Traditional displacement, modern Others : everyday whiteness, sexuality and Muslim alterity

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Traditional displacement, Modern Othering:

Everyday whiteness, Sexuality and Muslim alterity

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Weera Koopman 10787550 Master’s Thesis 08-07-2019 Supervisor: Paul Mepschen Second reader: Saskia Bonjour

Traditional displacement, Modern Others: Everyday whiteness,

Sexuality and Muslim alterity

Weera Koopman

University of Amsterdam

ABSTRACT

The sexuality of the Other has been central to the construction of modern white subjectivity, and these knowledges and affects that grant non-white Others more sexual vitality are part and parcel of the deep-rooted patterns of the Dutch cultural archive. In the face of the repositioning of the intersection of sexuality, religion and modernity due to an increasingly dominant regime of sexual nationalism in the Dutch context, I trace the (dis)continuities of this colonial economy of desire by examining how the white self is established through and against the Muslim Other on the everyday level. Taking on an ethnographic approach, I analyze 17 narratives of white LGBT identified people from three generations to show how subjects come to understand themselves under social processes like homonationalism and culturalism, and how they negotiate them.

KEY WORDS

homonationalism / sexual nationalism / whiteness / stranger fetishism / Islamophobia / culturalization of citizenship

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Mutual recognition of racism,

its impact both on

those who are dominated and those who dominate,

is the only standpoint

that makes possible an encounter between races

that is not based on denial and fantasy.

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Preface

I consider this project as the shape of a personal and academic process of the past five years of studying social science. After several research projects I can verify that conducting research is my passion, and being accepted to the Research’s Master Social Sciences is the proof of that. Though I have learned that balance is key, I have embraced, and my friends and family will confirm this, that I am a nerd, a sociological one, that is.

I want to highlight two professors that have been a true academic inspiration for me this year. Marguerite van den Berg has showed me the true value of sociology. Used as an instrument for defamiliarization, sociological research can make a real impact by imagining alternative worlds. Due to this insight, I have regained my sense of agency in the fight for social justice within the existing white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. I want to thank Adeola Enigbokan for showing me the importance of thinking about ethics, power and positionality in qualitative research.

Writing this thesis has certainly not been a lonely process. I want to very much thank my respondents for their time and honesty; I can truly say that I learned something from every one of them. Also, I want to pay tribute to my ‘Hema’ peer group for their support and friendship. I am furthermore grateful for Saskia Bonjour’s time and engagement in this project. A very special thank you to my supervisor Paul Mepschen, whose complete confidence in my work gave me the confidence I needed. As I take a lot of inspiration from his academic and political contributions, it was an honor to work with him.

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Introduction

‘If I ever spoke with Muslims before? I even have sex with them, mister the Imam!’i

(Pim Fortuyn 2001)

Pim Fortuyn, the populist right-wing ex-politician pivotal in ushering in a political era of Islamophobia, homonationalism and culturalism in the Dutch sexual democracy, was known to give many interviews about himself, in which he was highly explicit about his gay identity. The quote at the top of this page is a reply to a question of Imam Abdullah Haselhoef, and is symbolic of Fortuyn’s charismatic character, which he had built around a fundamental attack on immigrants and Islam (Metro 2015; Mepschen 2016a: 22). In her seminal work White Innocence (2016), anthropologist Gloria Wekker (2016) points out that in these interviews, Fortuyn displayed a simultaneous disgust and attraction to young Muslim men; a dynamic which has been left widely unaddressed in the Dutch context (Wekker 2016: 127). When I first heard about this paradox when I had the opportunity to attend a lecture from Wekker herself, it struck me as the most glaring contradiction, and has provoked my interest ever since. Whereas the Muslim Other1, who has taken center stage in Dutch anxieties about cultural homogeneity and social cohesion, is thoroughly scrutinized in public debate for its alleged homophobia and sexual archaism, desire towards Muslim individuals is almost never part of public reflection or discussion (Mepschen 2016b: 150; Duyvendak et al. 2016; Wekker 2016).

‘I argue precisely’, Wekker writes, ‘that in order to make sense of this glaring paradox, we should inspect the Dutch cultural archive.’ (Wekker 2016: 129). Central to Wekker’s argument is that a cultural archive is in play in the Netherlands: an unacknowledged reservoir of meaning-making processes, affects and memories that is based on four hundred years of Dutch imperialism (Wekker 2016: 2). Manifested on the cultural archive is a Dutch white sense of self, in which ‘race’ and racial imaginations are central,

1_{Muslims’ have increasingly come to be defined in cultural terms in the Dutch case, in which} ‘culture’ is essentialized and as such instrumentalized to replace biological notions of ‘race’ (Mepschen 2016a: 23; Essed & Hoving 2014; Essed & Trienekens 2008).

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yet aggressively denied and neglected (Wekker 2016). The sexuality of the Other has played a crucial role in the construction of the modern Dutch white sense of self (Stoler 1995; Balkenhol 2016: 63). Imperial sites containing Other bodies functioned as racial counterpoints for the construction of Western discourses on sexuality, and sexualizing these bodies in terms of deviance and sexual excess was used as a tool to establish the white self as superior (Stoler 1995: 7; Wekker 2016: 45). The thoughts and affects originating from imperial rule are captured in the cultural archive, and have produced a sexual map that still construct bodies of color as being in need of control because of their sexualized, available, untamed ‘nature’, making them extremely and maddeningly attractive for orientalists due to the mixture of pleasure and danger (Wekker 2016: 129; hooks 1992: 370).

Rather than being contradictory, then, Fortuyn’s simultaneous disgust and desire towards Muslim men is well aligned with colonial sensibilities. While the sexuality of the Muslim Other still plays a significant role in the construction of white subjectivity, a fundamental transformation has taken place in its character. Whereas an assumed sexual ‘licentiousness’ in Muslim and Arab contexts used to be proof for the backwardness and lack of civilization of these contexts, homosexuality and sexual freedom in the present-day are seen as signs of modernity, progress and civilization (Bracke 2012: 249; Massad 2007). Queer theorist Jasbir Puar (2007) has coined the concept ‘homonationalism’ to denote the way gay and lesbian2 rights in western societies have come to act as a prism through which the binary between the western modern and sexually free self and the Muslim backward and sexually archaist Other is installed (Wekker 2016: 113; Puar 2007; Puar 2013). Due to academic and activist travels of the concept, homonationalism has come to be defined and represented in terms of a political position, a standpoint or an identity (Puar 2013: 337). Rather than an accusation of gay racism, however, homonationalism needs to be understood as a conceptual framework accounting for a historical transition marked by a ‘reorientation of the relationship between the state, capitalism and sexuality’ (Puar 2013: 377).

2_{I use the terms ‘gay and lesbian’ here instead of a term such as ‘queer’, because other} sexualities play a minor role in this discourse.

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In the Dutch case, where notions of citizenship have come to be construed in terms of cultural assimilation and national belonging, homonationalism has provided the fruitful context for the emergence of sexual nationalism: a new junction of sexuality, cultural otherness, and nationalism (Mepschen 2016b: 154; Duyvendak, 2011, p. 87; Duyvendak et al., 2016; Mepschen 2016a: 23; Mepschen et al. 2010).

