‘The right to fall in love and kiss without consequences’: on racialized Muslim women, ‘mixed’ intimacies, and Dutch sexual exceptionalism

Abstract

ABSTRACT What does political concern with ‘mixed’ intimacies articulate about the nation? This article unpacks this question by analysing a Dutch poster campaign on self-determination, organized by the Rotterdam municipality and a feminist NGO, that visualized ‘mixed’ couples intimately kissing. It uses a visual analysis of the posters, combined with a post-structural policy analysis of a variety of documents that were essential to the production of this campaign. First, the article argues that the campaign centred on the racialized figure of the Muslim woman, problematizing her self-determination through a framework of liberal-secular notions of freedom and agency. Then, by historicizing the Dutch preoccupation with ‘mixed’ intimacies as a mode of (colonial) governance, the article accounts for how the campaign engages with particular kinds of ‘mixing’ to underscore Dutch sexual exceptionalism. The article argues the campaign can be seen as part of the contemporary configuration of the Dutch ‘Muslim Question’, mobilizing the intimate lives of racialized Muslim women to problematize Muslims as deviant populations. Overall, this article explores how representations of, and discourses on ‘mixed’ intimacies can be used as prisms to study the gendered and racialized state management of population, as well as (shifting) imaginaries of the nation in the Netherlands.