion as playing the central part. Calls for decoupling religion from ethnicity and culture appear justifiable: religions are increasingly disconnected from the cultures in which they have been embedded. But established political discourse infrequently makes such distinctions and may go further to racialize cultural and religious attributes of non-Europeans through essentialist framing. Islamophobia becomes a cryptic articulation of race and racism even if overtly it appears as religiously-based prejudice. Islam has been culturalized and racialized by its adherents and antagonists alike. Survey data on attitudes towards Muslims confirm such framing: the most common grounds given for experiencing discrimination was race or ethnic origin; religion and belief system were cited less often. Racialization, race and differential racism have become more endemic to Islamophobesã stigmatizing of Muslims, but to categorize Islamophobes as racists is bad politics.
It is striking to observe the virtual absence of an established literature on race and racism in the discussion of Islamophobia; something that is only marginally more present in the discussion of antisemitism. This special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies locates the contemporary study of antisemitism and Islamophobia squarely within the fields of race and racism. As such it problematizes the extent to which discussion of the racialization of these minorities remains unrelated to each other, or is explored in distinct silos as a series of internal debates. By harnessing the explanatory power of long-established organizing concepts within the study of race and racism, this special issue makes a historically informed, theoretical and empirical contribution to aligning these analytical pursuits.
This article examines what race has meant in and to Europe. If Europe has different, if related, histories of racial thinking, expression, imposi-tion, and exclusion, how has it been shaped, in part, as specific region in the figure of race even as race, in the aftermath of World War II, is largely denied as a category applicable to human groups? And what today does Europe as a region, and the societies constituting it with all their internal variations, contribute, especially in the popular imaginary, to the extensions of racial meanings and to thinking critically about the racial ordering of social structure, racist exclusions, and social markings? This study is concerned with mapping the racial contours of contemporary European self-conception, historically understood, tracing the figures in the European imaginary of the European, the black, the Jew, and the Muslim.
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