The workshop title is “Muslim women” in Europe: Bodily performances, multiple belongings and the public sphere"

This workshop focuses on the heightened tensions between legal citizenship and cultural citizenship (national belonging) that Muslim women in Europe are confronted with. In the course of the last decade many European nation states have shifted their policies to a stronger assimilationist stance, while the general public has increasingly come to see Muslims as a threat to national security and Islam as incompatible with European values. In this context everyday performances of national belonging in several European countries have become ever more demanding. Women are particularly implicated not only because they are often seen as markers of communities but especially because their gender submission - symbolized by the headscarf as immediately visible sign - is taken as one of the hallmarks of this incompatibility. This workshop investigates what discursive and/or performative strategies Muslim women employ in the face of such shifts in state policy and public opinion. The premise is that both in the everyday performance of national belonging as well as in public debates the cultural politics of bodily appearances and of aesthetics count. This workshop, therefore, sets out to discuss the kinds of bodily performances Muslim women in various European nation-states engage in and the sorts of belonging they more or less consciously (want to) produce. The workshop invites papers based on in-depth research that focus on the diversity of strategies Muslims women have developed during the last decade with respect to issues of cultural citizenship / practical national belonging.

This includes questions such as: