eJournals Colloquia Germanica 47/1-2

Colloquia Germanica
cg
0010-1338
Francke Verlag Tübingen
Es handelt sich um einen Open-Access-Artikel, der unter den Bedingungen der Lizenz CC by 4.0 veröffentlicht wurde.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/61
2014
471-2

Truth in advertising: Representations of Faith and Belonging around “Muslim” Women’s Memoirs

61
2014
Lindsay Lawton
Recent bestselling memoirs by “Muslim” women are categorized together by booksellers and cited in reports about Islam in Europe even though the authors describe very different experiences of Muslim faith. The divergent representations of faith in these memoirs are mediated by their uniform packaging and promotional campaigns, which depend on the exposure of the author as a gendered, racialized embodiment of the familiar figure of the Muslim woman as victim of religious violence. Authors are identified as Muslim despite building careers based on their rejection of Islam. Images of authors are prominently displayed on the covers of their books and some of them have become prominent activists, even though they write under pseudonyms for their own protection. Even as paratextual networks that have grown up around Muslim women’s memoirs reflect increasing conflation of marketing and consumption, the networks as well as the memoirs themselves also provide an important space where tropes of Muslim faith and belonging are complicated, challenged, and disputed.
cg471-20133
Truth in Advertising: Representations of Faith and Belonging around “Muslim” Women’s Memoirs1 3 3 Truth in advertising: Representations of Faith and Belonging around “Muslim” Women’s Memoirs Lindsay Lawton University of Minnesota abstract: Recent bestselling memoirs by “Muslim” women are categorized together by booksellers and cited in reports about Islam in Europe even though the authors describe very different experiences of Muslim faith. The divergent representations of faith in these memoirs are mediated by their uniform packaging and promotional campaigns, which depend on the exposure of the author as a gendered, racialized embodiment of the familiar figure of the Muslim woman as victim of religious violence. Authors are identified as Muslim despite building careers based on their rejection of Islam. Images of authors are prominently displayed on the covers of their books and some of them have become prominent activists, even though they write under pseudonyms for their own protection. Even as paratextual networks that have grown up around Muslim women’s memoirs reflect increasing conflation of marketing and consumption, the networks as well as the memoirs themselves also provide an important space where tropes of Muslim faith and belonging are complicated, challenged, and disputed. Keywords: Muslim, post-Muslim, women, memoirs, marketing The stories that audiences expect to find between the covers of books with dramatic titles such as Ich wollte nur frei sein: Meine Flucht vor der Zwangsehe (Hülya Kalkan, 2005) , Mein Schmerz trägt deinen Namen: Ein Ehrenmord in Deutschland (Hanife Gashi, 2005) , or Mich hat keiner gefragt: Zur Ehe gezwungen—eine Türkin in Deutschland erzählt (Ayşe, 2007) were familiar long before the turn of the twenty-first century. These popular works are characterized as Muslim women’s memoirs and share themes of forced marriage, honor killing, and the cruelty and violence to which the protagonist is subjected during her quest to pursue a “Western” lifestyle. Equally familiar are the stories about the books and about their authors: it is understood that the women whose experiences form 134 Lindsay Lawton the basis of these memoirs are taking enormous risks by “breaking their silence,” that Islam was the reason for their suffering, and that their rejection of such suffering was tantamount to a rejection of Islam and of their Muslim communities. Such beliefs are foundational components of the discursive context in which these books are produced and promoted. They are reflected in marketing across the genre, aligning a spectrum of politically, culturally, and spiritually diverse authors and obscuring the specificity of their experiences with and attitudes toward Muslim faith and belonging. These books are successful in part because of mainstream beliefs about the nature of Islam as inherently violent and about Muslim communities in Europe as independent from and inaccessible to non-Muslims. 1 The rhetorical substitution of a transnational Muslim community for Allah and the racialization of Islam also play an important role. But despite giving initial impressions of uniformity (and generic condemnation of Islam), the central stories in these memoirs vary significantly—especially on matters of faith. The heroine’s suffering is tied to the religious beliefs of her tormentors more overtly in marketing and other paratexts like titles, forewords and afterwords, or cover design than in the stories themselves. Authors also describe very different experiences of Muslim faith. Sabatina James’s story documents her search for God, while Ayşe writes that Islam actually didn’t play a very big role in her family, and Hülya Kalkan describes how she was taught as a child that to be Muslim “bedeutet ein Leben in ständiger Furcht” (30) without stating her current religious beliefs. How can we make sense of the apparent disconnect between text and paratext? One approach is to consider whether the paratexts that I examine here are actually generated by the individual narratives at all. In order to understand the relationships of paratexts to Muslim women’s memoirs, to other paratexts, and to the imaginary figure of the Muslim woman victim, I look at how publishers, activists, authors, and consumers position these books in the public sphere across a range of media. I draw a distinction between the figure of the Muslim woman victim and what I call the “post-Muslim woman”—women who are identified by their experiences with Islam even after their public rejection of Muslim faith, and whose subject status in the public eye depends on their continued denouncement of Islam. Because not every author participates in this sort of critique, and because the content of the memoirs in question focuses primarily on authors’ experiences before and during their break with Muslim faith rather than after, I still refer to these books as Muslim women’s memoirs. Even as new distinctions emerge, I also emphasize the blurring of boundaries between producer or promoter and consumer, as well as between the marketing and consumption of individual memoirs, the genre to which they belong, and larger narratives about the victimhood of Muslim women and the struggle Representations of Faith and Belonging around “Muslim” Women’s Memoirs 135 against Islam. Brian Massumi observes that “the difference between marketing and consuming and between living and buying is becoming smaller and smaller, to the point that they are getting almost indistinguishable” (229). The paratextual networks that have grown around Muslim women’s memoirs reflect this shift in the way that stakeholders seem stuck consuming and reproducing the familiar story of the Muslim woman victim. Though much of the paratextual content I examine here reinforces negative stereotypes about Muslims, I argue that the networks as well as the memoirs can also provide an important space where tropes of Muslim faith and belonging are complicated, challenged, and disputed. Let us begin by examining how the memoirs’ paratexts at first seem only to reinforce the very tropes of Muslim faith and belonging that are complicated in and around these narratives. Cover designs provide a useful point of entry for distinguishing between the figure of the Muslim woman victim and the post-Muslim woman. Beginning with the covers also lets us follow the steps of the general public, since covers are often the first point of contact for consumers—whether in stores, online, or as graphics appearing in advertisements, television interviews, or review articles. Visual and textual cues on the book covers converge in a culturally and temporally specific framing of female Muslim faith as blind obedience and lack of subjectivity, female Muslim belonging as violent oppression, and Islam as the reason for the suffering of Muslim women. It is no surprise that portraits of veiled women or women with their faces obscured by graphics resembling veils 2 are so often used for cover art, reinforcing the hijab’s status as “an important signifier of intersectional difference” (El-Tayeb 83). Two books of this kind even use the very same cover image. 3 The women’s eyes are frequently the only exposed or visible part of the face; their mouths are often covered by their veils, and their expressions are difficult to read. They are mute, inscrutable, and trapped. These portraits are framed by author names and titles that give the images context. Names are often obvious pseudonyms that nonetheless highlight the authors’ non-German heritage—Ayşe, Leila, or Inci Y. come to mind—and these are displayed as prominently as the titles. Titles almost always refer to forced marriage, honor killing, and / or a loss or lack of agency such as being trapped or forced; some specifically reference Islam as well. This combination of visual and textual cues draws several connections. First, because the veil remains a salient reference to Muslim faith and belonging as well as a gender marker, while also suggesting that something hidden will be revealed, this type of cover design identifies the authors as post-Muslim women and refers, at least implicitly, to existing ideas about forced marriage, honor killing, and lack of female agency as inherent or essential characteristics of Islam. Second, by visually connecting 136 Lindsay Lawton Muslim belonging and violence with a pseudonymous author, these covers emphasize the risk to the author’s personal safety that comes from breaking codes of silence and sharing her story with the broader (and implicitly non-Muslim) public. Finally, and perhaps most fundamentally, these covers connect the female Muslim body with covering, victimhood, and oppression even as the book seems to also offer proof of the author’s agency, voice, and visibility. The bodies on these covers are marked as female and Muslim already by the veils and the sociocultural contexts that the titles evoke. The books’ proximity to one another in retail settings and reviews only reinforces the sense of vast differences between Muslims and the rest of the public, the impression of sameness among Muslims, and the notion that there are countless such tales waiting to be told. Even though the books are premised on the idea that authors have rejected Islam and become “Western,” the covers also illustrate the inescapability of “Muslim” as a category. In that sense, they contribute to the discursive production of “Muslim” as a kind of racial or ethnic group, a social category that connects ideology, class status, and phenotype. Muslim women’s memoirs tend to uncritically circulate in physical stereotypes of Muslim belonging with portraits of authors with dark eyes and hair, often combined with the ideological marker of the veil despite the fact that they are not likely—due to the circumstances necessary for the production of such a work—to have Muslim faith. The books reinforce rather than deconstruct the stereotype even when they defy convention. In attempting to draw consumers’ attention and interest by surprising them, some covers provide a photo negative of expectations. For example, the cover of Katja Schneidt’s 2011 memoir Gefangen in Deutschland (Fig. 1) reinforces the racialized stereotype by emphasizing the incongruity of a body coded as “Western European” embodying “Muslim victimhood”: it pictures a veiled, fair-skinned, blond-haired, blue-eyed woman, and bears the subtitle Wie mich mein türkischer Freund in eine islamische Parallelwelt entführte. Representations of Faith and Belonging around “Muslim” Women’s Memoirs 137 Figure 1: Cover image from Gefangen in Deutschland: Wie mich mein türkischer Freund in eine islamische Parallelwelt entführte © Münchner Verlagsgruppe GmbH 138 Lindsay Lawton The image is carefully composed and richly colored: Schneidt’s blond hair is cut into bangs which cover her forehead, and the veil that covers the rest of her hair as well as her mouth is a vivid blue that matches her eyes and evokes the blue mantle of the Virgin Mary even as it alludes to the silencing and lack of agency she experienced. She stares straight into the camera, and there is urgency in her expression. The colors are obviously digitally enhanced, such as that of Schneidt’s skin, which is considerably smoother and a lighter shade of pink than in other images of Schneidt or her live television appearances. Her face and the veil that surrounds it take up almost the entire cover. This cover summarizes her experiences as victim of kidnapping and imprisonment in an “Islamic parallel world,” constructing “German” and “Islamic” societies as fundamentally separate and distinct. Her boyfriend is specifically “Turkish” and therefore explicitly non-German, especially in light of his ostensible access to and significant power in the “Islamic parallel world” where he held Schneidt captive. Schneidt’s race, ethnicity, non-Muslim origins, and victimhood status are all implicit in the book’s title, cover image, and discursive context. The cover depends on producing a kind of cognitive dissonance among viewers by juxtaposing a Western European body with the imprisonment of the veil, which is coded as Muslim and as a tool of the oppressive Islamic parallel world. This world comes across as a threat not only to Schneidt’s German / Western European body, but also to Germany / Western Europe itself. These paratexts focus primarily on Schneidt’s suffering and clearly reinforce the equation of Muslim faith with the figure of the Muslim woman victim, who is trapped, silenced, and abused because of her tormentors’ religious faith. Although the very existence of the memoir suggests that Schneidt has left the role of victim, the paratextual emphasis rests squarely on her victim status. The transition to post-Muslim woman becomes much more apparent in and around the second books or sequels published by some of the more activist authors (i.e., James, Inci Y.). The title of Schneidt’s second book, Befreiung vom Schleier: Wie ich mich von meinem türkischen Freund und aus der islamischen Parallelwelt lösen konnte, overtly communicates the shift from victim to post-Muslim woman. The cover of this book (Fig. 2) depicts Schneidt in the act of freeing herself from what is clearly meant to be a veil. She is holding the same blue cloth that was her veil on the first book cover, which floats above and around her, as if she were throwing it off. The fabric that she holds evokes a hijab, but the stylized, dramatic shape of it billowing around her is at best a generous interpretation of throwing off a veil. Her entire face, head, and neck are exposed, and she offers the camera a half-smile. Next to the cover of her first book, and the other portraits of veiled women described above, the half-smile presents a striking contrast between the abject Muslim woman victim trapped behind a veil and the happy European subject freely demonstrating her agency. Representations of Faith and Belonging around “Muslim” Women’s Memoirs 139 Figure 2: Cover image from Befreiung vom Schleier: Wie ich mich von meinem türkischen Freund und aus der islamischen Parallelwelt lösen konnte © Münchner Verlagsgruppe GmbH 140 Lindsay Lawton Although the covers of Schneidt’s two books raise all kinds of questions, I would like to return here to the issue of race. While the typical portrait for memoirs of this type shows a dark-haired, dark-eyed woman readily identifiable by audiences as “Muslim” (whether or not she wears a veil), Schneidt’s pale, blond, blue-eyed image conveys not an oppressed Muslim woman, but a German woman oppressed by Muslims. This kind of cover design reflects the extent to which “Muslim” has become a catchall term in Germany, not necessarily referring to practices or experiences of religious faith so much as to a culturally, ethnically, and spiritually diverse group of people. Perhaps the only thing they all share is their perception or interpellation as “other” or non-German. Schneidt’s cover portraits are striking precisely because they reflect the assumption that audiences expect to see something else behind the veil, something that Schneidt is not. Inaccurate terms like Orientalin, Gastarbeiterin, or Türkin that have been used in the past to describe people who do not look like Schneidt have evolved into Frau mit Migrationshintergrund. 4 While critiques of these terms have focused especially on the issue of national origin and citizenship, some scholars have argued against the increasing racialization of Islam and the use of “Muslim” to refer to a group of phenotypic traits rather than religious faith (see Spielhaus, Sieg, El-Tayeb). Riem Spielhaus connects this growing trend to the 2000 change in German citizenship laws, since “ehemalige Türken” could no longer be identified simply by their (presumed) non-German citizenship (30). In her examination of the commonly cited statistic that 2.8 to 3.2 million Muslims live in Germany, Spielhaus found that these misleading numbers were based on statistics about migration to Germany from countries with majority Muslim populations, naturalized German citizens from predominantly Muslim countries, and Germans who chose to list their religion as Islam in the 1987 census. Of these three strategies, only the census self-identification actually reveals anything about the number of people in Germany with Muslim faith—in 1987. 5 Spielhaus argues that the terminology may have changed from “guest worker” or “Turk” to “Muslim,” but that its othering function and the visible minority to which it refers remain fundamentally the same; many people once incorrectly identified as immigrants are now incorrectly identified as Muslims. Visible markers of difference may constitute the basis of this identification, but “Muslim” connects physical traits with implications about the beliefs of those whom it describes, with added complexity depending on self-identification and social context. Tropes of Muslim faith are thus tied to a visible minority but also include a range of presumptions about faith, ideology, obedience, and patriotism. These include the notions that Muslims have greater loyalty to Islam or the transnational Muslim community than to the nations in which they Representations of Faith and Belonging around “Muslim” Women’s Memoirs 141 live; that they are either blindly and literally obedient to the rules set forth by the Koran and Hadiths or use their religious affiliation as a cynical excuse for misogyny and violence; and that Muslims are ideologically homogenous. Cover design and other paratexts around Muslim women’s memoirs reinforce and rely on these tropes of Muslim faith, but the racialization of Islam suggests a degree of permanence or inescapability that appears to contradict the narrative of personal change and escape that runs through this genre. The sense that “Muslim” is somehow an indelible characteristic is reflected in the role of the post-Muslim woman, who is defined by her vocal rejection of Islam and continued critical engagement with Muslim faith. I use the term “post-Muslim” specifically to describe those authors, like Schneidt, Sabatina James, or Serap Çileli, whose professional success is deeply connected to their experiences with Muslim faith and their continued critique of Islam. Their continued (albeit often negative) relationship with Islam grants them a certain subject status and differentiates post-Muslim women from those authors whose time in the public eye is focused almost exclusively on the suffering they endured, like Ayşe or Inci Y. Like Schneidt, many post-Muslim women have leveraged the success of their memoirs into second books as well as careers as public speakers and activists. Their status is evident in common cover designs for their second books, which often feature a full portrait of the author, bare-headed and in Western dress, with an expression of wistful courage and determination. These covers show empowered women, public figures whose work tends to include stories of their own experiences and those of other women who have suffered in similar ways. Compare, for example, the cover images from Sabatina James’s first and second books: on the cover of her first memoir, Sterben sollst du für dein Glück: Gefangen zwischen zwei Welten (Fig. 3) 6 , the author appears veiled to the left of the title, with only her eyes visible, and then, as if to demonstrate a transition, in a wider angle image and only slightly less cloaked by her long, dark hair on the right side. The title banner also suggests a sort of imprisonment, delimiting how much of the “before” and “after” faces we can see. James’s second book, Nur die Wahrheit macht uns frei: Mein Leben zwischen Islam und Christentum (Fig. 4) connects James’s personal experience ( “Mein Leben” ) with a larger narrative of struggle and liberation ( “macht uns frei” ). It also circulates in the visual tropes of the post-Muslim woman. It depicts the author with a more confident expression than her first book, directly confronting the viewer by making eye contact; the image has been artfully faded to the point that her dark hair appears to be touched with gray in places and her skin looks white. 142 Lindsay Lawton Figure 3: Cover image from Sterben sollst du für dein Glück: Gefangen zwischen zwei Welten © Knaur Taschenbuch Representations of Faith and Belonging around “Muslim” Women’s Memoirs 143 Figure 4: Cover image from Nur die Wahrheit macht uns frei: Mein Leben zwischen Islam und Christentum © Pattloch Verlag 144 Lindsay Lawton On their own, these cover images may not differ much from cover design of non-Muslim life writing, but given the books’ titles and their marketing and media contexts, they reinforce the currency of “Muslim” as a category. In media coverage of the genre and in brick-and-mortar or online stores, the books convey the impression of a shared experience of abuse and oppression of Muslim women in the West. This physical and virtual proximity, along with the similarity in titles, sharpens the contrast between the images of women coded as Muslim and as victims by their veils and their body language, and the post-Muslim woman, who remains defined by her experiences with Islam rather than her experiences after escaping abusive families, partners, or communities, and whose vocal critique of Muslim faith allows her a kind of critical agency in the public sphere. Regardless of when or whether they ever experienced Muslim faith as a personal conviction, post-Muslim women have been categorized as Muslim, primarily on the basis of the fact that their public (and often polemic) criticism of Islam has a great deal to do with their former positions as Muslim women victims. Their experiences as victims are intimately tied in their public images to deep knowledge of the religion; together, these legitimize their criticism. As Fatima El-Tayeb points out, it is this criticism which gains them a voice in public debates about the role of Islam in Europe (103). The juxtaposition of the Muslim and post-Muslim figures across Muslim women’s memoirs sets up a before / after dynamic; the familiarity of the genre, along with the information in the titles, ensures that consumers know that the veiled woman embodies the “before” and the book is proof of the “after.” These narratives are often placed in physical, virtual, and discursive proximity to polemics by (white male) political figures decrying the “false tolerance” of Germany. These other works, exemplified by the bestselling books of Thilo Sarrazin and Heinz Buschkowsky, also shape the meaning of the women’s memoirs described above. The two types of books are mutually reinforcing, ideologically opposing and demonstrating the existence of the dreaded Parallelgesellschaft. 7 The consequence of the physical and discursive proximity between these two complementary narrative genres is that images of veiled women are set in opposition to images like those of Schneidt or James that represent a particular kind of critical, activist subjectivity. Such memoirs constitute a metaphorical exposure—unveiling 8 —at both the autobiographical and the social levels, that is, of both the author herself and a secretive, scandalous Parallelgesellschaft otherwise inaccessible to many readers. Because the particular market context of these memoirs lacks images of veiled Muslim women in subject positions similar to those of post-Muslim activists, it is specifically the exposure which appears to grant the author subject status, implying a causal rather than correla- Representations of Faith and Belonging around “Muslim” Women’s Memoirs 145 tive relationship between unveiling and subjectivity. One effect of this rhetorical strategy is that it prevents an understanding of veiled women as subjects with agency, framing them instead as always already victims of Muslim oppression. It also relegates gendered violence to the parallel world, a realm that does not (or should not) touch Germany. At a time when post-Muslim women are quite prominent on national and international stages, the fact that practicing or veiled women are rarely acknowledged as active participants in debates about integration and Islam in Europe underscores the extent to which the “mainstream public persistently ignore[s] the work done by Muslim and minority women who struggle to change structures within their communities rather than condemning them wholesale,” such as the Aktionsbündnis muslimischer Frauen (El- Tayeb 102). These memoirs could not exist without the agency of their authors, whose work in bringing their stories to press is often framed as supporting Muslim women, yet the paratexts that surround them reinforce the widespread stereotype of Muslim women as mute victims. Despite their non-fiction status, the attention these books receive reflects much less