Figures of Femonationalism

In this chapter I begin to lay out a critical genealogy of the mobilization of women's rights in anti-Islam and anti-immigration campaigns in the Netherlands, France, and Italy from the early 2000s until 2013. In particular, the next sections will provide a detailed account of the ways in which three right-wing nationalist parties — the PVV in the Netherlands, the FN in France, and the LN in Italy — have increasingly resorted to a gender equality lexicon to advance their xenophobic political agendas. This chapter also traces the participation of several feminist intellectuals and women's organizations, female politicians (including some of Muslim descent), and women's equality agencies (or femocrats) in the campaign against Islam's "patriarchy" and Muslim women's alleged special exposure to misogyny and gender violence. However, before I begin to describe the contours of these femonationalist figures, in what follows I will provide a brief historical framing of the ways in which the stereotypes of the non-western migrant man as misogynist and of the non-western migrant woman as victim to be rescued have gained currency in the western European imagery. It is important to highlight that the current stigmatization of Muslim men as enemies of gender equality and the foregrounding of Muslim women as oppressed victims both build on gendered prejudices that had been applied to non-western, colonized subjects more generally in all three countries. As I mentioned in the introduction, the current positioning of Muslim men and women, with the latter playing the role of the passive object of nonwestern male congenital violence who require protection, can in fact be regarded as a contemporary face of a well-known western topos, namely, that of the "white men [claiming to be] saving brown women from brown men," to use Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's apposite formulation. I thus contend that, in the present context, Muslim women play the role of a synecdoche for the western European stereotype of the female Other. That is, Muslim women currently personify in the western European imagery the homogenizing figure of the nonwestern woman as the victim par excellence of non-western male violence. In this sense, the Muslim woman nowadays powerfully embodies the features of what Chandra Mohanty already in the 1980s famously called the Third World woman: that is, the representation of women from non-western societies as constituting a homogeneous "powerless" group defined by their status of victimhood.

Muslim Women as Synecdoche

The mobilization of issues of gender equality to stigmatize non-western migrant men in general has indeed a specific history and trajectory in the western European context. After World War II, when western Europe began to recover from the devastations brought about by the horrific conflict, millions of migrants, mostly male, migrated to and through the continent to fill the demand for labor power in the reconstruction industry. A whole business grew up around these new migrants, with bilateral agreements signed between states and offices across northern European countries that were specifically designed to attract young males to be employed in manufacture and construction. Whether coming from the ex-European colonies (or from countries that were still under colonial rule), or from the Mediterranean region (e.g., southern Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Yugoslavia, Turkey, and part of the Maghreb), these male migrants soon became the victims of widespread xenophobia and racism. Despite their crucial role in the reconstruction of western European economies, they were portrayed by the mainstream media and right-wing parties, and perceived by many (northern) Europeans, in negative terms: lazy, uncivilized, aggressive, backward, unambitious, and so forth. It was only from the mid-1970s onward — that is, after the 1973 oil crisis and the policies stopping further immigration flows to the majority of northern European countries — that migrant women entered onto the stage of migration on an unprecedented scale (on which more in chapter 5). Fearing that they would not be able to come back to the "hosting" countries once they left, a number of these male migrants decided to settle in northern Europe and bring in their family members: spouses, mothers, or daughters. From the 1970s onward the geography of migrations also changed, whereby countries of emigration became countries of immigration — as in the case of southern Europe — and were admitted to the western European family. The presence of migrant women from the ex-colonies and the Global South in western Europe thus, at least in its initial stage, was largely the unexpected and paradoxical outcome of policies that aimed to reduce, rather than to increase, the number of migrants present in the continent. And it was not long before these women too became the object of political scrutiny and stereotyping. Typical orientalist gendered dichotomies began to be applied to them: if migrant males were usually depicted as brutes and uncivilized, women were portrayed as passive and submissive. In the Netherlands, Conny Roggeband and Mieke Verloo remind us that it was only at the beginning of the 2000s that Muslim women started to attract increasing political and media attention and to be used as the chief example of the non-western woman as victim of gendered oppression. Before then, women from minority groups in general were referred to as "allochthonous" and discussed in denigratory terms as retrograde — without distinctions of nationality or religion — when compared to the "autochthonous" Dutch women. Until the late 1990s, therefore, women from former Dutch colonies (Surinam, the Antilles, and Indonesia), from eastern Europe as well as from Turkey and Morocco (the biggest migrant communities in the country), were all represented as backward and victims. For instance, discussing the status of Russians in the Netherlands, Gudrun Willett points out that "the Dutch in particular use [sex] trafficking and mafia images in order to define them [the Russians] as 'other' in matters of migration, work, and crime." Russian women, and eastern European women in general, have thus usually been thought of as being "trafficking victims." From the end of the 1990s onward, however, the hierarchy of backwardness became more layered, with Turkish and Moroccan women gradually being placed at the bottom of the emancipation scale, with Surinamese and Antillean women being presented as less backward in comparison. The relegation of Muslim women to the lower echelons of the emancipation league table became more pronounced in the early 2000s under the center-right Balkenende I (2002) and Balkenende II (2003–2006) cabinets. In 2002 the appearance on the political scene of the party named Pim Fortuyn List (on which more below), and its subsequent electoral success involving fierce anti-immigration and anti-Islam...