The representations of Islam in/ and Germany’s sexual exceptionalism*

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article is inspired by Alloula and his analysis of French colonial postcards in 1986 disseminated by the French in Algeria from 1900 to 1930, where he exposes the epistemic violence emanating from the distorted representations of Algerian society by the French colonial photographers. I aim to expand Alloula’s approach, of inverting the orientalist portrayal of the ‘colonial harem’, onto the contemporary German context. Thereby, I attempt to analyse how Germany’s image of sexual freedom is contrasted with orientalist tropes of Islam, while placing a particular emphasis on how sexual freedom becomes tangible and is potentially being experienced precisely through visually representing Islam and Muslim sexuality as not just pre-modern but also anti-modern. Drawing on postcolonial, postmigrant, and feminist theory, this article delves into the dichotomies between the entanglement of Germanness, sexual exceptionalism and Islam. It aims to interrogate the notion of sexual freedom as an inherently ‘Western’ value, thus challenging existing hegemonial narratives about Islam/Muslimness in the German imagination.