about the actual subjectivity of Muslim women than about the appetites of a Western European reading public that fails to understand veiled women as agents in the same way as unveiled post-Muslim activists. Regardless of whether they feature images of oppressed or liberated women, these covers suggest that behind them are already-familiar stories about Muslim women victims, that the oppression and violence their authors suffered was motivated or justified by Islam, and that it was impossible for them to reject this oppression and violence while nurturing religious faith. Since Muslim faith is conflated with Muslim belonging, it is also understood to be impossible for these women to remain a part of their Muslim community after their break with Muslim faith. The memoirs themselves demonstrate their authors’ agency and ability to change, and in some cases, to continue to participate in a family or community even as they come to terms with their traumatic experiences (see, for example, Ich wollte nur frei sein: Meine Flucht vor der Zwangsehe by Hülya Kalkan). However, the covers reinforce a sense of Muslim identity as racialized and fundamentally inescapable by relegating authors to positions as perpetual victims of Islam or post-Muslim activists. These book covers, along with other paratexts, shape their own discursive context such that their authors seem to disappear entirely as individual and specific agents, and with them, the diversity of their experiences and beliefs. What is at stake in the way these individual narratives of personal experience are obscured by their paratexts? Book covers are just one example of how the marketing of Muslim women’s memoirs can subsume their authors as unique subjects and shift focus toward an overarching—and oversimplified—narrative 146 Lindsay Lawton of Muslim oppression and Western European salvation. Like book covers, other paratexts such as news reports, print advertising, and public service campaigns overshadow the individual subjectivity of the author and subvert the ostensible goals of bringing such stories to press in the first place. Instead of benefitting other women in similar situations, the paratexts described above and those that I examine below function as if promoting a brand and do more to incite moral panic than to promote integration. In the pages that follow, I show how a range of other paratexts reinforce an overarching narrative featuring the imaginary figure of the Muslim woman victim while obscuring the individual accounts of diverse experiences, putting the public recognition of Muslim women as unique subjects with agency at risk. I also highlight how the familiar story of the Muslim woman victim can shift in these paratexts into a transnational narrative about the threat of Islam to the West. While many of the same problematic tendencies evident in other paratexts also figure prominently in reader reviews, I argue that social media also offers a unique space to complicate the relationship between memoirs and paratexts by blurring the distinction between producer and consumer such that the memoirs begin to seem more like paratexts of another, larger narrative. Expanding the scope of this study to include paratexts such as news reports, print advertising, and nonprofit campaigns highlights new contours in the familiar story of the Muslim woman victim and the moral panic that accompanies it. Muslim women’s memoirs are framed explicitly as selfless gestures on the part of their authors, who risk their safety to educate the public for the benefit of others in similar situations. Although this is part and parcel of the post-Muslim woman’s public persona, even authors who disappear from the public eye must justify their brief self-exposure. For example, Renate Eder, who co-wrote Mich hat keiner gefragt together with Ayşe, explained that “Ayşe will aufklären, will anderen Frauen aus der Not helfen, aus der Anonymität herauszutreten, will ihnen sagen: ‘Schaut her, ich hab’s auch geschafft. Ihr könnt das auch. Ihr müsst nicht alles aushalten’” (Geiling). Positing this kind of selflessness in the authors diminishes the unique character of their experiences, their decisions, and their attitudes toward Islam. Moreover, it suggests that there is something inappropriate about an author telling her story primarily for her own benefit. The author’s value as an individual subject is further reduced by the way authors are positioned as a small part of a larger struggle. Verena Araghi’s 2005 article “Flucht aus der Ehehölle,” which appeared in the German news magazine Der Spiegel, offers a good example. The article included cover images of six memoirs sharing the single caption, “Erfahrungsberichte unterdrückter Frauen: ‘Da entsteht plötzlich ein Gefühl der Solidarität’” (119). Such collective appraisal suggests that the narratives are so similar that they do not merit separate re- Representations of Faith and Belonging around “Muslim” Women’s Memoirs 147 views. This paratextual information not only connects the individual personal narratives to one another, but also implies that they give voice to a shared experience and a shared dedication to a larger struggle, an inference that is also reinforced by cross-referencing in marketing and promotion. The suggestion of charitable or activist motivations on the part of authors is reinforced by the support of women’s aid organizations, which can also contribute to the impression of each memoir as a uniform part of a much simpler liberatory narrative. Terre des Femmes, a nonprofit women’s rights organization based in Berlin, makes a good example. The organization has provided material contributions to books, including afterwords in Mich hat keiner gefragt and Mein Schmerz trägt deinen Namen: Ein Ehrenmord in Deutschland, and has also mediated between authors, publishers, and readers by handling publicity and interview requests for authors. In addition to selling Muslim women’s memoirs through its website, frauenrechte.de, and sponsoring readings and talks by authors, Terre des Femmes hosts a film festival which has featured films in which authors of these memoirs were involved (notably Iss Zucker, Sprich Süss ). Other aid organizations are run by authors, as in the case of Sabatina e. V., which is led by Sabatina James, and peri e. V., led by Serap Çileli. These kinds of organizations arguably provide critical support to victims of abuse, but their involvement in promoting Muslim women’s memoirs situates each narrative as a small piece of a grand, transnational struggle to liberate