Frontmatter and Editorial

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is the first paragraph of the editorial:

Given the new normal of fascist-oid populisms and all too familiar neoliberalism, ‘the Muslim woman’ is produced as a performative battleground of ideological and normative contradictions; as a commodity product with a rearranged voice, not an arrangeur of voicings. The AfD (Alternative for Germany) – with its gendered Islamophobic rhetoric materialized in election posters that mobilize the image of burqa-clad women to warn against the supposed Islamization of German – rose to 13% in the 2017 German parliamentary elections. Austria recently banned face-veils to make a stand against the oppression of Muslim women, relying on an all too common, ethnosexist ‘saving-brown-women-from-brown-men’ discourse (Spivak 49; Abu-Lughod 784), whilst neglecting the symbolic violence undergirding standardized body politics. In a more alarming and far reaching manner, a recent ruling by the European Court of Justice which grants employers the right to ban all religious symbols in professional settings is not only to be read as an attack on religious embodied practices and identity formations under the sign of religious neutrality, but also as a juridical precarization of Muslim headdress-wearing women, refusing to meet the coercions of mandatory assimilation (El Aabedy). Sadly enough, we have not yet moved beyond the over-significance of the veil in debates about Islam, women and gender, which makes the veil police and the no-veil police strange bedfellows. And sadly enough, such a move seems far from possible, so long as commentators like the self-declared Muslim feminist Seyran Ateş insist that veils gender and sexualize, whilst excluding embodied performances of hair-dos, make-up and the latest fashions from this line of reasoning (see Yeğenoğlu 63). What the aforementioned legislations and attitudes foreclose is what Sara Ahmed terms “a future response to an other whom I may yet approach”, an approach that does not intend to outlaw identities that I personally and affectively cannot (imagine) to live (Strange 146, Ahmed’s emphasis). The may-yet temporality of this approach helps to imagine encounters beyond the mediated histories of prejudiced sentiment – ranging from pity to disgust – and the fantasy of knowing what is best for the other.