Mepschen, Paul. 2009. Erotics of Persuasion. Media, Aesthetics and the Sexual Politics of Belonging. Conference paper at AISSR. (unpublished).

Erotics of persuasion Media, aesthetics, and the sexual politics of belonging WORKING PAPER Opening conference ‘Culturalization of Citizenship’, January 2009 Paul Mepschen M.Sc. Amsterdam Institute for Social science Research (AISSR) University of Amsterdam mepschen@uva.nl Among all the things that can be said about the politics of globalization and mass immigration in the Netherlands, two closely associated issues stand out: first, obviously, the rising prominence of the notion of belonging; and second, the large role played by sexuality in discourses of autochthony1 and alterity. ! Questions of belonging and alterity are central to the 'culturalization of citizenship' (Tonkens, Hurenkamp and Duyvendak 2008). This culturalization refers to the increasing problematization of cultural difference in a multicultural and multireligious society, and a growing insistence on the need to educate immigrants and their families culturally and morally, 'integrate' them as citizens in the Dutch national (moral) community, and thus mold them into assimilated citizens. As Verkaaik puts it: "[F]ull Dutch citizenship is not merely a legal status, but also comes with a certain acceptance of ‘Dutch norms and values’ and a certain level of integration in ‘Dutch culture’" (2008, 1). As 'culture' is not a given but a process constantly 'in the making', invented and reinvented, resisted and appropriated, it needs come as no surprise that the culturalization of citizenship is accompanied by controversy and conflict about competing cultural discourses and perspectives on moral citizenship and moral order. ! The politics of culturalization are thus played out by various social actors in the 1 The Dutch term 'autochtoon' has become ever more current in the Netherlands and Flanders, and in the debate about immigration and citizenship refers to citizens who belong to the national community, who are, so to speak, 'linked to the soil'. Its counterpart, 'allochtoon', refers to immigrants and their families and communities. In Anglo-American academia, the term autochthony refers to "a particularly pregnant expression of the local [...] 'to be born from the soil'" which "seems to be the most authentic form of belonging" (Geschiere i.p.). See Geschiere (i.p.) for a comparative approach to autochthony, citizenship and exclusion in Africa and Europa. 1 media and the public sphere, in civil society, and in the sphere of 'official' (state) politics. These different actors put forward conflicting views of citizenship, contrasting cultural canons, and competing ideas of ideal moral conduct, and set out to persuade citizens of the desirability and authenticity of their articulations of cultural identity and heritage. To add to the troublesome conundrum emerging here, these processes take place in a time marked by "dialectics of flow and closure" (Meyer and Geschiere 1999), which refer to the "way globalization goes together with frantic attempts toward closure" (Geschiere and Nyamnjoh 2000, 425). On the one hand, it seems to have become increasingly difficult to persuade people to adhere to fixed identities and notions of citizenship, to identify with any cultural heritage and perspective in a fixed or static way. On the other hand, as Arjun Appadurai says, globalization reinforces the already existing, characteristic, instability of identity, which is subject to "constant reinterpretation and adaptation" and hence produces ever more "drastic efforts towards clarification and ultimate forms of 'identification'" (Meyer and Geschiere 1999: 10-11). It is in this state of flux in which a radical politics of belonging seems to have emerged in Dutch society, marked by ever more insistent efforts to persuade members of the many different diasporic communities in the country to 'feel at home' in the Netherlands - and in the Netherlands only; and to become loyal citizens bound to the soil and to the moral values of a reinvented but unstable nationalism. But there are other, possibly competing, aspects to the politics of belonging as well, as is for instance shown by the 'religionization' of part of the Muslim community (see De Koning 2008; Eade 1996), as well as by the development of other alternative, often hybrid, identities: transnational and urban, communal and local, generational and gendered, religious and socio-political.2 ! Not unlike other modern nations, the Dutch national community has always been a conflicted and contested space, as is shown by the history of Dutch 2 The present era of new technologies and the mass mediation of identities and cultural repertoires is marked by the creation of hybrid combinations of identities. Johan Főrnass, for instance, speaks of youthnicity to refer to combinations of religious and ethnic repertoires with elements of youth culture (see De Koning 2008). 2 'pillarization' (Van Rooden 1999). The fact that different cultural canons and moral convictions compete to be recognized as attractive and desirable, authentic and real, is not a new phenomenon. In the past, Dutch national identity competed with Roman Catholicism as a partly conflicting cultural and ideological universe, demanding extra-national loyalties, and characterized by modes of governance and politics of moral order that were not automatically congruous with the demands of the nationstate and national identity. The idea of the modern nation-state as based on one common and shared culture must, in other words, be dismissed as an illusion, even if that is exactly what the prophets of new Dutch nationalism argue today. Nevertheless, globalization and diaspora do increase and reinforce the hybrid character and heterogeneity of our life worlds. Common understanding does not appear naturally. Homogeneity can only be artificially produced: it is "an achievement, attained (if at all) at the end of a long and tortuous labor of argument and persuasion and in strenuous competition with an indefinite number of other potentialities" (Bauman 2000: 14). Hence Appadurai's warning that globalization reinforces the instability of identity - and may thus lead to violence (Appadurai 1999). Globalization is accompanied by the rise of new media technologies, like the Internet; it is an age marked by the mass mediation of various competing sources of meaning and belonging, ideologies, cultural canons, which people can critique and appropriate, resist or adhere to in a radically changing public landscape. National identity as a mass mediated source of cultural meaning constitutes only one of the available options. ! Nationalism is nevertheless an important source of cultural identity, well placed in the dynamics of power. The dialectics of different cultural perspectives and articulations take place within a context of unequal power dynamics. The state, in its local and national manifestations, plays a central