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Femicide Video Series

Islam, gender, and immigrant integration: Boundary drawing in discourses on honour killing in the Netherlands and Germany

Study
Western Europe

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Public discourse on Muslim immigrant integration in Europe is increasingly framed around the presumed incompatibility of Islam and Western values. To understand how such framing constructs boundaries between immigrants and majority society in the media, we analyse newspaper discussions of honour killing in the Netherlands and Germany. These debates reinforce existing bright boundaries, or a strong sense of us versus them, between immigrants from Muslim and/or Turkish backgrounds and the majority population. Limited elements of boundary blurring are also present. We extend existing theory by showing that these boundaries are inscribed in the intersection of ethnicity, national origin, religion and gender. This article is only accessible with journal subscription.

External Authors

Anna Korteweg
Gökçe Yurdakul
Boundaries have strong cultural components and it is culture that concerns us here (see also Lamont and Molnar 2002; Alba and Nee 2003). In boundary theory, the term culture refers to everything from ethnic food and leisure activities (Alba and Nee 2003) to ‘fundamental beliefs and ideas regarding existence’ (Zolberg and Long 1999, p. 8). We use the term to denote shared meaning involving the imputed norms, values and traditions of a perceived group.

 

 


 

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