Saturday, March 15, 2014
Cabinet (Omni Shoreham)
Over the course of the last thirty years, the publicly visible “otherness” embodied by the Muslim population in the member states of the European Union has sparked movements of transnational moral panic mainly driven by the fear of the collapse of “national cohesion”. These occurrences of local friction, tension, disagreement, and more recently violences as in France and Sweden, have emerged in different contexts, regardless of the national conventions with regards to immigration politics, the relationship between church and state and the wider construction of national identity. They are part of a racializing configuration about which three arguments can be developed. The first hinges on the unintelligibility of certain manifestations of belief in secularized European public spaces. The second develops an analysis of the racialization of the indicators of religious belonging, which most specifically affect the Muslim population of the EU. The third finally proposes some speculative readings of the public experience of the different crises arising from the visibility of Islamic religious signs and the capital attached to their visibility: what does fetishism about religious attire tell us about European Islamophobia? This paper engages theoretically with the idea that Islamophobia has become an ordinary trap for European publics. They develop « scopic fixations » around the Muslim subject that is being fetishized. This paper thus looks at the analogy we can establish between Islamophobia, the work on fetishism as cultural discourse and scopophilia (the love of looking).