The discrepancy between the homonationalist representation of the Muslim Other as ‘not sexual enough’ and its place on the Dutch sexual map that grants non-white Others more sexual aliveness, needs to be accounted for (Wekker 2016: 137; Puar 2007). Central to this thesis is the series of displacements, affects and projections by which the white subject defines itself against and through the body of the Muslim Other (Massad 2015: 11; Ahmed 2000: 99). To examine these dynamics in the face of the re-articulation of sexuality, modernity and religion, I take on an ethnographic perspective to show how whiteness is made on the everyday level (Ahmed 2000; Mepschen 2016a: 37). Building on the work of social anthropologist Paul Mepschen (2016a), I understand ‘everyday whiteness’ as part and parcel of a culturalist framework that builds on the assumption that Dutch society is divided up into separate ‘cultural wholes’, and in which the ‘autochthonous’ Dutch are presented as under attack from norms and values of racialized3 Others (Mepschen 2016b: 161; Mepschen 2018: 20; Mepschen 2016a: 23). The culturalist framework has installed a field of knowledge that enables the white subject to construe boundaries between Dutch white nativity and Muslim alterity (Ahmed 2000; Mepschen 2016a).

Sexual nationalisms have been mostly studied ‘from above’, that is, by analyzing national (policy) discourse analyses and political processes (Mepschen 2016b: 153; Puar 2007). Studying public discourses on the level of the subject is relevant however as it ‘has significant impact on the lives of individual subjects, affecting and reconfiguring

3_{Though whiteness is also a racialized position, I understand racializing as in line with Etienne} Balibar’s notion of ‘neoracism’ which builds on ‘naturalized and essentialized notions of cultural incompatibility’ (Bonjour & Duyvendak 2018: 897), rather than biological or physical assumptions (Balibar 2007: 85; Bonjour & Duyvendak 2018: 897).

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perceptions, routines, habits and practices that define everyday experience’ (Mepschen 2016a: 24). The present study aims to contribute to the body of literature that has examined how everyday subjects work with the categories and frames handed to them, and how they come to understand themselves under social processes (Mepschen 2016a: 25; Mepschen 2016a; Mepschen 2016b: 153; Verkaaik & Sprong 2011). Mepschen (2016a) has conceptualized culturalism as follows:

... productive of categories, frames and schemas through which people perceive the world and act upon it; it is a process in which forms of ‘self-understanding’ (Ibid.) take shape and a sense of location, commonality, and alterity is construed and negotiated.

(Mepschen 2016a: 25)

For this purpose, 17 Dutch white LGBT identified people were interviewed, who belong to three different generations. It is worth mentioning that the majority of the respondents identify as liberal. These individuals are middle class and university graduates, who move in circles where racism is generally believed to be non-existent. I want to show how the discourses described above become a lens through which liberal people look at the sexual politics as well.

In sympathy with the following statement of bell hooks (1989: 162) – ‘one change in direction that would be real cool would be the production of a discourse on race that interrogates whiteness’ -, this Master’s thesis will render whiteness ‘visible’ by making it the main object of study. Relying on Wekker’s account of the cultural archive as well as the body of literature on the culturalization of citizenship and homonationalism, I aim to answer the following main research question:

How is Dutch LGBT whiteness established through and against the encounter with Muslim alterity in the context of homonationalism?

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Chapter Two

Theoretical design

The cultural archive

Gloria Wekker (2016) has identified the cultural archive, a concept first coined by Edward Said, as a reservoir of thoughts, affects and meaning-making processes that is based on four hundred years of Dutch imperialism (Wekker 2016: 2). Central to Wekker’s argument is the notion that a Dutch white sense of self has manifested on the cultural archive, and White Innocence is the result of her attempt to develop an ethnography of this dominant white Dutch self-representation. The Dutch understand themselves as homogeneously white as only the continent is regarded as part of its history, which contributes to the fundamental impossibility of being both European (read: white and Christian) and black, migrant or refugee (Wekker 2016: 4, 21). Despite its significance as an imperial force in geopolitics (Wekker 2016: 13), the Dutch history of slavery is largely neglected in public discourse, enabling the Dutch to lay claim on a sense of self as small, innocent, emancipated and color-blind (Wekker 2016: 15). In this national perception of the Netherlands as a caring and innocent nation, there is no room for race and racism, hence a discourse on racism and slavery is lacking in the Dutch context, and anti-racism critique is dismissed (Wekker 2016: 15; Essed & Hoving 2014; Balkenhol et al. 2016: 60). Essed & Trienekens (2008) argue that Dutch whiteness has a unique character for it is based on cultural rather than biological differences. Though race is ostensibly absent from the Dutch context, its citizens are still categorized along an institutionalized ethnic and racial terminology in public policy and public discourse (Balkenhol et al. 2016: 60; Schinkel 2018). In this terminology, whiteness and autochthonous are installed as unmarked, neutral, and ahistorical categories, that form the benchmark on which other categories - most notably individuals with a Muslim background in the present day – are evaluated (Mepschen 2016a: 28-29; Schinkel 2007: 172-174; Emirbayer & Desmond 2012: 6). Race and ethnicity are thus understood as interchangeable with black or brown

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bodies, whereas whiteness is invisible, self-evident and bracketed (Hall 1992; Wekker 2016: 23).

The ‘silence’ about race and slavery should, according to social anthropologist Markus Balkenhol (2014), not be understood as a denial of imperialism or as an absence of speech in general. Rather, it should be interpret as, somewhat paradoxically, a discursive silence, meaning that through a discourse on slavery, its cruelty is displaced out of western modernity by ascribing it to Western colonizers before ‘modern’ times (Balkenhol 2014: 112). By embracing images of slavery’s cruelty in the discourse on the Dutch nation while simultaneously denying its affects in the present-day, a national self-perception as a caring nation was made possible (Balkenhol 2014: 111, 112). Dutch white innocence should, therefore, not only be understood as the innocent and harmless qualities of the Dutch, but also as a stance of aggressive ignorance and denial, enabling them to fully benefit from their white privilege and entitlement (Wekker 2016: 17-18; Mills 2007).

It is important to take notice of the construction of the Dutch white sense of self, in which the intersection between sexuality, class and race has always been pivotal. In the

History of Sexuality, philosopher Michel Foucault asserts that the popular narrative

about sexuality in the 19th century as hidden and silenced is historically false, as sexuality was constantly provoked in the search for the ‘truth’ about sex, and as an instrument of power (Foucault 1990; Stoler 1995: 2-3). In her postcolonial reading of Foucault, anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler points out that Foucault fails to account for race and non-European sites in his study, which becomes apparent in his depiction of the object of the discourse about sexuality (Stoler 1995: 6). Stoler argues that the Western objects that Foucault proposes gain their strength from a ‘racially erotic counterpoint’; ‘the libidinal energies of the savage, the primitive, the colonized – reference points of difference, critique and desire’ (Stoler 1995: 6-7). Though in the general consensus ‘race’ was something that resided overseas (Wekker 2016: 93), there is a mutual dependency between the production of discourses on racial others, but indeed also on lower-class Europeans, and the production of the self through a tight network between the metropole and the colony (Wekker 2016: 83, 84; Stoler 1995). The emergence of the

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modern western white subject is therefore intimately connected to the images, knowledges and discourses that surrounded people of color on the colonized lands, which is why sexual differences, among other things, are understood in relation to race (Wekker 2016: 44; Stoler 1995).

These discourses were fixated on the perceived sexual excesses and improper desires of colonial racial others and lower-class Europeans, who were taken as ‘other’ domains to define what it meant to be a superior bourgeois white respectable citizen (Stoler 1995: 182; Balkenhol 2016: 63). Accordingly, multiple policies were implemented in the colonies to separate white people from racialized others, as whiteness’ racial purity had to be protected from the sexual forces of the natives (Balkenhol 2016: 63; Stoler 1995). Images of black people moreover were in fashion in the metropole in the early twentieth century, wherein the attention was manifested on a desire to delve into the ‘primitive, the authentic, the pure, the primary and the magic’ (Schreuder 2008: 109; Wekker 2016: 95). These primitive others were presented as possessing the qualities that modern white humanity had lost over time – like closeness to nature and sexual freedom – which is how non-white places and people ‘became the projection screen by which these desirable states could be recuperated’ (Wekker 2016: 95; Essed & Hoving 2014b). These ‘exotic’ populations each had their own histories and set of stereotypes: ‘the sexually potent Arab with his harem, the phlegmatic, sensual Asian, and the African with his savagery, barbarism, cannibalism and immorality’ (Wekker 2016: 96; Corbey 1989).

Significant in this process is the development of colonial ‘scientific pornography’ experiments in which the skull, but above all the genitalia and pelvis of native women were photographed, studied and measured to provide support for the hierarchical classification of the different races (Stoler 1995: 189; Wekker 2016: 101). According to Stoler, scientific pornography and the excessive attention to black female genitals confirms ‘the story that colonialism was that quintessential project in which desire was always about sex, that sex was always about racial power, and that both were contingent upon a particular representation of non-white women’s bodies’ (Stoler 1995: 189). Wekker concludes in relation to scientific pornography that race has been central to the conceptualization of the categories sex, gender and sexuality, in which ‘the more

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pronounced the sex/gender dimorphism in a particular race, that is, the outward differences between men and women, the more advanced that group of people is considered to be’ (Wekker 2016: 99).

Sexual nationalisms

Gender, sexuality, race and colonial encounters have, as previously stated, been crucial in the construction of modern white subjectivities. The knowledges, narratives and images originating from imperial rule, captured in the cultural archive, now form the cornerstones of contemporary nativist protectionism (Balkenhol et al. 2016; Stoler 1995; Wekker 2016). In neoliberal Western European societies, culture, norms and morality increasingly play a role in notions of citizenship, denoted as the culturalization of citizenship (Duyvendak et al. 2016) or virtualization of citizenship (Schinkel 2010). The concept sexual citizenship was coined to account for the entanglement of sexuality with notions of citizenship, which is open for several interrelated interpretations relevant for this thesis.

One of the interpretations of sexual citizenship addresses the new or altered conditionalities that have emerged as a result of the increased access of gay and lesbian people to notions of citizenship as well as their increased normalization as ‘ordinary citizens’ (Richardson 2018: 213; Warner 1999; Duggan 2002). The Dutch social history of a relatively rapid secularization accompanied by a relatively far-reaching normalization of Dutch gay identities (Mepschen et al. 2010: 955; 971), has translated in a national image of ‘tolerance’, which disguises the heteronormativity that still prevails in the Dutch context (Lisdonk et al. 2018: 1895; Buijs et al. 2011). Professor of social and cultural analysis Lisa Duggan has coined the term ‘new homonormativity’ to describe the new neoliberal, assimilationist mainstream discourse of sexual politics that, in the words of professor of African-American literature and culture El-Tayeb:

... attempts to expand rather than dismantle heteronormativity by internalizing a conceptualization of LGBT identity that constructs legitimacy and rights along established lines, challenging neither the exclusion of those who do not or cannot play

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by the rules nor a system whose very existence depends on such exclusions. (El-Tayeb 2012: 85)

Through homonormativity, western contexts have colonized notions of the ‘universal’ in relation to gay and lesbian identities and activism (Richardson 2018: 215; Massad 2002). In effect, homosexuality has come to function as a marker of ‘the civilized West’ (Bracke 2012: 245). Through its history of discourses on sex that are manifested by institutions like the church (Foucault 1990), a very specific form of homosexuality has been established in the Dutch context, that is presented as the ‘global’ or ‘universal’ form as well as the only right form, translating in a westernization of gay and lesbian identities and activism, in addition to a hierarchy of different sexual cultures (Richardson 2018: 215; Wekker 2016: 125; Massad). As Fassin & Salcedo state, ‘gayness is not universal; but the categorization of homosexuality is universally about power’ (Fassin & Salcedo 2015: 1124). This specific Western form of sexuality is based on the assumption of an underlying individual rights bearing subject making individual choices (Richardson 2018: 216, 217), who has to come out as well as speak about their sexuality (Wekker 2016: 122; Jivraj & Jong 2011), and must consume (El-Tayeb 2012).

The western ‘achievements’ on the level of sexual citizenship have aroused a moral panic about losing them again, which has translated into the racialization and culturalization of sexuality in the Dutch context (Mepschen 2016: 153). Sociologist Eric Fassin has coined the concept sexual democracy to denote the fundamental role of sex in the realm of laws and norms in western societies (Fassin & Salcedo 2015: 1118). Fassin and Salcedo write that ‘sex becomes our ultimate democratic truth’: rather than organizing our identities on the basis of transcendent principles such as religion, our truth has come to lie in sex (Fassin & Salcedo 2015: 1118). Sexual democracy, in the context of reanimation of new nationalisms, provides fruitful ground for the development of new sexual nationalisms, as the normative nature of sex can be instrumentalized to establish a binary between the sexually modern white self and the sexual archaist Muslim Other (Fassin & Salcedo 2015: 1118; Mepschen 2016: 152). Rather than defining achievements on the level of sexual freedom and sexuality as part of ongoing political processes and conflict, these achievements are essentialized as authentically Dutch in need of protection from

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‘outsiders’ (Mepschen 2018: 22; Oudenampsen 2013, 2018).

In her seminal work Terrorist Assemblages (2007), Jasbir Puar has coined the concept ‘homonationalism’ to denote the re-articulation of sexuality in western state practices. Homosexuality used to be rejected by the state, but it is now increasingly defined in positive terms, particularly in the context of immigration policies (Fassin & Salcedo 2015: 1118). In this radical, biopolitical reconstruction of state formation, gay and lesbian subjectivities are deemed worthy of protection by nation states at the cost of racialized others, who ostensibly do not share these ‘modern’ and tolerant western values of sexual freedom (Foucault 1990; Puar 2013: 337; Mepschen 2016: 152; Richardson 2018: 214; Wekker 2016: 126; Mepschen et al. 2010). Whereas homosexuality in colonial times was, while simultaneously provoking various oriental fantasies, used as proof for a lack of civilization of colonized lands, homosexuality in contemporary homonationalist times is used as a sign of civilization and modernity (Bracke 2012: 249; Massad 2002: 375). As Massad writes, ‘while the premodern West attacked the Muslim world’s alleged sexual licentiousness, the modern West attacks its alleged repression of sexual freedoms’ (Massad 2002: 375, emphasis in original). The entanglement of sexuality with citizenship is thus used as a political tool to make as well as discipline racialized others, especially ‘Muslims’4 in the present day (Puar 2013: 337).

