PhD Project (2002–2024): Discourses of “New Anti-Semitism” in the German Context (Research area Migration)
Rigid beliefs, passionate affiliations, and affective interpretations around what constitutes anti-Semitism turn the term’s definition into a controversy. Disagreements about definitions and their materializations are actively setting boundaries around the proper manners of talking about anti-Semitism. Since anti-Semitism discourses move around different intersections, understanding what comprises anti-Semitism in the current context of Germany requires assembling, compiling, and collation. Interchanges of gender, religion, race, nation, class, body ability and size, mobility, and territory play a pivotal role in constructing anti-Semitism discourses. Fears around the interpretation of history and current matters continuously morph anti-Semitism into different forms, leading to its instrumentalization in other discursive contexts.
This study will accommodate the need for research of the complexities of the anti-Semitism discourse, which theorizes race and religion, emphasizing queer urban online and offline spaces in Berlin. Utilizing theoretical tools such as queer necropolitics, assemblage theory, and genitality, audio/visually representable discourses around anti-Semitism, migration, and genitals would be analyzed. To question the influence of migration (of bodies, discourses, and their binary ambiguities) on religion as well as the role of religion in social trans-formations, epistemological and phenomenological perspectives will be examined.
The research is situated in the field of religion and gender studies, queer and postcolonial theory as well as migration studies. The work adopts methods from discourse analysis, visual culture studies, and transfeminism. The study’s novelty is in its approach to intersectionality, namely the proposed superimposition of religion and ability in relation to already established literature on gender, race, and nation. The research will correspond to the need within the research of migration and anti-Semitism for a critical inspection of the intricacies and nuances of the gendered and racialized discourses of religion within national belonging situated in the specifics of the German contemporary history in the broader spectrum of European kinship. Specifically, the work intends to deconstruct notions of Europeanness within rhetorics of Islamophobia and anti-Semitism representing the German racialized reflections of otherness embodied by the “Muslim” and the “Jew”.
The questions of the study, therefore, regard the relationship between race, racism, and religion in reference to embodiment, discourse, and assemblages of national belonging as well as possibilities of trans-formations and connectedness opened up by futurity.