Drawing on and responding to the writings of theorists such as Judith Butler, Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, and Lisa Lowe, this book proposes the notion of “precarious intimacies” to navigate a dilemma: how to recognize, affirm, and value love, touch, and care while challenging the racialized and gendered politics in which they are embedded.

T…[Read more]

Gegenwartsliteratur: A German Studies Yearbook, vol. 17, 2018: pp. 115-133.
In this article I propose the notion of precarious intimacies as entry point into the representation of the political in Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s work. Through an analysis of Die Brücke vom Go/denen Horn, I explore intimacies as sites of transformation and political p…[Read more]

Despite the recent wave of scholarship on intersectionality, as well as a surge in feminist scholarship on Islam in German feminist studies, feminist research has yet to adequately engage with the role of religion in intersectionality. In this article the author draws on the work of the Aktionsbündnis muslimischer Frauen in Germany to explore the…[Read more]

Fereshta Ludin’s struggle to be appointed as a public school teacher while wearing ahijab received massive media attention in Germany, while the xenophobically motivated murder of Marwa el-Sherbini, who was eventually dubbed the “hijab martyr” internationally, elicited muted response. Yet interpreting the reactions to these two cases toget…[Read more]

The paradox of rights and racism, whereby human rights are re-racialized even as racism is rejected, reveals the deeply gendered workings of whiteness. Whiteness works as a social structure and a set of somatic norms that allows some bodies to be more at home in the world than others, and some bodies to move in the world more easily than others.…[Read more]