role in the reinvention and promotion of Dutch national identity and citizenship, and the same is true for several leading public intellectuals and other players in different, often still under-researched 3 forms of, media.3 These social actors set out to invest the cultural canon of 'Dutchness' with desirability and 'realness', authenticity. Thus, while the nation-state has certainly lost its 'naturalness' in these transnational times, its mediation as a sexy and authentic cultural option as well as its well-placed position in the dynamics of power and its prominence in the politics of the imagination, makes its proponents into important players in the 'game of culturalization'. To paraphrase Bauman, a tortuous labor is necessary to persuade people to accept this reinvented national identity as authentic and truthful. There is every reason, therefore, to assume that the present preoccupation with belonging, autochthony and alterity will be with us for a while. As Lechner argues, nations "are tough and [...] resilient units not likely to be transcended" (2008, 54) because they are "always under re-imagination by modern means, evolving along complex paths, nevertheless stubbornly stuck in [their] discursive ways, and putting up, so to speak, a brave face and good fight in dealing with globalization" (Ibid.). This is certainly true for the Netherlands, which has been characterized by the revival of the nation, of national identity and national pride, and by an increasing annoyance and frustration with the culture and moral convictions of the nation's Others. ! Citizenship is thus a contested issue in the Netherlands. The state and several public players put forward a 'rewritten', reconstructed national narrative and are competing with several alternative cultural perspectives, repertoires, and identities, as well as with the forces of 'creolization', hence the development of new, mixed up, 'postmodern', hybrid identities, which produce cultural and moral universes and repertoires that do not easily fit any canon of cultural heritage. These hybrid, temporary, mixed up versions of citizenship and belonging, disparate sources of meaning, compete with more fixed cultural canons - recall, we spoke of flow and closure - on a 'marketplace of cultural meaning'. Like products sold on actual markets - concrete or abstract - cultural canons need to persuade, to allure, and to 3 I am thinking for instance of the influence of websites and weblogs on the Internet and the many discussions about all kinds of current topics taking place there. Most popular seem to be websites and blogs offered by right-leaning media like the populist daily Telegraaf and the conservative weekly Elsevier, as well as the independent GeenStijl. Discussions and debates in these corners of the public sphere tend to have alterity and autochthony as focus points. 4 pervert to catch the public eye. They are like commodities, invested with desire. The competition between different sources of meaning makes it necessary for actors to saturate cultural canons with an aura of desirability and truthfulness. To persuade citizens to embrace a reinvented Dutch nationalism, of which the moral universe of liberal secularism and an ideology of neoliberal subjectivity are framed as the characteristic elements, the newly invented and constructed notion of Dutch national identity was embellished with sex and desire. At work have been, at least since the astonishing rise of the great sexualizer of the new right in the Netherlands, Pim Fortuyn, erotics of persuasion. Media, aesthetics and desire The study of culture has developed into an art of deconstruction, of unveiling the mystified character of essentialist and naturalizing universalisms, of the repudiation of popular and social scientific pursuits of 'an authentic core', that is often assumed can be found at the heart of the cultures and identities of Others. Culture is the product of history, not of nature; it is a process, not a given; and what we tend to experience as natural and real is never completely of our own making, even when we would - but we seldom do - feel completely in control of our own lives. The 'real' is a product of history, social structure, discourse, the imagination. ! This perspective is complicated by the question of how the historical subject fits into these theories. As Alex Callinicos argues from a Marxist perspective, history is "not a process without a subject" (Callinicos 2004). Jean and John Comaroff argue for a dialectical approach, and point out there is a "dialectics of culture and consciousness, of convention and invention" (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991, 9). Agency, they say, is not merely structure in the active voice [....] Social practice has effects that sometimes remake the world [...] it cannot therefore be dissolved into society or culture [....] Human agency is practice invested with subjectivity, meaning, and to a greater or lesser extent 5 power. It is, in short, motivated. (Ibid: 10). The notion of agency may help explain why it is that contrary to anthropological theory, people tend to view their identities and life worlds as real, and surely not as 'constructed'. The question is how people "transcend the constructedness of their life worlds" (Van de Port 2004, 9). How they make choices in a world marked by a plethora of cultural meaning. How are people persuaded to adhere to a certain canon of cultural truth, while they leave others aside, and sometimes even actively oppose other cultural perspectives? How, for instance, can we explain the relative success of a reconstructed national identity in the Netherlands, which invents the Dutch as hyper-modern, ! tolerant, secular, autonomous, (neo)liberal individuals? Understanding the role of sexuality in framing the nation as an attractive cultural alternative may help us understand the entanglement of the politics of belonging with those of desire. I propose therefore to turn our attention to the erotics of persuasion, to the role of media and aesthetics in the sexualization of national identity in the Netherlands. The notion is inspired by Birgit Meyer's aesthetics of persuasion (see Meyer 2006). Meyer's concept, which she applies to explain the appeal of religion, exceeds the understanding of aesthetics as referring to 'the beautiful' in the artistic sense (Meyer 2006, 18) and refers instead to "Aristotle's notion of aisthesis, which is understood as organizing 'our total sensory experience of the world and our sensitive knowledge of it" (Ibid., 19). Sensational forms, mass mediated religious images, are incorporated and embodied by their beholders. These forms invoke and perpetuate shared experiences, emotions and affects that are anchored in a taken-for-granted sense of self and community, indeed a common sense that is rarely subject to questioning exactly because it is grounded in shared perceptions and sensations. Common sense is what gets under the