oppressed masses of women around the world from their Muslim tormentors. When an author’s specific, individual experiences of violence and abuse are framed as standardized and generic, it reinforces negative stereotypes and limits the possibilities for recognizing her as a unique subject. When the standardized narrative about the figure of the Muslim woman victim is globalized, it transforms the genre of Muslim women’s memoirs into evidence of the threat that Muslim faith presents to Germany, Western Europe, and the world at large. This second shift, from the threat to Muslim women to the threat to the West, is especially evident in paratexts that characterize the violence and abuse described in Muslim women’s memoirs as Menschenrechtsverletzungen. Christa Stolle, director of Terre des Femmes, cites a number of human rights treaties in her afterword for Mich hat keiner gefragt, including the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women as legally binding agreements with the goal of “kulturellen Praktiken entgegenzuwirken, die Frauen diskriminieren und sie ihrer universellen Rechte berauben” (241). 9 Online reader reviews connect human rights violations with territorial rhetoric: a user writing as G. Lange on amazon.de notes in a review of Mich hat keiner gefragt that “fundamentale Menschenrechte werden in Deutsch- 148 Lindsay Lawton land in unmittelbarer Nachbarschaft mit Füßen getreten.” Another commenter on Buechereule.de connects both themes back to aid organizations by providing a link to the Terre des Femmes website and writing: “Für einen aufgeklärten Westeuropäer ist es nicht ganz einfach, diese Geschichte zu begreifen. Vor allem die Tatsache, dass so etwas sich in der unmittelbaren Nachbarschaft abspielt, erscheint auf dem ersten Blick absurd” (Aeria). Such comments reinforce cultural, territorial, and intellectual boundaries between the universe of the non-Muslim “Westeuropäer” where human rights are understood and respected and the “unmittelbare Nachbarschaft” of the Muslim parallel world. At the same time, they suggest that the image of the Muslim woman victim is so troubling and prevalent that it merits further study, although not necessarily interrogation or critique. They also create institutional presence in social media through individual contacts, producing a kind of viral marketing under the guise of personal communication. Finally, user-generated content of this kind builds additional overlapping and intersecting connections among memoirs and to the familiar figure or story of the Muslim woman as victim. The notion that legal rights and territory as well as Muslim women are being violated by adherents of Islam contributes to a sense of moral panic and global struggle between diametrically opposed groups. It is not surprising that this sense of moral panic is particularly clear in reader reviews and other social media, which present a number of methodological and theoretical challenges. 10 However, social media platforms have also provided an important venue for individuals to participate in shaping the discursive context of this genre. In many instances, the integral role of social media in the consumer experience has meant that those who stand to profit from the popularity of these books are not necessarily in control of the narratives that develop around them. Reader ratings and comments posted on product pages of online booksellers are especially significant because of the role they play in the purchasing process and in their obvious blurring between consumption and marketing, as ratings and quotes from user reviews are displayed next to the cover images of books at almost every stage of viewing. Authors might follow, like, or otherwise endorse one another; activists link to similar stories; readers review multiple books and recommend some over others in their comments. These gestures of liking and linking work to reinforce the commonly held belief that oppression and victimhood are not just experiences that are shared by some Muslim women, but rather that they form a uniform and universal dimension of the Muslim female experience. Such impressions are buttressed by assertions of authenticity outside of the authors’ own autobiographical experiences. Some contributors to the wealth of social media content related to Muslim women’s memoirs claim personal knowledge of authors, bypassing the book and its cast of producers Representations of Faith and Belonging around “Muslim” Women’s Memoirs 149 to bring an ostensibly more authentic version of the author into the social network. One especially interesting example is a review of Mich hat keiner gefragt on the popular Buechereule.de forum: Aufgrund meiner ehrenamtlichen Tätigkeit für Terre des Femmes hatte ich das RIESENGLÜCK , Ayse gemeinsam mit ihrer Journalistin Renate Eder, zu Lesungen zu begleiten und vorab einen kleinen Vortrag zum Thema Zwangsheirat zu geben. Dadurch habe ich das Buch natürlich mehrfach gelesen und noch öfter Ausschnitte daraus gehört. […] Da ich mich ja lange Zeit mit den Themen “Zwangsheirat” und “Ehrverbrechen” beschäftigt habe, habe ich entsprechend viel Lektüre konsumiert. Natürlich sind hier keine Pulitzerpreisverdächtigen Werke dabei, aber dies Buch gehört in dem Themenkomplex in meine Top 3. (bibihexe76) In addition to dismissing the possibility that the memoir might have aesthetic value, bibihexe76 reminds us that contributors to these narratives are also private citizens. Moreover, bibihexe76 emphasizes the importance of themes like forced marriage and crimes of honor in the genre’s discursive context. Other social media responses to Muslim women’s memoirs distill the problematic messages in other paratexts to pointed and sometimes blatantly xenophobic statements that identify Germany and Western Europe with Christianity, modernity, and the ability to understand and defend the natural and inherent rights of all humans. Islam, on the other hand, is often discussed as violent, sexist, backwards, and unthinking. In one review posted to the page for Mich hat keiner gefragt on amazon.de , a user with the screen name Edessa does not write a single thing about the memoir, focusing instead on Islam and the problems it has created in Germany: “Fast jede 2. Frau in deutschen Frauenhäusern ist eine Muslima. […] Trotz immer wieder vorgebrachter gegenteiliger Behauptungen von Muslimen ist die Frau im Islam dem Mann nicht gleichgestellt” (“Kundenrezensionen: Mich hat keiner gefragt ”). The reviewer then goes on to quote the Koran as evidence of her claim. In