Contesting Stereotypes: Muslim Women’s Responses to Globalized Fear Discourses
BY DORTHE POSSING
A report, “Being a Muslim woman in Denmark,” published in March 2009 and commissioned by the former Danish Minister for Gender Equality, Karen Jespersen, concluded that the circulation of “Islamist” discourses on the Internet and Arabic satellite-TV put young Danish Muslim women’s notions of equality and citizenship at risk. The logic was that religious discourses, which originated outside Denmark, challenged the social coherence of Danish society as well as the boundaries between private-public and religious-secular spheres. The report argued that even if young Danish Muslims do not communicate or interact directly with Muslims from abroad (i.e. Muslims who do not live in the West), they may still be under their influence through others, such as imams, preachers and peers who may interpolate and thus communicate foreign Islamist discourses. The report predicts that these foreign influences will pose future security problems for Denmark if not dealt with by the authorities (“At være muslimsk kvinde i Danmark” 2009: 17, 217).
The 2005-6 “Danish cartoon controversy” has prompted the Danish government and authorities to monitor Muslim communication about Denmark more closely.1 In the wake of the controversy, such monitoring became an important part of the authorities’ continued work to restore good relations with Danish Muslims and Muslims globally. Yet, the report can also be seen as a part of the Danish government’s increasing concern about the circulation of information flow and communication between Muslims after the “cartoon controversy.”2 The report reflects this concern when assuming that “Islamist” discourses produced and circulated globally, are consumed and applied locally. In this sense, the report not only reproduces binaries between global-local, national-transnational, private-public and religious-secular, but it also assumes that Danish Muslims notions of belonging, citizenship and equality are being shaped primarily through “Muslim communication” and “Muslim interaction.”
While on the one hand this story is unique to Denmark, it is at the same time a story about how Muslim women in many Western European societies are sometimes associated with the potentially “threatening nature” of Islam (Silvestri 2008, Scott 2007). European Muslim women have become objects of particular interest to politicians and policy makers because they are sometimes perceived to be docile subjects—often alienated from society—through whom various patriarchal Islamic discourses can be produced and reproduced, thus affecting the norms and values of society. With its explicit focus on young Muslim women and its presuppositions about their identities as being primarily shaped through “Muslim interaction and communication,” the 2009 Danish report eloquently illustrates this mindset.
Many of the Muslim women participating in my study brought up the report as an obvious example of the dominant representations about Danish Muslim women that they contest through their own online communication and activism. My study examines computer-mediated communication and activism among well-educated Muslim women aged between 18 and 35 years old living in Denmark and Britain. Based on a combination of research interviews, online observations and long-term relationships with key-informants I examined how the Internet is used for information retrieval, communication, and support for political and social activism. My primary focus has been on how the circulation of specific events and debates affects social affiliations on- and offline.
EUROPEAN MUSLIM WOMEN AS OBJECTS OF “GLOBALIZED FEAR”
Many of the women participating in my study initially viewed my work with certain skepticism. Some were concerned that my work, much like the report, presupposed that consuming theological information circulating online “radicalized” them. Others were concerned that my approach assumed that the anonymity of the Internet was used to address sensitive issues that Muslim women were otherwise reluctant or afraid to address. Yet others were concerned that I considered Muslims in Europe to be so isolated, marginalized and de-territorialized, forcing them to go online to find “like-minded people” with whom they could share religious worldviews otherwise absent from their “secular” surroundings. Whatever the reasons for viewing my work with skepticism, the interviewees almost always had a common objection to European Muslims becoming objects of interest to others. As objects of interest, their practices in everyday life, such as Internet habits had caught the attention of the media, politicians, policy makers, intelligence services and researchers, often in ways that were preoccupied with how these practices might underscore—or perhaps even promote—their alienation from wider society. We could say that they thought that they had become objects of what Rachel Pain (2009) has termed a “globalized fear.” Globalized fear refers to a meta-narrative that acts as a mode of describing contemporary, everyday life, as threatened by destabilizing forces (such as political and religious extremism) potentially in highly disembodied and fragmentary ways. The report’s assumption that young Danish Muslims are uncritically or unconsciously communicating the agenda of Islamists determined to undermine the social coherence of Danish society is a particularly good example of how globalized fear can play out.
The 2009 report was considered by my interviewees to be a textbook example of how Muslims are articulated as a potential problem by the state and how they are bundled into a single-issue problem with no regard to differences within the category “Muslim women.” The report and other similar governmental initiatives reflect underlying ideas about societal cohesion. Put crudely, the report conflates state, nation and community in a way that ultimately defines the nation-state as a relatively homogeneous entity residing within a delimited territory. Within this paradigm certain forms of diversity, in this case religious diversity, disturbs the national imaginary. By this standard, Muslim and national identity are seen as mutually exclusive. The report offers a good example of how national identity and fear of threats to cohesion are produced and reproduced, not always in violent conflicts, but often in language politics, educational practices, political speeches and government reports and socio-political analyses (Billig 1995, Hopkins and Smith 2008, Hopkins 2009). Through implicitly or explicitly pointing towards those who deviate from national practices, the report reproduces ideas of social norms, identity and modes of belonging. The online debates and activism that the women in my study engaged in included questioning these assumptions and asserting their inclusion in national spaces. Muslim women therefore often evaluated and contested the steadily growing stream of governmental analysis and reports, news and opinion pieces on them as an obsession. They argued that they have become an object of “Otherness,” i.e. alienated individuals, to the state and society.