skin, enveloping us in the assurance 'this is what really is'. Sensational forms produce a "holistic sensorial experience, shared among a broader 6 community and thus overcoming the Zerstreuung that marks the modern world [....] In this way, religious experience can evoke a feeling of 'authentic belonging' in the midst of a world that seems to be fragmenting" (Geschiere i.p.). I propose to see if we can transfer this approach "from the field of religious studies to understanding the appeal of alternative forms of belonging, like autochthony" (Ibid.). In other words, I want to appropriate the concept to research and analyze the deep emotional impact of Dutch nationalism and the large role played by sexuality in producing an emotional sense of belonging. Sexuality, I hypothesize, invests the notion of Dutchness with an aura of desirability and brings the nation in close range of the senses. It redeems, so to speak, the deeply felt need in present society, to 'really', authentically, experience community; to hence experience belonging 'sensationally'. To analyze this process we turn our attention to the sensory regimes of the discourses and practices that produce Dutchness, to the mass mediation of images and discourses that appeal to the senses and the body and "induce a particular sense of the self and one's being in the world - if you wish: a particular identity" (Meyer 2006, 22). We then should be able to analyze how Dutch subjectivity is produced "by a structured process [...] in which the senses are called upon and tuned in a way that yields a habitus" (Ibid.). A taken for granted sense of relating to self and community develops, a common sense, in which (sexual) tolerance, autonomy and freedom become viewed as the unique qualities of being Dutch and modern. This common sense develops because it rests upon a shared sensorial experience: on the mass mediation of images and discourses and on embodied performances of Dutchness by public figures (like Pim Fortuyn); by 'ordinary people' (like participants in the Gay Pride and other public and mass mediated national rituals); as well as by the state (through pronouncements and policies of politicians; through the invention of naturalization courses and ceremonies; and through the invention of all kinds of measures to mold deviance into compliance). A common denominator in these images, discourses, performances, and rituals, is the notion of sexuality. 7 Sex and the Dutch self Sexual politics have become increasingly entangled with identity, belonging and alterity, with the crisis of the nation-state, and with the dialectic of secular and religious that is one of the central markers of Dutch society today. Jean and John Comaroff go as far as to argue that sexuality has come "to stand, metonymically, for the inchoate forces that threaten the world as we know it" (2000, 305). If we turn our attention to Dutch society, the Comaroffs certainly seem to have a point. Public debate about immigration and especially Islam, increasingly central topics in the public sphere since the early 1990's, is saturated with sex and sexuality. Sexuality has given shape and direction to a 'sexual reconstruction' of national identity, and to the fixing of boundaries between selves and others, between those who belong and those who do not. This is especially true for the question of homosexuality. In the debate about Islam in Dutch society, the politics of homosexuality have increasingly been instrumentalized as a marker of Dutchness, and simultaneously of (Islamic) alterity. While Muslims were increasingly criticized for not embracing sexual tolerance, and represented as homophobic, traditional, and backward, homosexuality was mobilized as the hallmark of what it means to be Dutch and modern today. This functioned as a grounding for the reinvention of Dutch national identity as postreligious (secular), 'tolerant', modern, and (neo)liberal. Sexuality offered up a language to speak about the Dutch nation and national identity in these terms. ! It needs come as no surprise that in these times of social, political, cultural, and phenomenological instability, which evoke burning questions about citizenship, identity and moral order, sexuality has come to play a central role. In the past, sexuality was intimately entangled with the constitution of modernity, the construction of the modern Self and the fixing and 'civilizing' of the Other (see Mosse 1985; Foucault 1990; Van der Veer 2001). The sexual and gendered discourses of bourgeois society produced the modern moral universe of the nation through the enforcement of "the ideal of respectability", which came to characterize the style of life of the middle classes (Mosse 1985, 4). "Through respectability, they sought to 8 maintain their status and self-respect against both the lower classes and the aristocracy" (Ibid., 4-5). Central the the ideal of respectability were ideals of manliness, reinforcing the division of labor and insisting on the need for men to restrain themselves, and women, sexually (Mosse 1985, 25; Van der Veer 2001, 83 -105). This moral universe was strictly heterosexual. Homosexuals - the ultimate sexual Others - were "not only thought to symbolize the confusion of the sexes, but also sexual excess - the violation of a delicate balance of passion" (Mosse 1985, 25). The place of homosexuality in the modern world was thus characterized by the subordination to heterosexual normativity. Homosexuality was the object of study and of political and religious constraint and repression. This subordination was a central aspect of the modern Dutch nation-state, as it was of all modern nationalisms - the nowadays popular discourse of a Dutch 'heritage of tolerance' notwithstanding. The relationship between heterosexuality and homosexuality was maintained by repressive practices and discourses, in which the homosexual was represented and produced as a deviant, sick, criminal, Other. ! In the present constellation, sexuality again plays a central role in the production of nationality and modernity. I will focus on homosexuality here, which has become the hallmark of the Dutch nation's moral righteousness, and helped produce the nation's Other, the Muslim, by allocating him or her a position outside of the dominant moral order. Homosexuality gained prominence in the Dutch politics of belonging after the El Moumni-affair of May 2001, when an imam of Moroccan descent working in Rotterdam, Khalil El-Moumni, stated that homosexuality was a dangerous disease threatening civilization on national television. Homosexuality, the imam argued, was contagious and therefore formed a threat to reproduction, and hence to the very fabric of society. The weekly Vrij Nederland claimed that in a sermon El-Moumni had taken it a step further and had called Europeans inferior to pigs and dogs because at least in the animal world homosexuality did not exist. But ElMoumni has always denied having made the latter remarks. ! The classic patriarchal views of the imam were fuel for intense moral 9 commotion. 