doing so, Edessa assumes religious authority and contributes to discourse equating Muslim faith with blind obedience to religious texts. Edessa reiterates the connection between Muslim faith and oppression of women, implying that a faithful Muslim adheres exactly to what is set forth in the Koran and glossing over the tradition of discussion and debate that surrounds the holy text and the practice of Muslim faith. It is perhaps ironic that Ayşe, the author of the memoir that Edessa is “reviewing” here, specified that “Islam spielte eigentlich keine Rolle” in her family (126). At the same time that many reader reviews conflate Muslim women’s memoirs with each other, with a larger narrative about the figure of the Muslim woman victim, and with a sense of moral panic about the global struggle against Islam, social media platforms have also offered some exceptional possibilities 150 Lindsay Lawton for users to publicly challenge this larger narrative and to evoke alternate social models in Muslim communities. User review pages are one of the only paratextual spaces where the connection between Muslim faith or identity and the violent oppression of women is actively and publicly disputed as part of the consumer process and made available to future potential consumers . In a comment for Sabatina James’s Sterben sollst du für dein Glück on amazon.de, a user writing as Isnija Musljija challenges the one-dimensional image of “the Muslim” by claiming a different and yet nonetheless Muslim viewpoint, asserting the existence and agency of self-identified Muslim women who neither feel oppressed nor condone violence in the name of religion: ich komme selbst aus einem islamischen background, aber bei uns geht es so überhaupt nicht zu. es macht mich krank, dass mitten in deutschland oder össterreich soetwas passieren kann, kaum zu fassen. und ich verachte menschen, die “ehrenmord” durch religion rechtfertigen. das sind keine moslems, dass sind teufelsanbeter. [sic] (“Kundenrezensionen: Sterben sollst du für dein Glück: Gefangen zwischen zwei Welten ”) Comments like Edessa’s or Musljija’s reflect the extent to which consumers consider themselves stakeholders in the familiar story of the Muslim woman victim, if not always in the specific narratives categorized as Muslim women’s memoirs. When commenters actively and consciously engage with the reception of a particular text by posting their reactions and opinions online as an extension of their purchase, they assert themselves as consumers as well as producers of the larger narratives that accompany the genre. “Producer” here means more than the creator of a material item for sale, and the above analysis of book covers, reviews, aid organizations, and social media responses shows that the product in question is more than the account of a specific author’s experiences. “Product” also refers to immaterial aspects of a thing and the interactions that take place around or because of it (Massumi 227), such as exchanges between stakeholders or the sense of collective action and belonging noted by producers and consumers of Muslim women’s memoirs. Conceptualizing the familiar story or figure of the abused Muslim woman as a product or what Massumi calls a “cultural node” (227) helps make sense of the somewhat disjointed relationship between the content of Muslim women’s memoirs and the networks that shape their discursive context. Treating the figure of the Muslim woman victim as the product also explains why the paratextual networks do not seem to “radiate out” from the more complex and diverse experiences that authors describe in their memoirs (Massumi 227). Yet it also makes the active participation of so many individuals and institutions—from authors to aid organizations to readers posting reviews on social media—in the Representations of Faith and Belonging around “Muslim” Women’s Memoirs 151 promotion and consumption of a product with such negative potential more complicated and troubling. As I have shown, book covers rely on and reinforce negative stereotypes about Muslim faith, belonging, and identity as well as the agency of Muslim women. Even the subject status of post-Muslim women is connected to their continued engagement with Islam. Reviews, print advertising, and aid organizations also obscure the unique subjectivity of authors and the diversity of their experiences, instead stoking moral panic about the threat of Islam to Germany and Western Europe. Even as social media platforms offer an opportunity for some users to challenge the dominant narrative, they also provide a venue for some of the most troubling rhetoric about a perceived global struggle against Islam. Much about the discursive context of Muslim women’s memoirs remains problematic. Since so much of it threatens to obscure the subjectivity of Muslim women, it is important to return to the authors themselves. What is at stake for them in the commodification of their experiences? If we regard the figure of the abused Muslim woman as a brand, product, or cultural node, parallels to more explicitly identity-based marketing begin to appear which can help make sense of Muslim women’s participation. Agency in the objectification and commodification of identity tends to belong primarily to the performers of that identity in such campaigns. But the gap between authors’ narratives and paratexts shows that the authors of these memoirs are not necessarily performing an identity as Muslim women victims, or even as Muslim women. Instead, the memoirs rely on the conflation of an actual, individual woman with the imaginary figure of the Muslim woman victim all the while providing opportunities for other participants in the circulation of the product to perform identities as non-Muslims and non-victims. Many authors decline to participate fully in such commodification, but the work of post-Muslim activists most clearly combines the role of native informant with that of entrepreneur. In their study of identity-based marketing in regional tourism campaigns, Comaroff and Comaroff describe similarly combined roles in the examples of a Shipibo shaman who offers “visionary consultation” for tourists and the Scotts employed by the organization “Scotland the Brand” (2-5). As native informants and survivors of Muslim violence, post-Muslim women demonstrate their agency as they claim to speak for a population of oppressed Muslim women, women who represent an otherwise inaccessible parallel world and upon whose existence they depend for their continued cultural relevance. Although post-Muslim