Accompanying the discourse of homonationalism in the Dutch case are feelings of secular nostalgia (Bracke 2012) or homo nostalgia (Wekker 2016: 108), feelings that build on the conception that the good old times of ostensible emancipation, secularism and cultural homogeneity were disrupted by Muslims arriving in the Netherlands (van der Veer 2006; Duyvendak 2011). Due to the Dutch social history of a relatively rapid secularization accompanied by a relatively far-reaching normalization of Dutch gay

4 _{I have bracketed ‘Muslims’ because due to travels and translation practices of the terminology} surrounding Islam since the nineteenth century, ‘Islam’ has in western contexts come to stand for a religion, a site, a culture as well as a taxonomy (Massad 2015: 5). Rather than examining in this thesis how “Islam’ constitutes itself’, more important to his project is how the white subject ‘constitutes Islam in constituting itself’ (Massad 2015: 12).

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identities (Mepschen et al. 2010: 955; 971), secular conceptions and practices increasingly define the Dutch national cultural identity (Mepschen 2018: 20). Muslims therefore remind the Dutch of their religious past that they ostensibly freed themselves from (Van der Veer 2006: 199). In their ‘invitation to take secularism seriously as a cultural practice’ (2011: 84), Oskar Verkaaik and Rachel Sprong (2011) build on the notion ‘sexularism’ of feminist historian Joan Scott (2009) to ethnographically trace the role of secularism in the intimate realm of desire and sexuality (Mepschen 2018: 21; Verkaaik & Sprong 2011: 85). The notion sexularism builds on a tradeoff between religion on the one hand, and individualism, sexual freedom and rationalization on the other (Scott 2009: 1; Mepschen 2018: 21). As the historical perspective of sexularism shows that the fast increase of norms regarding sexual freedom in the West cannot be attributed to secularism alone, it helps to take issue with the binaries of the traditional and the modern as well as the religious and the secular (Scott 2009: 6; Mepschen 2018: 21).

Finally, the homonationalist tendency to entangle LGBTQ emancipation with the Dutch cultural identity is loosely based on, and provides fruitful ground for, the extension of the trope ‘white men saving brown women from brown men’ (Spivak 1988; Bracke 2012: 245). The contemporary public debate on immigration and sexual politics is deeply gendered, in which (heterosexual) Muslim women are generally presented as lacking agency in their ‘patriarchal culture’ (Meer et al. 2010), and men are portrayed as heterosexual, homophobic, aggressive racial others who need to be domesticated (Wekker 2016: 116; Balkenhol 2016: 64; Van den Berg & Duyvendak 2012). This is consistent with the ‘pernicious binary that has emerged in the post-civil rights era in legislative, activist and scholarly realms: the homosexual other is white, the racial other is straight’ (Puar 2007: 32; Wekker 2016: 117). However, more and more special attention is devoted to queer Muslims in the form of rescue narratives, which can be traced back to the Dutch imperialist past (Bracke 2012; Massad 2002). Whereas rescue narratives used to be restricted to brown women and Islamic women, queer Muslims now too need to be ‘saved’ from their ‘heterobrothers’ in their ‘backward Muslim culture’ through modernizing and civilizing them into ‘western values’ (Wekker 2016: 188; Bracke 2012: 241; Massad 2002: 362; Fassin & Salcedo 2015).

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Professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history Joseph Massad (2002) has coined the concept Gay International to denote the assimilationist project designated for the international rights of ‘gays and lesbians’ that builds from the same assimilating ontology and epistemology of many western human rights and feminist institutions in the sense that it has ‘reserved a special place for the Muslim world in both its discourse and its advocacy’ (Massad 2002: 362). This dynamic is part and parcel of the new neoliberal mainstream discourse of sexual politics that Duggan (2003) has designated as new homonormativity. Though it is important to refrain from reproducing the binary of ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’ by assuming that ‘modern’ gay practices such as coming out do not exist in non-western contexts (Fassin & Salcedo 2015: 1121, 1122; Carrilo 2002), critical reflection is needed on the way the logics behind Gay International become instrumentalized to ‘save’ Arab and Muslim ‘gays and lesbians’ by ‘transforming them from practitioners of same-sex contact into subjects who identify as homosexual and gay’ (Massad 2002: 362). Indeed, the two key ingredients of the rescue narratives in, among other things, the civic integration test, policy realms and regulations are firstly the assumption that Muslim women and gays are victimized in their ‘culture’, and secondly the assumption that they have an interest in being ‘saved’ by adopting Western values (Bracke 2012: 242; Prins 2000).

An important dissimilarity that professor of Sociology Sarah Bracke (2012) identifies in the ‘rescue gay’ narrative as opposed to the ‘rescue women’ narrative, is first that the rescue gays narrative not only pertains to Muslim or migrant gays who need to be saved from their ‘culture’, but also to white gays who are victims of homophobic heterosexual Muslim men (Bracke 2012: 247). It seems that the old ‘rescue white women from brown men’ narrative is replaced by its gay equivalent of ‘saving white gays from brown men’ (Bracke 2012: 247). A second difference is that brown women have to be saved from their state of false consciousness, whereas brown gays will be saved by a particular conceptualization of coming out. By coming out, Muslim gays are praised for following the rules of the game of the Dutch gay habitus (Wekker 2016: 118) and having ‘chosen’ to be gay rather than Muslim, which contributes to the homonationalist narrative of Muslim and gay as mutually exclusive spheres (Jivraj & Jong 2011: 152; Rahman 2010). In the face of the aforementioned lesbian and gay liberal rights discourses, the western

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conceptualization of gay and lesbian identities forces queer Muslims to choose between two parts of their identities (Jivraj & Jong 2011; Rahman 2010). The choice architecture that is presented here is either ‘choosing’ to be gay, and becoming an example for the rest, or ‘choosing’ to be Muslim, and becoming invisible or constructed as ‘not there yet’ (Jivraj & Jong 2011: 152).

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Chapter Three

Methodology

Methods

I interpret this thesis as the shape of a broader process that can not just be reduced to the interviews that have been conducted for this project. In addition to the participant observation I describe in chapter 5, I have been walking around like a ‘sponge’ to look for news, images, conversations and lectures related to the topic ever since I read the Mepschen et al. (2010) article. Be that as it may, the base for this project is an inter-generational comparative study based on 17 interviews with gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender identified people from three age categories. I have chosen the three categories based on their experience with ‘multicultural society’ and with different social constructions of gay identities in the Dutch case. Respondents from age category 3 (1950-1965) are part of the rise of non-heteronormative identities and politics. Respondents from the second age category (1965 and 1985) grew up in a period when gay and lesbian identities were increasingly normalized, and when the Dutch government invited guest workers from Turkey and Morocco. The first age category (1985-1996) grew up in a period of queer polarization, and when a discourse on ‘failed multicultural society’ started to radicalize and normalize in the Netherlands.