4 El-Moumni had collided upon some of the cultural cornerstones of the national community. The dominant self-image of the Dutch was that they were tolerant, free, and diverse (Duyvendak en Hurenkamp 2004, 10). The particularist influence of religion was thought to be contained to the private sphere. El-Moumni's views were perceived as an assault on the very fabric of what it meant to be Dutch and modern. Several participants argued that El-Moumni made abundantly clear that Islam was 'completely incompatible' with Dutch society. ! The focus was on the 'conflict of values' that was at play. The Dutch minister of 'city-affairs', Rogier van Boxtel, a member of a small, strongly secularist, liberaldemocratic current in Dutch politics (D66), put El-Moumni and other imams on the sport during a session in which 'Dutch values were explained'. He and others stated that the possibility of legal action against the imam should not be excluded. Gert Hekma recalls that the prime-minister used "the full 10 minutes of his weekly interview on the 11 May to tell Muslims to respect Dutch tolerance of homosexuality", although he clearly had trouble speaking about the subject in public. ! The religious views of Muslims were framed, in the public sphere, as dichotomously opposed to the tradition of tolerance in the Netherlands. The liberal daily NRC Handelsblad, the daily paper read by intellectuals, asked: "Homosexuality is tolerated in the Netherlands. Should the role of imams not be to promote tolerance and acceptance?"5 In a poll on the website of the Gay Krant, a mainstream gay and lesbian monthly, 91 percent of respondents agreed with the statement that "newcomers should tolerate our tolerance or should leave" (Prins 2002, 15). Full-time columnist Sylvain Ephimenco published 'a letter to El-Moumni' in which he called Islam a sickness.6 The affair was thus framed as an expression of 'the opposition' between Dutch tolerance and Muslim intolerance, a discourse in which 4 See Hekma (2002) for one of the few assessments of the El Moumni-affair form a social scientific point of view. Van der Veer (2006) touches lightly upon the affair in his assessment of the politics of tolerance in the Netherlands. NRC Handelsblad, May 9, 2001. As everywhere in this article when a source in Dutch is translated into English, the translation is my own. Groene Amsterdammer, June 9, 2001. 5 6 10 homosexuality was represented as a characteristic element of Dutch culture, while the views of Muslims were displayed as the expression of exactly the opposite. The uncritical reader could begin to think that homophobia was something alien to Dutch culture. Muslims and their sexual and cultural politics came to be described as increasingly problematic to the Dutch tradition of tolerance. Even authors who were critical of simplistic views of a homogeneous Islam, like the chairman of the Christian-Democratic party, Marnix van Rij, referred to Dutch values and traditions of tolerance when they participated in the debate.7 ! Muslim homophobia was thus represented in an essentialist, a-historical way and framed as evidence of the 'clash of civilizations'. The discursive genre emerging in the debate was an appropriation of an ideological construct in which Islam was diametrically opposed to Western, liberal modernity, of which 'tolerance' was one characteristic element. An important aspect in this genre was the representation of Muslim homophobia in a temporal manner: while the Dutch culture of tolerance towards homosexuals was 'modern', the ideas of El-Moumni could only be found in "the Middle-Age deserts of Northern Africa", as one commentator in the populist and widely read daily De Telegraaf put it.8 Another crucial aspect in the construction of a discourse of Islam as incongruent with modern Dutch values was the insistence on the liberal character of Dutch society. Tolerance towards homosexuality was promoted as a hallmark of liberalism. Twelve prominent homosexual members of the Amsterdam branch of the largest political party in the liberal continuity in the Netherlands (VVD) published a pamphlet titled "We want to live in freedom and without fear as well"9, in which they argued that the principles of liberalism were threatened and the basic values of Dutch society undermined. ! The dichotomy between the Dutch nation-state on the one hand, represented as modern, secular, and tolerant, and Muslim communities, viewed as representing 7 8 9 Trouw, May 16, 2001. Telegraaf, May 8, 2001. Algemeen Dagblad, November 2, 2001. 11 opposite values, on the other remained a basic discursive grounding throughout the debate about Islam, which exploded after September 11 and the remarkable rise of Pim Fortuyn. In the months after the attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon gay dandy/publicist/politician Fortuyn became the political leader of a new, populist political movement in the Netherlands which emerged out of the crisis of traditional politics, and of social democracy (Labor) and mainstream liberalism, a conservative to centrist political current in the Netherlands represented by the before mentioned VVD, in particular. Fortuyn, whose development from a professor in Marxist sociology to a populist politician with a neoliberal, anti-establishment, antiimmigration platform has been widely chronicled10 , had put forward a modernist anti-Islam discourse in his books and columns in the right-wing weekly Elsevier for years. Fortuyn attacked the established political right for not peddling on the widespread annoyance of and frustration with refugees and immigrants. Fortuyn wanted to close the borders for asylum seekers and represented Muslims as threatening to the hard-won freedoms of the Dutch (Van der Veer 2004, 115). As Peter van der Veer argued: Fortuyn was vocal especially in the defense of individual sexual freedom, and his public gay identity enabled him perfectly to take up the defense of Dutch progressive sexual politics against Islamic tradition. Asylum seekers, foreign immigrants, and especially Islam as a backward religion represented threats to the Dutch way of life, and it was time to be proud of our advanced nation and defend it. (2004, 115) Fortuyn sexualized the classic modernist discourse of the Muslim as Other and helped publicize and politicize popular representations of Islamic conceptions of homosexuality. In 1997, Fortuyn had published a book on Islam that was not well received at the time, because it is was considered racist and "grist to the mill of the 10 See, for instance, Fortuyn's biography (2002). For an elegant assessment of Fortuyn's personal and political history, see Bosscher (2004). For an approach to Fortuyn's politics and influence in Dutch political arena see Pels (2003) and Buruma (2006). 