Abstract
This chapter discusses the intersectional construction of gender, ethnicity, class and religion in migration processes. Through a comparison between migrant women of Kurdish, Turkish and Moroccan origins, the author focuses on the mechanisms of identity construction and transnational practices of the interview partners. The author emphasizes temporal and spatial features of the identity construction, and proposes to understand migrants’ strategies of identification within the framework of transnational biographies. The chapter is based on the interpretation of biographical narrative interviews combined with an intersectional approach. Drawing on the biographical narrative of three young migrant women, the author shows how the interview partners challenge hegemonic images of Muslim migrant women, generating their own hybrid solutions about being Muslim and being young migrant women living in Germany.
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Notes
- 1.
The extensive role of social science literature in the diffusion of such homogeneous and reductionist discourses on Muslim migrant women cannot be neglected. In this sense, Turkish migrant women have been the target of homogenizing and essentializing representations in many ways. Indeed, “the debate on foreign women became a debate on Turkish woman” that were represented as “oppressed by her tradition and (Islamic) culture” (Inowlocki and Lutz 2000, p. 307); additionally, no differentiation is made between the women from Turkey regarding their different ethnic, cultural, and religious backgrounds. Kurdish women, for example, are also subsumed under the category of Turkish women who are considered to be homogeneous. Furthermore, headscarf-wearing Turkish women have come to represent Muslim migrant women, disregarding both the national differences between Muslim migrants and the differences related to the reception and interpretation of Islamic doctrine and practices from region to region.
- 2.
All three interviews cited in this article were conducted in German, and the interview passages quoted here were translated by the author into English.
- 3.
Because these Muslim women had different ethnic backgrounds, these three interviews differ considerably with regard to their religiousness in terms of the five dimensions of religiosity (religious faith, religious knowledge, social consequences of religion, religious practice, and religious experience). See Glock 1969, cited in Y. Karakaşoğlu (2003, p. 110). Again, this further indicates, in contrast to the representation of a monolithic idea of a “Muslim migrant”, how heterogeneous the Muslim population is with regard to religious orientation.
- 4.
The veil originally refers to the clothing that covers the whole body of the woman, with the exception of the feet, hands, and face (Hoodfar 1997, p. 7). Asiye is wearing a headscarf, but the rest of her clothing (coat, skirt, or trousers) differs little from the usual dress code. Still, she is perceived as veiled.
- 5.
Wearing a headscarf has very negative connotations in the German public sphere and is seen as “evidence of an undemocratic, theocratic and thus dogmatic world view” (Karakaşoğlu 2003, p. 121).
- 6.
I do not want to say that migrants are some kind of experts on the culture of their ethnic origin or that they are able to skilfully combine two untouched pure cultures (the sending and receiving countries) and create something new out of them, a much criticized idea in the literature on hybridity. “All cultures are always hybrid, as both Bakhtin or Levis-Strauss argue from different vantage points. […] Hybridity is meaningless as a description of ‘culture’, because this ‘museumises’ culture as a ‘thing’. Culture as an analytic concept is always hybrid (Friedman 1997; Wicker 1997), since it can be understood properly only as the historically negotiated creation of more or less coherent symbolic and social worlds” (Werbner 2000, p. 15).
- 7.
- 8.
The intersectionality approach enables the researcher to capture the multilayered character of subordinate relations which are simultaneously operative in the construction of gender identities. Thus, axes of difference cannot be understood in additive ways as if they were separate from each other (Erel et al. 2010). In this sense, their mutually interdependent and interactive character cannot be neglected (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1983).
- 9.
We should, rather, develop dialectical ways of thinking and grasping the interaction between modern forms of life and traditional forms of life and critically rethink our accounts of what is modern and what is traditional (Salih 2000; Apitzsch 2003; Karakaşoğlu 2003). In this sense, Salih, in her research on headscarf-wearing young Moroccan women in Italy, shows how, contrary to expectations, Islam can be modern, as revealed in the narratives of young, educated, “Islamist,” Moroccan women compared to the traditional religiosity of their uneducated Muslim mothers (Salih 2003).
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Acknowledgments
All interviews were conducted within the framework of the research project “Family Orientations and Gender Differences in Intergenerational Transnational Migration Processes,” directed by Prof. Dr. Ursula Apitzsch (Goethe University, Frankfurt am Main) and financed by the Ministry of Science and Arts of Hessen (HMWK). Within the framework of the project, my colleague Robson Marques and I had conducted 18 interviews with first-, second- and third-generation migrants belonging to different age groups. This paper is based on the evaluation of the first results of this research project. All of the interviewees cited in this article are anonymized. I wish to thank all of my interview partners for their trust and for generously sharing their time and life stories. I would also like to thank the editor of the book, MariaCaterina la Barbera, for her very useful comments and corrections to this article.
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Al-Rebholz, A. (2015). Intersectional Constructions of (Non-)Belonging in a Transnational Context: Biographical Narratives of Muslim Migrant Women in Germany. In: La Barbera, M. (eds) Identity and Migration in Europe: Multidisciplinary Perspectives. International Perspectives on Migration, vol 13. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-10127-9_5
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