The interviews, which took 1,5 hours on average, were informal ethnographic in nature, which means that it appeared as if there was no forethought about where the conversation was going (Madden 2010: 66). I memorized the questions I wanted to ask in the interview in order to minimize the risk of disrupting the flow of the conversation by having to look down at my question list. There was a give-and-take relationship in the sense that I shared some personal experiences and opinions as well, like my own ‘coming-out’, which helped the respondent to feel at ease. Even if the conversation went really ‘off-topic’, I have still treated this as valuable information as ‘the recorder that resides in the body of the ethnographer is always ‘on’’ (Madden 2010: 67). Consequently,

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I felt that a lot of rapport was built during the interview, also because some sensitive issues were discussed. At times the interview seemed so much like a conversation that I perhaps overshared my personal opinion, which might have resulted in me censuring my respondent. The only objects between me and the interviewee were my phone as a tape recorder, and my notebook.

Interview guide

Although I have adjusted the interview guide a couple of times during the research process when new themes and issues came up, the foundation of the interview stayed the same. Before the interview started, I engaged in some small talk with the respondent to start building up rapport. The first question in every interview was related to respondent’s upbringing, asking them to tell me something about their parents, siblings and hometown. This relatively simple question enabled the respondent to get used to the format of the interview. Depending on the rapport and vibe of the interview, the interview generally flowed from the topic of their upbringing to the first thought they had about their sexuality, their process of ‘coming out’ and what role others played in these processes. In the case of the respondents who came of age between the 1960’s and 2000’s, we discussed in-depth what being LGBTQ meant when they were younger, and when the ‘other’ emerged in LGBTQ experience.

The order of my questions depended on what turn the conversation moved in, but the discussion that generally followed the topic of coming-out was the role of religious and cultural differences as well as ‘multicultural society’ in Dutch LGBTQI experience. To examine the ways in which the respondents approach difference, I discussed news items that had recently been featured in public debate. Although this way of organizing the interview makes this research very context-dependent, I felt this was the most neutral way to examine what role the Muslim Other plays in Dutch gay experience. Also, as this research takes into consideration how individuals come to understand themselves and to experience and perceive their everyday life in the context of homonationalism and culturalization of citizenship (Mepschen 2016a), this seemed to me like a valid method

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to consider how the respondents ‘work’ with frames and effects in public debate. These news items included the ‘bolt cutter’ incident5 and the Nashville agreement6.

Moreover, I asked every respondent the following question: ‘you just told me about your own process of coming to terms with your gay identity, what do you think it is like for somebody who is gay and Muslim?’. To touch on the issue of sexual preference, I described the debate that is currently taking place surrounding Grindr profiles that explicitly discriminate and exclude others, mostly men, on the basis of race or performed masculinity. I asked the respondents what they thought of the debate, and depending on the respondent, we then continued discussing the role of race in the realm of Grindr, sex and dating. The closing question in every interview was related to the future of LGBTQI emancipation in the Netherlands.

Positionality

There are different paradigms in qualitative research, which is understood as a certain perspective that both shapes what a researcher sees and how they understand or interpret it (Hennink et al. 2011). I undertook research within the interpretivist and feminist paradigm, that both stress that it is important to understand a social phenomenon from the perspective of the individuals involved. Compared to the

5_{This denotes an event that took place on 2 April 2017, which involved a gay couple who, after} a night out in the Dutch city Arnhem, were severely injured during a violent incident with a few young men. The young men were in possession of a bolt cutter, although it has not been proven whether they in fact used it. The frame of this event has from the outset been a racialized one, as the couple reported on various media platforms that the group of young men were of Moroccan descent. This event sparked a heated debate on anti-gay violence in the Netherlands, in which the imagery of the perpetrator and victim are respectively non-white and white. 6

To start a discussion on LGBTQI acceptance and tolerance among white Dutch individuals, I asked the respondents how they felt after reading the so-called Nashville agreement. This agreement originates from Nashville in the U.S. and declares that ‘same-sex marriage, gay identity and transgender identity do not reflect God’s design for humanity’ (CT 2019), of which a Dutch translation was signed by, among other institutions, the political party SGP in the Netherlands.

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interpretativist paradigm, the feminist paradigm gives more of an account of power structures as well as of subjectivity; the idea that the researcher is ‘in’ the research. Subjectivity and the researcher’s reflection on their influence on the research process are crucial for the validity of ethnographic research (Madden 2010: 20). The assumption underlying this reflexivity is that truth is never absolute (Madden 2010: 22; Marcus 1998).

As a feminist I believe that whiteness, sexuality, racism, and so forth are all socially constructed. Though I realize that, and I am aware that individual white people are not necessarily to blame for their (potential) ignorance, unless it is a militant, aggressive ignorance (Mills 2007); racism and problematic remarks regarding fetishization still tend to make me feel agitated and uncomfortable. Embedding LGBTQI rights in an Islamophobic rhetoric is highly problematic to me, as it displaces it as a ‘problem’ of ethnic minorities, and thereby obstructs the need for dialogue on institutional homophobia in the Dutch context. As I am relatively skilled at hiding what I am actually feeling, this did not pose a problem during the interviews. When I was confronted with white innocence, plain racism or sexist speech, it sometimes felt unethical to use an encouraging or accommodating probing tactic (Moerman 2010: 142) as I was pretending to agree with it. Also, at times I felt that the ‘ethical bottom line’ was crossed in the tradeoff between racist and sexist speech on the one hand and obtaining knowledge on the other (Palmer 2010: 433; Warren 1988: 36). At times, therefore, I adopted a challenging probing tactic (Moerman 2010: 142) to take issue with these assumptions. Because of my own personal view on the matter, I also have a tendency to formulate sentences in my analysis in a way that underscores what I think is problematic, or to exaggerate a problematic statement to make a point. Despite this, I have tried to keep an open mind, and to focus on how a viewpoint came about.

The body is a crucial instrument in ethnographic research, so it is important to reflect on the way the respondents have perceived my person. The advantages of being white myself are that the respondents have considered me as an insider, which encouraged them to share their honest opinions. The disadvantages are that as an insider, I have a blind spot for what is self-evident about whiteness. I have tried to avoid this by looking very critically at the transcripts of the interviews. Furthermore, I cannot deny that I am

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quite a timid - and some might say a ‘girly’ - person, which I have used to my advantage to build trust and to invite the respondents to tell me possible socially undesirable standpoints. Finally, I do identify as a bisexual, but I am neither enrolled in any organized queer organizations or institutions nor am I very familiar with the (clubbing) ‘scene’ in general. Because of my position as an outsider, I do not know the ‘rules of the game’, which might have lead me to overlook important details and nuances in the interview. Nevertheless, my own social position contributed to a safe environment during the interview, and was also a useful tool to defamiliarize what is considered ‘normal’ or common sense for the interviewee.