12 far right"11. The book argued in favor of a revival of Dutch national pride and a more vivid and lively nationalism as a counterweight to the influence of Islam. In the world after September 11 these views became far less marginal quickly, and were even embraced by several public intellectuals and especially by a growing number of Dutch citizens to whom Fortuyn had become a star. In 2001, the book was reprinted and was much better received. ! I agree with Baukje Prins when she argues: "Fortuyn [...] did not so much break with previous approaches to multicultural society as radicalize a genre of discourse that at the time of his arrival on the political scene, had already gained considerable respectability" (2002: 364). Prins argues that Fortuyn's way of speaking about the Muslim as Other was not new. The genre of speaking Prins refers to here is what she calls 'new realism', of which Fortuyn was the "consummate champion" (2002, 366). New realism emerged in the late 1980's and was developed by the conservative liberal Frits Bolkestein in the 1990's and the publicist Paul Scheffer in 2000. It represents a new approach to immigrants and multicultural society and criticizes previously dominant approaches to ("genres of speaking about") immigrants and their cultures. Prins sums up the characteristic elements of new realist discourse (2002: 368-9). First of all, proponents of new realism claim they are 'truthful' about issues others cover up or which are actively silenced. Second, new realists claim they speak for 'ordinary people'. According to Bolkestein in the nineties as well as to Fortuyn some years later, the controversial views they were notorious for were widely accepted in 'common' circles. Like Fortuyn, Bolkestein boosted he was in touch with ordinary people, whose problems and preoccupations needed to be taken seriously.12 11 12 Trouw, February 14, 1997. Bolkestein never problematized this concept of 'the ordinary'. His party and the economically liberal politics it advertized have certainly never been associated with lower- or working class folk. In new realist discourse, ordinary people are almost always native, white 'Dutch' people. Immigrants and/or Muslims tend to be the object of complaint, policy and refashioning: objects instead of subjects of politics. In his recent study of the Netherlands, Buruma quotes Bolkestein saying: "You should never underestimate how deeply Moroccan and Turkish immigrants are hated by the Dutch. My political success rests upon the fact that I have listened to these feelings" (Buruma 2006: 58). 13 ! The third defining element of new realism is that new realists define themselves as typically Dutch. "[R]ealism is a characteristic feature of national Dutch identity: being Dutch equals being frank, straightforward, and realistic" (Prins 2002: 369). To conclude, the fourth feature is new realists' opposition to the political left. This feature of new realist discourse is crucial because the ideology of having to break the power of the 'left elite' links Dutch secularism with new realist ideology. Fortuyn, in fact, invented the term that embodies this link: 'the left church'. He used that term to refer to what he considered to be the old-fashioned, 'well-meant' politics of the left: the insistence on multiculturalism and the welfare state, which Fortuyn consistently compared to the Stalinist regimes of the past. Fortuyn also insisted that the left church consisted of an elite which determined the limits of acceptable speech through a politics of official anti-racism. ! The 'left church' became a popular term during the months of Fortuyn's rise in the public and political sphere. When he was killed in May 2002, blame was immediately assigned to the 'left church', which, the argument went, had demonized Fortuyn by associating him with fascism and far-right politics and had in this way created the atmosphere that legitimized murder. 'The bullet came from the left' was a popular slogan at the time. The use of the discursive construct of the left church points to the close association of new realism with secularism. To Fortuyn and most other new realists, the left represented a politics of the past. And although Fortuyn adhered to Catholicism in kind of a postmodern way, modern religion was viewed as something of the past as well. As Van Rooden argues, Dutch churches had simply not managed to transform Christianity into a commodity on the cultural market, making the church hopelessly old-fashioned in the era of mass-consumption. 13 Van der Veer (2006) points out that the piety of many Muslims reminded the Dutch too much of what they had recently left behind: religion. Muslims, says Van der Veer, came to stand for the theft of enjoyment, a remark that hits the spot when it comes to Fortuyn 13 Moore (1994) shows that religion took a whole other trajectory in the United States, where it was transformed into a commodity on the cultural marketplace. 14 to whom 'enjoyment' was a constitutive element of his public performance and politics. Of all the things that can be said about the left church, the most important seems to be that it unveils the meaning of Dutch secularism for the reinvention of autochthony and national identity. The fact that Fortuyn was buried in a huge cathedral in Rotterdam does not change the fact that he was first of all a secular phenomenon - the funeral showed Fortuyn's taste for theater, and it made abundantly clear, once again, that the dichotomy of religious and secular is a too simplistic model for understanding the dynamics of religion and secularism in contemporary society. Buruma shows this beautifully and unveils the close links between the politics of desire and religion when he quotes Fortuyn, in an interview in 1999: I don't mean to be blasphemous [...] but I must say that I find elements of the atmosphere of the catholic liturgy in certain practices in the darkroom [....] The darkroom that I visit in Rotterdam is not completely blacked out, the light comes in filtered, like in an old cathedral. [...] Religiosity and 'fusion' - which one reaches in sex sometimes - can be two sides of the same medal... Moreover, the darkroom is erotically exciting, definitely. More exciting than the church? That's not what I am saying. It was very exciting to be an altar boy as well, to be sure; let's judge everything on its merits. (Buruma 2006, 51) ! Fortuyn's death in May 2002 evoked an enormous amount of emotion in the Netherlands, that we have only begun to understand. It is crucial that his rise in the political sphere was accompanied by a huge popularization and mass mediation of his persona and politics in the public sphere. Fortuyn was literally everywhere in the landscape of media, on television, in papers, on the Internet, and in the books he had published over the years that were dusted of or republished and sold massively. Fortuyn was sacralized even before his death, and that his dramatic murder reinforced and intensified this sacralization. To give one example: in 2002 I was a student working a part-time job in a book store with a large number of second hand 15 