Racializing “Oriental” Manliness: From Colonial Contexts to Cologne

Abstract

We propose a co-authored, interdisciplinary paper examining the durability of Islamophobic stereotypes connected to men from the MENA region and their specific forms of “manliness”. We argue that European notions of “Oriental” manliness — covering all ethnic and religious groups from this region — were strangely homogenized and static: the colonized “Oriental” manliness was constructed as the “primitive” counterpart to an idealized form of European masculinity. The significant markers of “Oriental” manliness, as defined in the 19th century, were still essentially the same in the 1960s, when Frantz Fanon wrote that his contemporaries had solidified (but not founded) the idea of North African men as “born slackers, born liars, born thieves, born criminals”.1 The events in Cologne on New Year's Eve 2015 went viral worldwide. Right-wing groups felt vindicated when the public discourse seemed to confirm their narrative of North African, sexually uncontrolled men. A lot of the media coverage following the events in Cologne overlapped with right-wing (and colonial) notions of wild North African men, who are in Europe in order to sexually threaten the white female body. Following the assaults in Cologne, this anxiety was not just limited to women in Germany, but extended across much of Europe. To analyze this alleged durability, we propose to divide our paper into a historical part, which will give a short overview over the formulaic metaphors, images and knowledge production of colonized “Oriental” manliness. In our contemporary analyses, we will trace the harmful longevity of these colonial stereotypes, from the Victorian epoch to the sensationalist reports following the recent incidents in Cologne. We will use pictures from German (and other European) public media depicting the incidents in Cologne and analyze how they reproduced the longstanding anti-Muslim-racist stereotypical image of and knowledge on the North African masculine subject.

Gendered and Racialised Border Security: Displaced People and the Politics of Fear

“…For more on the masculine stereotype of 'the Negro', see Fanon (1986). For the longstanding, anti-Muslim, racist stereotypical image of and knowledge about the North African masculine subject, see Jazmati and Studer (2017). For analysis of Chinese masculine identity, see Eng (2001).…”

Cologne and the (un)making of transnational approaches to sexual violence

“…The media hypervisibility of Cologne exposes how racialized gendered identities interacted with existing anxieties and how deeply entrenched colonial notions of wild Arab men sustained the enactment of the sexually threatened body of the German woman as a surface to frame migration as a security issue (Jazmati and Studer, 2017; Pressentin, 2017). The mediatization of the assaults was framed by a narrative that had emerged in the autumn of 2015 contesting Angela Merkel’s pledge to give refuge to Syrians and which claimed that the influx of refugees was overburdening Germany, the state was losing control, and chaos was about to erupt (Herrmann, 2019).…”

“…Drawing on research about mediatic rapes perpetrated by Muslims in the West (the tournantes in French banlieues , the Rochdale and Rotherham child abuse cases in UK, the Sydney and the Ashfield gang rapes in Australia) (Grewal, 2017; Patel, 2018; Ticktin, 2008; Tufail, 2018), this article assumes that, in contexts of social, religious, racial and ethnic tensions, the mediatization of sexual violence is framed by these very tensions. It is informed as well by research on the racialization of rape in the coverage of Cologne, which exposed how the mediatization of the incidents contributed to xenophobia, discrimination, border control, perceptions of migration as risk, legislation and policy reforms concerning sexual offences, immigration and asylum, and an increase in the support of the far-right (Abdelmonem et al, 2016; Arendt et al, 2017; Behrendes, 2016; Bielicki, 2019; Boulila and Carri, 2017; Drüeke, 2016; Dürr et al, 2016; Hark and Villa, 2017; Herrmann, 2019; Jazmati and Studer, 2017; Vieten, 2018; Weber, 2016). This article shares the conviction that the cultural impact of Cologne must be read ‘against gendered culturalism and racism in Europe’ (Vieten, 2018: 75) and the media construction of the figure of the (un)deserving refugee (Holzberg et al, 2018).…”

Female Bodies Adrift: Violation of the Female Bodies in Becoming a Subject in the Western Media

“…While public discussion connecting gendered violence with "race and ethnicity", in Keskinen's view (2011), is not as polarized in Finland as in some other European countries, rapes of Finnish women by migrant men have resulted in the reproduction of an understanding of migrant male sexuality in particular as threatening. Similarly, many others (Boulila & Carri, 2017;De Hart, 2017;Jazmati & Studer, 2017;Pirani & Smith, 2016) point out the tendencies of public discussion to employ the notions of migrant masculinity as a threat to European women, often in close connection with migration policy debates.…”