Ethics

I have tried to minimize the harm to the respondents by not only considering the basic ethical principles of informed consent, self-determination, anonymity and confidentiality (Hennink et al. 2011: 63), but also addressing some important ethical issues. I have entered the lives of the respondents with the following, translated from Dutch, research objectives:

I am writing my graduate thesis about how sexual identities, in the context of the multicultural society, have developed since the ’60. I would therefore really want to engage in conversation with men and women from the LHBTQ community who would be willing to share their experiences about what it is like to be queer, gay, lesbian or bisexual in these times of cultural and religious differences in the Netherlands.

This way, I tried to introduce the interviewees to the idea of ‘multicultural society’ while simultaneously framing it in as neutral a way as possible. At the start of every interview, I told the respondents that I will make no judgments about their viewpoints, and that they don’t have to respond to a question that they are not comfortable with. In order to make sure the respondents benefit from participating in my research, I have decided to send them a Dutch summary of the main findings as well as a short reflection of how I experienced the interview, because I want to give the respondents feedback about my findings in such a way that they can learn about themselves. I have tried to treat the respondents with great compassion when personal issues, such as coming out, were

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discussed. To minimize mental harm, I changed the conversation in another direction when I felt that the topic would be too difficult for the interviewee to discuss. Also, I tried to create a safe environment by giving the respondents the opportunity to pick the place and time of the interview. Although all the quotations used in this thesis are manipulated by the way I translated them, I felt that conducting the interviews in their native language (Dutch) contributed to a comfortable interview environment.

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Chapter Four

Biographies of respondents

Category 1

Fief (f, lesbian)

Fief and I attended the same primary school, and were reunited for the interview via Facebook. We drank a beer or two at her beautiful apartment in a ‘multicultural district’ in The Hague, where she lives together with her girlfriend. Her parents divorced at a young age, and she learned from them that it is important to be open

about who you are. Whereas Fief does not have a high school diploma, she owns several companies and has made a ‘name’ for herself. She describes herself as ‘stereotypical gay’, as she has a lot of gay friends and is involved in activist LGBTQI groups. Fief had a very clear narrative of herself, which made it relatively easy for me to invoke a response.

Juul (f, lesbian/bisexual)

Aside from writing her master’s thesis and working for a member of parliament, Juul is a board member of the LGBT network of the political right-wing party VVD. I approached the LGBT VVD board, because I was interested in how members would reconcile right-wing politics with queer issues, as that seemed, especially in homonationalist times, contradictory to me. For Juul it fit together perfectly, as the liberal tradition of the VVD advocates for giving individual’s the space to ‘be themselves’. Juul could be described as stereotypically feminine, which is why many people do not

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consider her as gay. She told me that that annoyed her, because ‘being gay doesn’t have a face.’

Jesper (m, bisexual)

I found Jesper on the Facebook page of ‘gayservative’ organization the Pink Lion [de Roze

Leeuw]. I saw on his Facebook profile that he identifies as Christian, and that he studies

History, so he seemed like an interesting person to talk to. As I felt a lot of rapport was established, the conversation got very personal and insightful. I was truly inspired by the role of God in his life, and the way he made homosexuality and religion perfectly compatible. As he moves back and forth from his home in a village to Amsterdam, where his boyfriend lives, it was interesting to learn about the way he compared urban and non-urban settings on these issues.

Sappho (f, lesbian)

We drank coffee at the CoffeeCompany in the East of Amsterdam, very close to the place where we used to work together. Although we know each other pretty well, we had never discussed politics. Sappho is a student in Economics who grew up in Amsterdam, and has lived there ever since. Although she might appear a bit timid at first, it does not compromise her strong opinion on issues. She described the process after her coming out developing from ‘Sappho who is gay’ to ‘Sappho, who is, among other things, gay’. Though her sexuality is not that dominant in her identity anymore, she still describes herself as ‘really very gay’. It stood out to me that she felt very violated by the (assumed) discontent among religious groups with LGBTQI issues.

Nadine (f, bisexual)

Nadine and I have both worked at the same coffee place, although not at the same time. Although we were Facebook friends, which is how we got together to conduct the interview, we did not know each other beforehand. Nadine is a student in Maastricht, where traditional ‘old people’ form the most significant source of possible homophobia. During the first half of the interview, I was a bit caught off guard as our opinions on several issues were so alike that it felt an odd interview setting. Whereas the beginning of the interview started off somewhat awkward, I felt later that, after I had let go of the

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original scope of the interview, we got into a very natural flow and we discussed some very interesting topics. As she only recently ‘discovered’ she was bisexual, it was interesting to hear her perspective on homonationalism.

Thom (m, gay)

As a political science master’s student Thom is an information specialist at Dutch high schools on behalf of the COC, Thom has a very clear narrative of himself and his coming out. He seemed very articulate on all the issues we discussed, in the sense that he builds his arguments on statistical research, and used ‘woke’ grammar. It would have been impossible to pin him down on a possibly ‘politically incorrect’ viewpoint, as he added ‘it’s different for everyone’, ‘it’s context dependent’, ‘depending on the person, ...’ to every answer. The extent to which he took issue with the homonationalist discourse positively stood out to me. Also, he was one of the only interviewees who critiqued the idea that the visibility of certain gender expressions during Pride would disrupt LGBTQI emancipation.

Martijn (trans non-binary, bisexual)

At the sunny terrace of de Jaren, Martijn and I had a three-hour conversation on gay culture, Grindr, gender norms, the division of roles in sexual intercourse, and anti-gay violence. Martijn is a friend of a friend, and a singer and actor who runs an activist movement that takes issue with gender norms. When we got to the topic of ‘coming

out’, Martijn told me with a big smile that they never came out of the closet, for they wouldn’t know ‘as what’. The conversation was very much a mutual relationship as they educated me about many issues. For example, Martijn explained to me how sexual and romantic interests and feelings are truly malleable [maakbaar]. On the issue of sexual racism, they told me: ‘my sister just says like, ‘I do not fall for black people’, and then I respond ‘you do not know any black people’. You know....’

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Category 2

Zayn (m, gay)

Zayn is a colleague of a friend of a respondent, and works in the arts. We drank a beer in a cafe in Amsterdam West, and I felt that a lot of rapport was established. He grew up in a lower class neighborhood, where he was one of the only ones who loved reading and who was planning to go to university. He found out he was gay through romance books when he was 18. He does not ‘mind’ being gay, but does not appreciate it as others designate him as such.

Irene (f, lesbian)

Irene is a friend of my mother’s, and lives together with her partner in a small village near Gouda. We drank a beer on their sunny terrace, where she told me about her relatively late ‘coming-out’ during her forties and her upbringing in a small, religious village. She told me that she has no experience of homophobia, but that ‘you take it into consideration. But yes, you also take into consideration that you do not pop a XTC pill, like that ha-ha.’

Jolijn (f, lesbian)

Due to her catholic background and knowledge about Dutch LGBTQI infrastructure, Jolijn seemed like an interesting person to talk to. We had a morning coffee at her home which is decorated with many ‘ethnic’ objects from different continents. Jolijn, also a friend of my mother’s, works in HR, works out a lot and writes for the neighborhood magazine. She was very elaborate and direct in her answers, which I appreciated.