books and publisher's remainders.14 We sold a large number of Fortuyn's books, as we had done for years, quite cheaply, in both departments of the store. The books, which as far as I recall had never been very popular and were even a little untouchable as their design was exceptionally unattractive, suddenly sold like warm cakes. And somehow, the buying and selling of Pim Fortuyn's books acquired, even in the few months before his death, when he was becoming more and more popular, a sense of profoundness, and - as he was a controversial figure - of profanity at the same time. The buying and selling of Fortuyn's books was almost always accompanied by this profundity on the one hand, and a certain tensed feeling, anxiety, on the other. To the buyers, acquiring such a book seemed to be an act of political deviance. Fortuyn was after all an outcast in the political arena, criticized as an extremist, a far rightist, even a fascist. A large amount of people in Rotterdam, which was Fortuyn's home as well as the birth place of his political movement, seemed to identify with this role of the outcast. They would always make some kind of comment on Fortuyn's politics, and especially on the issues of immigration, refugees, and multiculturalism. People seemed to recognize themselves in Fortuyn's views on these issues, and felt legitimized by him. If the famous professor agreed with them, surely their views could no longer be dismissed as lacking importance, as racist views that could easily be dismissed as alien to the dominant moral order. To employees in the shop, however, often left-leaning (former) students like myself, the trade of Fortuyn's works also contained more meaning than the simple, repetitive, daily act of selling a couple of books would suggest. The trade became invested with politics. The remarks of customers, and Fortuyn's political prominence in general, became sources of furious discussions during coffee- and lunch-breaks in the shop's canteen. ! After Fortuyn's dramatic death the sacralization of his discourse and persona became much more intense, especially but not uniquely, in Rotterdam. In the book 14 What follows is not based on structured ethnographic research, but on what I would like to call an 'everyday ethnography'. I propose to look at ethnography as a way of being in the world. I made these observations as 'an active subject', an individual who was part of the society described here and a participant in the debates and struggles and anxieties this paper deals with. 16 shop we had a regular customer who was a staunch supporter of Fortuyn, and who would often try to start discussing politics when visiting the store. My regular workdays were Friday and Sunday and for a period of time after Fortuyn had been murdered I saw this customer coming in every week to ask if we had acquired any new books by or on Fortuyn. Obviously, at one point he must have had obtained all of Fortuyn's books and I was even pretty sure that he was buying some of them more than once. Colleagues agreed with me that something funny was going on, and I couldn't help but ask the customer if he hadn't read all of Fortuyn's books by now. Interestingly, he answered that he wasn't much of a reader, and that he already knew what was in the books anyway, as he had personal experience with what Fortuyn was talking about. After which he enlightened me on the maliciousness of multiculturalism. The customer was, in other words, a collector of Fortuyn's sacred texts, without really reading them but instead appropriating the mass mediated forms that Fortuyn's image and discourse took. Fortuyn's books, so it seemed, had acquired a kind of aesthetics that surpassed the 'normal' intellectual relation of readers to the books they read. ! Fortuyn's views dominated not only debate in the book shop I worked in, but in all of society for months. I was a staunch celebrator of gay night life at the time and visited several gay establishments in both Amsterdam and Rotterdam on a regular basis. Fortuyn and his politics were an extremely popular subject of chatter and sometimes furious discussion. Fortuyn was extremely popular among many gay men, and I remember very serious grief and anger among some after Fortuyn was killed. Fortuyn embodied not only the modern homosexual who made no secret of his sexuality - who was in fact loud and proud about it - gays also recognized themselves in Fortuyn's role of a social outcast. And simultaneously, Fortuyn represented the entry of the outcast into the national community for a group of people, homosexuals, who had never completely belonged. Fortuyn, who was immensely popular not only among gays, but especially among many heterosexual 'ordinary people' and in this way continued a longer tradition of popular gay public 17 figures in the world of performance, embodied a 'return to the soil'. That longing, to be admitted into the autochthonous community, is a continuum among gays that partly defines their relation to a heteronormative surrounding, and may very well explain some gay men's obsessions with the Dutch queen and Dutch folk music.15 ! The primacy of Fortuyn in the public sphere after his death could be observed in many other corners of society. Especially Internet discussion forums and the free daily papers that were a relatively new phenomenon in Dutch society at the time, opening up access to news, opinions, images, and participation in the public sphere to new groups of people, seemed to be very important here. Once again, sexuality was at the core of the mass mediated discourses and images, sensational forms, during the rise and death of Fortuyn. First of all, this was the result of Fortuyn's public image as the representation of the sexual tolerance he boosted was a characteristic element of Dutch autochthony and of modernity. Fortuyn not only presented tolerance to homosexuality as a defining element of autochthonous culture and as a reason for wanting to belong in the Netherlands, he also pointed out, repetitiously, that intolerance to public sexuality and to homosexuality was characteristic to Islam and the Muslim community. Moreover, Fortuyn was not alone in arguing that the presence of Muslims in society evoked a sense of discomfort, of not feeling at home. He said: "[...] I am not just a 'Christian dog' (christenhond), but I am also considered less than a pig. Well, you can have a go at people like that [....] Islam is retarded, I am just going to say it like it is, it is a retarded culture [....] I am not planning on starting all over again with the emancipation of women and homosexuals."16 Fortuyn also spoke of a feeling of alienation when seeing Muslim women wearing a headscarf in the streets. Views and feelings echoed, but also resisted, reduced, and appropriated, by others in society, on hundreds of Internet forums, in everyday conversations, around the dinner table, and in social, political, 15 See Van de Port 1999 for a look at the appropriation of Portuguese