CONTESTING GLOBALIZED FEAR DISCOURSES BY EMPHASIZING EVERYDAY LIFE AND BELONGING
The women often emphasized their citizenship and belonging within the Danish national space, redefining a national sense of belonging to include Muslim and national identity while showing their awareness of the existing power structures that made communicating a distinct Danish Muslim identity urgent in the first place.3 Through engaging in online activism and communications on a variety of issues, such as environmental and health-related issues, these women assert their belonging to Danish society as a whole rather than merely to Muslims as a distinct group. They emphasized that issues like the environment and health were as important to them as the more obvious politicized ones of global threats and religious extremism. Rather than engaging in threaded communication on Islamic or Muslim Internet sites, most of the women participating in my study engage in communication that involves Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Their communication is often intended to contest and transform dominant discourses about Muslim women as oppressed and alienated from society by pointing to the intersectionality and individuality of their identities. They highlight that besides being Muslim and women, they are also students, academics, citizens, mothers, activists etc. and deal with societal issues accordingly.
The nature of their online communication is diverse, including blogging (and commenting on other peoples blogs), writing comments and publishing articles on the websites of larger TV-networks and newspapers and using Facebook profiles to post links to articles or videos or participate in threaded communication. Through diverse forms of online communication they seek to gain a voice for themselves without depending gatekeepers such as politicians, policy makers, journalists and editors—otherwise mostly ignoring their voices—granting permission to engage in public debate. Indeed they were eager to have their voices heard on a wide range of issues. Interestingly, interview participants rarely referred to geopolitical events, such as the war on terror and the “Danish cartoon controversy,” when initially describing their motivations for online activism. However, in the course of the interview, geopolitical events as a motivational factor for online activism emerged via other routes, e.g. their critique of the 2009 report. Some also mentioned that after seeing how the “cartoon controversy” impacted Danish perceptions of complex issues such as integration, education and identity (national, religious, etc.)—which sometimes led to inflammatory debates about the incompatibility of Islam and “Danishness” and ensued governmental initiatives—they became more aware that local and global issues are entwined. As a result, the impact of geopolitical events triggered growing interactions with non-Muslims because Muslim women wanted to partake in the debate instead of being objects of conversation.
In this article I have described how we can understand governmental initiatives such as the Danish report about Muslim women as expressions of a “globalized fear.” Drawing on empirical material generated as part of a broader study on computer-mediated communication and activism among Danish and British Muslim women, I have illustrated that in order to understand this phenomenon, we need to simultaneously examine the relations between broader geopolitical issues and how people in everyday life experience the boundaries of a particular location or place. My study shows that everyday life does not simply absorb “global fear” discourses, but rather contests them. When looking at the communication and activism of young European Muslim women new, transformative discourses of belonging are produced and belonging becomes an important motivational factor for mobilization and engagement.
Dorthe H. Possing is PhD Fellow in the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies (Minority Studies Section) at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.
REFERENCES
“At være muslimsk kvinde i Danmark” (Being a Muslim woman in Denmark) (February 2009). Report by Maïa Consult. Copenhagen: Department for Gender Equality, Ministry of Welfare.
Billig, M. (1995). Banal Nationalism. London: Sage.
Hopkins, P. & Smith, S. (2008). “Scaling Segregation; Racialising fear” In R. Pain & S. Smith (eds.) Fear: Critical Geopolitics and Everyday Life. Aldershot: Ashgate.
Hopkins, P. (2009): “Geographical contributions to understanding contemporary Islam: current trends and future directions” in Contemporary Islam vol. 3 (2009), Springer, pp.213-227.
Klausen, J. (2009). The Cartoons That Shook The World. Orwigsburg: Yale Press.
Pain, R. (2009). “Globalized fear? Towards an emotional geopolitics” in Progress in Human Geography 33(4), pp. 466-486.
Scott, J.W. (2007). The Politics of the Veil. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.
Silvestri, S. (2008). Europe’s Muslim women: potential, aspirations and challenges. Belgium: King Baudouin Foundation.
ENDNOTES
- The “Danish cartoon controversy” is a phrase commonly used to refer to the protests and debates following in the wake of the Danish daily Jyllands Posten’s publication of twelve cartoons featuring the Prophet Mohammad on September 30th 2005. The publication of the cartoons was followed by massive, sometimes violent, protests from Muslims worldwide and by a longstanding boycott of Danish products sold in Muslim countries. For an account of the course of events during the cartoon controversy see Klausen 2009. [↩]
- The “cartoon controversy” is mentioned in the report as an example of an event that has encouraged “Islamist” missionary activities in Scandinavia (“At være muslimsk kvinde i Danmark” 2009:169, 217). [↩]
- The same tendency applies for interviews conducted in Britain. [↩]