activists’ work does not explicitly connect to any one ethnic group, it serves a purpose similar to that of Comaroff and Comaroff’s Shipibo shaman and branded Scotts in providing a glimpse into that parallel world even as they mark it as separate, distinct, and cohesive. Commodification of such stereotypes can, in some cases, 152 Lindsay Lawton provide better exposure for more complex and specific narratives: treating the familiar story of the Muslim woman victim as the product creates an opportunity for the actual content of Muslim women’s memoirs, as well as consumer responses via social media, to challenge it. While the memoirs in question here obscure or at least complicate agency, I argue that they also offer a kind of commodified identity as the basis of shared attitudes, lifestyles, and sense of belonging. The marketing of these memoirs may allow contributors to “(re)fashion identity, to (re)animate cultural subjectivity, to (re)charge collective self-awareness, to forge new patterns of sociality […] by ambiguating the distinction between producer and consumer, performer and audience” (Comaroff and Comaroff 26, emphasis original). Such an ambiguation highlights how the familiar narrative (product, cultural node) of the Muslim woman victim is instrumentalized by authors and users of social media alike, and rules out the possibility of understanding authors as simply victims—first of abusive Muslim men, then of exploitative industry professionals—or simply as producers, performing a role they know will sell to consumers who are absolutely separate from them. By enacting their own identity, “producers of culture” (here, the authors as well as other stakeholders) “objectify their own subjectivity, thus to (re)cognize its existence” (Comaroff and Comaroff 26). Much remains problematic about the marketing and consumption of these memoirs, but I argue for a more nuanced approach to the role of the authors that includes an awareness of the complexity of the roles they play and their agency even in the objectification of their own subjectivity. The ubiquity of Muslim women’s memoirs and the prominence of religion in their marketing both reference and reiterate an undefined, invisible threat of Islam to “Western civilization,” and therefore draw on existing tropes about the violent nature of the religion, the oppression of Muslim women, and the blindness or the cynicism of stereotypical Muslim faith. Although the marketing of these books depends heavily on one-dimensional concepts of “Islam” while standardizing the divergent representations of Muslim faith and belonging within the books being promoted, the ambiguity between twenty-first-century marketing and consuming opens the possibility for productive exchange among a range of stakeholders. The women whose experiences constitute the basis of such memoirs may disappear into the marketing conventions of the genre and the brand of the oppressed Muslim woman, only to reappear as less uniform in some paratextual retellings of their stories. It remains questionable whether memoirs of this type offer a true opportunity for survivors of abuse to realize their own subjectivity. But perhaps it is the pursuit of this opportunity that explains the sheer volume of paratextual content responding to the figure of the Muslim woman victim and the ideas of Muslim faith and belonging that surround her. Representations of Faith and Belonging around “Muslim” Women’s Memoirs 153 notes 1 Widely referred to in German media as a parallel world, Parallelwelt. 2 See, for example, authors Hanife Gashi or, doubly hidden by graphics and pseudonyms, Souad and Leila. 3 Schleier der Angst by Samia Shariff and Verschleppt im Jemen by Zana Muhsen. 4 Mit Migrationshintergrund may also be shifting to Pass-Deutsche (as opposed to Bio-Deutsche ). See, for example, Rennefanz 2008. 5 The fact that the 1987 census question about religion was optional and has not been repeated in the 2000 census also points to the fundamental difficulty of categorizing people by religious faith in Germany. 6 Sterben sollst du für dein Glück was originally titled Vom Islam zum Christentum: Ein Todesurteil and published by the tiny Austrian press Kleindienst Verlag. Soon after the first edition was printed, the book was licensed to Knaur Taschenbuch, a subsidiary of Droemer Knaur; the images used on the Kleindienst edition were simply rearranged for the first Knaur edition. 7 In fall of 2015, Sabatina James published her third book, Scharia in Deutschland: Wenn die Gesetze des Islam das Recht brechen. Although it is not a memoir and was published too close to the publication of this essay to fully address here, it seems to have had a similar effect on the discursive context of Muslim women’s memoirs as Buchkowsky’s or Sarrazin’s books. 8 In the case of Katja Schneidt, the unveiling is literal, if staged. It is worth noting that of all the memoirs of this narrative type which I studied for this essay, only the cover of Schneidt’s second book shows a woman in the symbolic act of unveiling herself. 9 These treaties, along with the German constitution, are also cited on the website info.zwangsheirat.de , run by Terre des Femmes as a resource for professionals dealing with forced marriage and crimes of honor. 10 Among the greatest of these challenges are questions of anonymity and authenticity also faced by the memoirs’ authors. Common knowledge though it might be, the New York Times reported in 2012 that “about one-third of all consumer reviews on the internet are fake” and consumers can rarely tell the difference (Streitfeld). Researchers have found that perfect reviews of five stars, which are critically important for sales, are likely to be the work of individuals with biases or ulterior motives: these include reviewers paid to write positive responses; biased users such as authors, publishers, and friends and family of the author; and parties otherwise invested in the book’s success (Liu; see also Mukherjee et al.). Interestingly, the risk of ratings manipulation points to their extreme importance in online book sales; 154 Lindsay Lawton otherwise, no one would go to the trouble of creating fake reviews. Online sales of books in Germany are not insignificant: in 2011, fewer than half of all books sold there were sold in brick-and-mortar stores, while Amazon alone controlled around twenty percent of the German book market after several years of exponential growth (“Amazon ist in Deutschland größer als bisher angenommen”). 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