fado singer Amália, by Portuguese gay men, after her death who declared Amalia 'to be theirs', which can be understood as a strategy to gain access to a national community they were excluded from. Volkskrant, February 9, 2002 16 18 and cultural organizations. Moreover, Fortuyn was certainly not the only one playing a central role in the radical and sexual reinvention of national identity, or embodying these new notions of Dutchness. After Fortuyn was killed that role was taken over, less flamboyantly but still effectively, by other public figures and opinion leaders, 'producers of sensational forms'. Many of them, like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Hafid Bouazza, and Afshin Ellian, were, interestingly, from a Muslim background, which points to an important aspect of Dutch national discourse: the focus on the need to 'make a radical break with the past'. Sexuality once again plays a central role in this discourse of rupture. ! Ayaan Hirsi Ali, for instance, was a liberal member of parliament, a former asylum seeker originally from a Muslim-family in Somalia, who had transformed into a symbol of Dutch liberalism and one of the strongest proponents of anti-Islamic discourse. The oppression of women and homosexuals in Islam could only be halted by the 'complete assimilation' of Muslims to Western culture. The road to freedom of homosexuals and freedom from homophobia was complete assimilation to modern and secular Dutch culture. Whereas Western modernity was governed by individualism and the rule of law, and a secular and democratic constitution protecting the rights of (individual) citizens, Muslims were governed by religious dogmas, the Koran, organized religion, and communal pressure. The result was a backwardness of Muslims that was shown by the aversion to homosexuality. The only way out of that backwardness was a break with the past..Hirsi Ali, of course, herself embodied such a radical break, the transformation from a religious subject to the free, autonomous individual of Western modernity. ! Several other public figures expressed similar approaches to Islam. The literary author Hafid Bouazza said, in a public lecture, that lecturing on Islam and homosexuality was a joke. "There is only one thing Islam has to say about homosexuality: 'it is forbidden'". He argued that Dutch civilization was under siege and in need of being defended. "It is the survival of a valuable civilization that is at stake, Dutch civilization. This should be respected. If not, the Netherlands will slide 19 off into a nightmare from which it is impossible to wake up." Another public intellectual who could claim personal experience with Islam in the past was Afshin Ellian, a former refugee from Iran who was a professor of law in Leiden, and a wellknown columnist. Ellian criticized what he defined as the lenient relativism of the Dutch state when it came to Islam. In response to the El-Moumni-affair he stated: 'Do we want to make Muslims into citizens, on the basis of the Dutch constitution? Or do we want them to become citizens of a political Islam that violates human rights."17 ! All three authors thus put forward a 'clash of civilizations'-approach to the place of Islam in Dutch society and evoked the question of sexuality to make their points. Islam was presented as incongruent with Dutch civilization, with modernity, and with the demands of modern citizenship. A complete break with the past seemed to be the only solution. This ideology of a complete break with the past, of rupture, unveils conspicuous similarities between Dutch modernist and secularist discourse and pentecostalist ideology in Ghana. Birgit Meyer argues that pentecostalists emphasize "the necessity to break away from local traditions" (1998, 317). Notions of rupture and an appeal to time as an epistemological category, argues Meyer, enable pentecostalists to "draw a rift between 'us' and 'them', 'modern' and 'traditional'" (Ibid.). In this way, pentecostalism takes up the discourse of modernity. Both pentecostalism and Dutch secularism emphasize the necessity of rupture. In Ghanian pentecostalism, "the emphasis on rupture serves very much as a temporalizing strategy - a 'denial of coevalness' (Fabian 1983), so to speak - through which persons with whom one actually shares time and space are represented as backward, as not deserving a place in the modern world" (Meyer 1998, 329). ! The similarities with Dutch modernist ideology are striking. It is no accident that sexuality offers such a transparent idiom to popularize and mediate modernist views of boundaries between those who belong and those who do not, between modernity and tradition, individualism and community. Modernist discourses insist that only a complete break with Islam, with the past, the 'traditional' community, can make a 17 Trouw, February 2, 2002 20 person 'free', autonomous, and modern. Critics of Islam like Hirsi Ali, Ellian, and Bouazza, themselves embody this radical break, this rupture. But is not the modern homosexual, the product of 'coming out', the embodiment par excellence of a radical break with the past, with tradition, community, and family? Is, in fact, the modern homosexual not the pinnacle of modernity, as Judith Butler suggests, in the sense that he is the representation of the autonomous, self-fashioning, subject, free of particularist and traditional influence? While ideals of autonomy and self-fashioning may rest on an illusion, they are framed and mediated as authentic aspects of modern Dutch identity. Homosexuality, which symbolizes the nation's moral superiority, in this way comes to constitute the antithesis of the idea of Muslims as traditional Others, colonized by Scripture, community and family. ! In a world in which homosexuality remains to be conceived, dominantly, as deviant, 'sick', or criminal, it is almost inconceivable that it manages to acquire such an important role in the imagination of the national community. In the Netherlands, gay rights are not only an official element of state policy, sexuality has become part of the way the state tries to promote autochthony and make immigrants into moral citizens. A clear example is offered by the Dutch naturalization procedure. The socalled naturalization exam, immigrant's ticket into the realm of citizenship, is prepared by taking language courses and courses on moral and cultural 'traditions'. Two of the things immigrants get to see in an educational film are images of a topless woman on the beach, and of homosexual men kissing. The topless woman and the kissing men thus come to stand for the nation's moral righteousness and are transformed into "border fetishes" (Spyer 1998), in the sense that they articulate and perform difference, by constituting national identity and producing and marking the boundary with Others. Judith Butler, who problematizes "state discourse that seeks to produce distinct notions of sexual minorities and distinct communities of new immigrants