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Jorrit (m, gay)

Jorrit is a colleague of a respondent who works at an art related organization, whom I met at a coffee place near The Hague Central. The interview touched on some very interesting in-depth topics very quickly. Jorrit stressed that accepting yourself is the most important step in the development of a queer life: ‘you can grow up in an environment where it [homosexuality, W.K.] is totally accepted, but in the end it is you who has to accept yourself.’ I have the feeling that the place he currently works has educated him on power relations in society, which has caused him often to reflect on his standpoints. On the issue of sexual preference, he told me that he has always been more charmed by people from another culture [een andere cultuur], in which he was: ‘very diverse, as I have had Asian men, yes, quite a long time with a Japanese boy, and now I have an Argentine-Israeli man, yes, so a little bit diverse in my [preference] or something. I do not have one type only; I was not thát racist ha-ha.’

Daan (m, gay)

I approached Daan for an interview via Facebook as I saw he had responded to several posts of Pink Lion [Roze Leeuw]. ‘I gladly participate,’ he wrote back, and so we met at het Plein in The Hague. Daan studied law in his twenties, and is now studying for a political science bachelor’s in Belgium after he wound up his security company. During the interview it transpired that he was one of the founders of Pink Lion, which would explain the way he very clearly reproduced the homonationalist discourse. He responded to my questions in a way that was very self-evident for him; although, he did sometimes apologize for controversial viewpoints. He seemed truly concerned about the well-being of gays and lesbians in the context of immigration, yet he was highly skeptical about the discussion on gender-neutral toilets.

Category 3

Jan Willem (m, gay)

Jan-Willem and his partner have been my direct neighbors for the 18 years I lived in The Hague. When I showed him my consent form, he was moved by the contrast between this professional piece of paper and the way I used to sit on his lap when I was still a

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baby. We discussed that homosexuality was invisible when he was younger, which, growing up in a disfunctional and large family, made him feel quite lonely.

He had quite a Freudian outlook on life, and advocated that LGBTQI people have to stand up for themselves; ‘don’t let that hetero humiliate you’ [laat je niet zo inpakken

door zo’n hetero]. He works as a couples therapist, and told me that heterosexual

individuals can learn a lot from the way non-heterosexual people communicate with each other.

Fransje (f, lesbian)

Fransje is a friend of a respondent, and we met in her office in Utrecht, where she works as a self employed person in finance. When I thanked her for the cup of coffee she gave me by saying Dank u (a formal way to say thank you in Dutch), she told me bluntly: ‘This is the last time I am saying it, but you can say ‘je’ [informal word in Dutch]! This interaction was symbolic for her lively character and the way she stood up for herself. When I addressed the issue of sexual racism, she firmly asserted that excluding on the basis of race is not discrimination. Nonetheless, we had a pleasant conversation. She came ‘out of the closet’ at the age of 27, ‘but not that there was not any room for that [in my family]’.

Bert (m, gay)

Bert seemed somewhat nervous in the beginning of the interview, so I tried to position myself as if I was meeting a friend to make him feel more at ease. Bert used to be a student in Sociology as well, so we started out by comparing our experiences. We met on the terrace of Kriterion, one of his favorite cafes, and I remember that although it was really hot outside, he was wearing very thick corduroy pants, and a blouse with a padded jacket. Later in the interview, he was very elaborate on his life story, and at times it seemed as if he was talking with himself rather than with me. He was very melancholic about how Amsterdam used to be. Also, Bert told me that he makes frequent trips to what he calls the Far East [het Verre Oosten], where ‘Grindr certainly comes in handy, ha-ha, especially in Taiwan.’

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Dorit (f, lesbian)

When I commented on the beautiful view from her apartment in Amsterdam, where she lives together with her partner, Dorit told me that she was able to afford this apartment because she did not have to raise children.

Dorit works in media and grew up in a catholic family. She is very interested in ‘other cultures’ and though she knows that it sounds ‘politically correct’, it does feel as a scarcity that she does not have any people of color in her circle of friends. She is the embodiment of the Dutch expression

van de hak op de tak springen [skipping from one subject to another], which is why it was

difficult at times to pin her down. Dorit seemed quite a dominant and opinionated person, and did not shy away from giving me feedback about my interview skills.

Sjaak (m, gay)

Sjaak is a friend of my father’s, and used to teach at a high school. He lives together with his partner in Osdorp in Amsterdam. As the West of Amsterdam is often mentioned in debates on anti-gay violence, I had expected a strong opinion on this issue. Rather, he explained to me how unfairly ethnic minorities are treated in the Dutch context. There was a moment when a group of young men and women had yelled ‘homo!’ at him, but the only aspect he took away from that incident was that it surprised him that they were able to see that from a distance. It was interesting to hear his views on the sexual scripts (or lack there of) that have been developed since the 1960’s.

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Chapter Five

‘They’

Political and social context

On Pim Fortuyn

On a sunny Monday morning at the beginning of May 2019, I decided to visit the annual memorial to Pim Fortuyn at the cemetery and crematorium Westerveld near the Dutch city Haarlem. Whereas I had planned to be more of a detached observer than a participating one, I was immediately included and welcomed by the small group who had gathered to honor their beloved ‘Pim’, 17 years after he was assassinated by a climate activist in 2002. The group consisted of around ten white, I would say right-wing oriented, people around their fifties, who did not seem to have known each other before this event. It struck me how much the group knew about Fortuyn’s life, and the way they spoke of their relation to him as if he was a friend. When one of the occupants addressed the age difference between me and the rest of the group, I told her that I was a student in Sociology writing my thesis on the topic of homosexuality, and that we discussed the role of Pim Fortuyn in Dutch politics and discourse quite often. She was very happy to hear that, and when she introduced me to several others in the group she proudly announced that Pim Fortuyn’s ideas were being discussed in academia. It became apparent that his assassination is still a very painful memory for the people present. It was especially painful to them that those who Fortuyn left behind were ‘not taken seriously’ by the ‘establishment’.

What most stood out to me was the omnipresence of the word ‘they’ [ze/zij] in the narratives of the individuals present. The word ‘they’ is crucial as it ‘holds both social and expressive, affective meaning’ (Mepschen 2016a: 170; Besnier 1990: 41): it not only denotes certain categories of people, but also ‘signifies the speaker’s emotional disposition to this category’ (Mepschen 2016a: 170). What binds the individuals gathered on this Monday morning is that their ‘they’ not just denotes ethnic minorities and

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‘Muslims’, but also members from political left activist groups with assumed ties to the Dutch media landscape and political ‘establishment’, who were conspiring to disrupt the memorial and pollute Fortuyn’s grave. Important in understanding the current Dutch political context is, then, that Fortuyn normalized a culturalist, neorealist discourse relating ethnic minorities and migrants with various public issues (Van Reekum 2014; Prins 2002; Mepschen 2016a: 23), which is why he was seen as the only politician who saw and spoke the ‘truth’ about immigration and Islam (Mepschen 2016a: 22). Fortuyn installed a fundamental attack on the ‘established order’ [gevestigde orde] by giving ‘a new sound’ [een nieuw geluid]; a baton which has now been passed on to liberal right-wing politician Thierry Baudet in 2019 (Volkskrant 2019). These new political tendencies are not restricted, however, to the political right. The whole political spectrum of the Netherlands has come to construe notions of citizenship in terms of cultural assimilation and national belonging, and hence migrants are asked not only to feel at home in the Netherlands, but also prove deep feelings of attachment and loyalty to the Dutch nation (Duyvendak 2011: 87; Duyvendak et al. 2016; Mepschen 2016a: 23; Mepschen et al. 2010).

On the Dutch LGBTQI infrastructure

Before the sexual revolution of the 1960’s, the Netherlands was a deeply religious country dominated by a system of ‘pillarization’. The latter denotes the way Dutch society was divided into four separate pillars - Catholic, Protestant, liberal and socialist communities – with their own church, television, newspapers, communities, and so forth (Van der Veer 2006). The social movements during the 1960’s for women’s and, somewhat later, gay and lesbian rights have been highly effective in the Dutch case. Due to support of the government for these emancipatory movements, it was one of the first countries to legalize gay marriage, and lesbian and gay individuals largely enjoy legal and sexual rights (Mepschen et al. 2010: 965; Wekker 2016: 112; Van der Veer 2006). Thanks to the gay rights activist Jacob Schorer, who also established the first social organization for gay emancipation in the Netherlands, the Dutch law that forbid sexual intercourse between adults and minors of the same sex (article 248bis), was removed in 1971. It was Amsterdam in particular that got the image of Gay Capital due to the organization of the Gay Games in 1998, and the many venues designated for non-heterosexual people,

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such as the Singel (‘Rue vaselin’), the Amstel, Warmoesstraat and most importantly the Reguliersdwarsstraat. Despite these achievements, activism for non-heteronormative social locations have in the Netherlands always been characterized by assimilating tendencies. Paul Mepschen, Jan Willem Duyvendak and Evelien Tonkens (2010) argue that non-hetero identities reproduce rather than threaten heteronormativity, for its non-radical focus on equality (Wekker 2016: 115). Also, in opposition to the feminist movement, the emancipatory work that was done for white homosexual identified people has from the outset barely taken race into account (Wekker 2016: 116). Therefore, ‘the dominant representation of homosexuality after sixty years of intense postcolonial, labor, and refugee migration to the Netherlands still is that gays and lesbians belong to the dominant racial group; that is, in the public eye gays are white.’

The extent to which most older members of the LGBTQI ‘community’ resist new activist movements related to identity politics is striking. When I attended a meeting on the topic of ‘Being Yourself’ [Jezelf zijn] of the municipality in Amsterdam South, a representative of Roze in Blauw in his forties started his speech with ‘I am just going to say LHBT, I am not going to say all those letters, but I do mean everyone.’ That it was even considered to include all letters was very amusing to the crowd, that mostly consisted of stakeholders, gay white men and a few white lesbian women. It stood out to me that the only individuals of color in the room were representatives of the municipality. During a lecture of the Amsterdam Academic Club, where UvA social scientist Linda Duits was invited to present a short history of the Dutch gay history, there were also only white people present. At the end of her speech, Duits stated: ‘now we say LGBTQ+*’, which was followed by barely suppressed chuckles from the listeners. While Duits pointed out that it is currently “mostly white men” who vote for right-wing parties, I heard some loud sighs and chuckles again. When there was room for questions, a male occupant asked a rhetoric question that seemed to be what everybody in the room was thinking: ‘is it really necessary to say all those letters?’ This ‘homonormative’ nature of Dutch gay activism explains why it is possible that 10% of gay men voted for the anti-Islam agenda of populist right-wing party PVV in 2017 (I&O Research 2017).

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Analysis

Certainly, I want to be able to kiss in public – don’t get me wrong.

But do I want to require

that everyone watch and approve before they acquire rights of citizenship? I think not.

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Chapter Six

‘This is the Netherlands’

Traditional sensibilities, Modern Others

In this chapter, I will show how the discourse of culturalism in the context of homonationalism takes root in how everyday subjects make sense of the world, which fundamentally changes the way they have come to understand their own identities. As I have argued in the theoretical framework, the intersection between sex, race, time and religion is pivotal in the Dutch case. In the first part of this chapter, I want to include spatial configurations to this intersection. I will argue that owing to the cultural archive, ‘we’ in physical ‘society’ are imagined to be white, and whiteness in turn is, owing to the discourse of culturalism in the context of homonationalism, imagined to be connected to modernity, secularism and sexual freedom. The assumed sexual archaism of the Muslim Other functions as a racial counterpoint here to establish the white self as such. This dynamic builds the foundation, as I will argue below, on which rescue narratives towards queer Muslims are articulated.

On ‘society’

I will start this chapter with the life story of Irene, whom, after having lived together with a male partner for 10 years, came ‘out of the closet’ at the age of 40. The small business owner lives together with her partner Carien7 in a small village in the area of Gouda. Irene grew up in an equally small village in the province Utrecht where religion played a significant role in her upbringing. She used to join her parents in their weekly visits to the church – ‘it is partly Bible Belt’ - though she is not practicing religion anymore. Irene tells me that she thinks that the fact that homosexuality was simply ‘not there’ in the village explains why her coming out was relatively late. Later in the interview, she discloses that she has never had a negative personal experience regarding her sexuality, though she does take into consideration that something might happen.

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After I asked her to imagine the experience of a queer Muslim growing up in a Dutch Muslim family, she responds that she expects that it is probably horrible and that she feels very lucky that she grew up on this little part of the earth [volgens mij heb ik echt

geluk dat ik op dit stukje van de aarde ben]. At the end of the interview, when I asked her

about the future of LGBTQI emancipation in the Netherlands, she stated:

I: I don’t know if it [emancipation, WK] is moving forward that much. In fact, I get the sense that we were further on [verder waren] than we are now. That we took a step back. [-] Like, during the time that I met Carien, you didn’t hear about gays being beaten up constantly, or constantly, frequently, and that there are problems. And now you hear about that quite often. So yes. I hope that step can be brought forward again [Ik hoop dat die stap weer vooruit gezet kan worden].ii W: What do you think changed?

I: I think partly because society has changed, that we also have a lot of Islamic people living here [dat we ook heel veel Islamitische mensen hier hebben wonen]. With other thoughts and also because of culture, other ideas. And that it is just so hard for those people to accept that we, here in the Netherlands, treat it very differently, of course that ís very difficult, if you did not experience that your whole life, and you had to seek refuge, and you come here, and you see that it is totally normal here. And you watch the Imam shouting every Friday that it is totally not normal. Yes, that, I think it is very difficult. I saw it with, Carien gives language lessons to someone, and they walked by [the house] a while ago, the young man and his mom, they are from Syria, so Carien knocks on the window like ‘hey, hey, Adnan8!’. So she walked to the front door, out of the kitchen. And I was in the kitchen as well, so he sees me too. I thought to myself, yes, I will also walk to the front for a bit. Well, he was astonished, ‘is that your niece? Is that your sister?’. And Carien says, ‘no, that is my partner’. And then she said, to me, back in the house, ‘well, Adnan, get used to it, because this is the Netherlands! [wen er maar aan, want dit is Nederland!]’iii

Note that the ‘we’ in this quotation denotes people read as ‘Dutch’; the respondents almost never use ‘we’ in relation to Muslim individuals (Massad 2002: 355). My

8_{Fictional name.}