Race, Religion, and Cultural Alterity in Sexual Politics: The Case of the Netherlands

Tuesday, May 9, 2017

12:00 PM-2:00 PM

Paul Mepschen, PhD (University of Amsterdam) shares his research on race, religion and cultural identity in sexual politics, drawing on his work in the Netherlands.

Cultural and religious alterity – associated with postcolonial and labor migrants and their descendants – has become a critical matter of contention in the Netherlands. Paradoxically, however, Dutch society lacks an explicit race discourse. Although culturalist and nativist discourses abound, racism in a country like the Netherlands is still widely perceived as non-existent, and anti-racist critique – deemed to miss the point – is marginalized in public discourse. While the registration of citizens on the basis of ethnicity continues to be seen as highly dubitable, a logic that divides society along ethnic and racial lines has been normalized in administrative practice, public policy, statistical research, media representations and everyday vocabularies. This assemblage of ethnicizied/racialized discourses, policy habits and everyday idioms simplifies the social space by symbolically dividing society between white Dutch ‘autochthones’ and ‘non-Western allochtones’ – a binary that plays a key role in current debates on post-migrant integration, national identity, social cohesion and moral order. Within these dynamics scholars discern an increasingly influential framing of the Dutch nation in terms of ‘home’ – a framing that goes hand in glove with a strong focus on Dutch culture and nostalgia for an imagined homogeneous past.

Join us as part of the Department of Politics LGBTQ Speaker Series.

To RSVP for lunch, please follow the link HERE.

Contact Information

Lauren Farmer
laf95@drexel.edu