"The Multicultural Ordeal: Race, Nation and Sexuality in Dutch Postcoloniality" by Deniz Unsal

Deniz Unsal

Deposited 2004

Abstract
This thesis investigates the contemporary multicultural Dutch context and how a cultivation of the European self is affirmed in the proliferating discourses around scientific studies, policy papers and mainstream popular feminist arguments on integration and emancipation of the ethnic minorities in the Netherlands. It analyzes the public discussion on cultural difference of ethnic minorities in Dutch society today and inquires how these discussions contribute to the renationalization and reconfirmation of Dutch identity.

The postcolonial multicultural Dutch society is composed of postcolonial migrants, refugees and economic migrants. The last category is composed of guestworkers and their families from southern Mediterranean countries such as Morocco and Turkey. These ethnic minorities, and especially migrant and second-generation women, have been the subjects of integration and emancipation policies sustained by scientific and policy-oriented studies in the Netherlands in the last thirty years.

Discourses on the sexuality of Muslim women locate how a middle-class European identity has been tied to notions of being “European” and “white,” and how a discursive mobilization of sexuality of the Other serves to secure and delineate the ideal of modern emancipated Dutch subject of the nation-state.

Based on this argument, this thesis reconsiders the processes of nation formation in the Netherlands and how discourses on race and sexuality were remobilized during certain historical periods, such as colonialism. It then asks whether the colonial perspectives on race and sexuality of the colonial Other are reproduced in the discourses on integration and emancipation of ethnic minorities in contemporary Dutch society, and if so, how it is specifically given shape. This thesis also juxtaposes the manifold strategies of the upwardly mobile second-generation Turkish women who, by borrowing and rejecting parts of these discourses negotiate middle-class, transnational identities.