within a temporal trajectory that makes Europe and its state apparatus into the avatar of both freedom and modernity" (Butler 2008, 2), is highly critical of this new state policy. She argues it is striking that the policies are directed to certain 21 groups of people that are presumptively 'pre-modern', while other groups of people European Union nationals, people who earn more than €45,000 per year, as well as citizens of the USA, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Japan and Switzerland - are exempted from the exam, as if it can be presumed that homophobia is alien to them. This echoes the presumption, present in the debate about homosexuality and Islam, that homophobia is something alien to Dutch culture, when research points out that disgust with public homosexuality remains very common, and that people carrying out violence against homosexuals come from disparate cultural backgrounds, including autochthonous culture, and have similar motives for becoming violent.18 Nevertheless, the images produced by the state constitute a link between Dutch citizenship and tolerance, are mass mediated and help produce a common sense 'feeling' in which sexual tolerance comes to be seen as authentically Dutch. ! The question remains, however, how the prominence of homosexuality in the Dutch imagination can be explained, even when heteronormativity remains rather unchallenged. A quick look at what Steven Seidman calls the 'normalization' of homosexuality may help us out here. Normalization refers to the transformation of the homosexual from a deviant Other to the mirror image of the ideal heterosexual. Seidman argues: "Normalization is made possible because it simultaneously reproduces a dominant order of gender, intimate, economic, and national practices" and warns that "normalization leaves in place the polluted status of marginal sexualities and all the norms that regulate our sexual intimate conduct apart from the norm of heterosexuality" (2001, 326). Sexual difference becomes nothing more than a minor, superficial aspect of someone who is in every other way an ideal national citizen. In the Netherlands, this process of normalization is remarkably characteristic for the gay community, perhaps even more so than in other societies. There are several reasons for that. One is the culture of accommodation which is rooted in the Verzuiling, 'pillarization'. Pillarization was a system of allocating power to the elite and controlling the moral and political universe of 'ordinary people' who were 18 See Van Wijk et. al. (2005); Keuzenkamp et. al. (2006); and Buijs et. al. (2008). 22 organized in the different pillars. The elites of pillars mixed, for instance in the political sphere, whereas the base of the pillars did not. This produced a model of governance that has been deeply influential in the Netherlands, even in the gay and lesbian movement. The leadership of that movement worked in close cooperation, at least from the start of the HIV/AIDS-crisis in the early 1980's (Duyvendak 1996), with the government and political elites. A professional gay elite developed, located in the pinnacle of the 'pink pillar', that represented other gays and lesbians. 'Homosexual politics' became the business of professionals, often members of leading political parties. Their strategy was to build a strong and professional lobbymovement towards politicians, who in this way could slowly get acquainted with homosexuals and their political demands, which they in fact did. This, and the fact that the demands of the Dutch gay movement remained within the Dutch socialliberal framework, produced an environment in which legal and political gains could be won. Instead of demanding radical social reform, 'sexual liberation', Dutch gays and lesbians demanded and won legal reform and formal equality; a strategy culminating in the opening up of civil marriage for gays and lesbians in 2001. ! A second reason for the normalization of homosexuality in the Netherlands is the commodification of gay and lesbian life worlds and identities. As the Comaroffs argue, the culture of neoliberalism is marked by the growing relevance of consumption in shaping selfhood, society, and identity (2000, 293), of what Van der Veer refers to as an ethos of enjoyment (2006). Consumption became the hallmark of modernity: "the measure of its wealth, health, and vitality" (Jean and John Comaroff 2000, 294) and the "moving spirit of the times" (Ibid.). The mass mediation of commodified images plays a central role in producing a sense of community and identity in these times. The gay and lesbian community found a place for itself in this consumption driven world and has become increasingly shaped by commercialization and commodification itself. As Binnie and Skeggs argue, "marketing and consumption have a significant role to play in inscribing differences with value" (2004, 43), which is exemplified by the fact that in "city marketing and 23 promotional campaigns, difference has been transformed into calculated, rationalized and repetitive programs" (Ibid.). The images of the homosexual produced through marketing and commodification fit well with the discourse of Dutch national identity as modern, liberal, and autonomous. The popular, dominant, mass mediated image of modern homosexual is that of the 'successful, cosmopolitan, global gay', a happy and wealthy individual who travels all over the world, has a very good sense of fashion, and is a champion of consumption in general. This image of the homosexual embeds homosexuality with desire - who does not aspire to be like that? - and promotes an image of the homosexual as the embodiment of a national ideal - the successful, autonomous self - the counter image of the Muslim, whose life world is framed as colonized by religion, tradition, and lack of autonomy. Towards the local This essay serves as a starting point in the analysis of how the cultural canon of Dutch nationalism is invested with desirability through the mass mediation of discourses, images, and performances in which sexuality plays a continuously central role. How, in other words, Dutch nationalism is relatively successful in persuading citizens to adhere to the cultural perspectives it puts forward, and is hence quite a capable 'player' in the dynamics of culturalization. However, the analysis of public discourse and mass media still tells us little about what people actually do with the 'sensational forms' they are confronted with; if and how these sensations evoke feelings of authentic belonging and if and how they help to overcome the experience of fragmentation. ! Moreover, although we have had an extensive look at the desirability of Dutch nationalism and at some of the 'authoritative voices' in this cultural canon, we know little of who the authoritative figures in competing cultural canons are; of how these cultural canons are constituted; of who the adherents of these alternative identities and sources of meaning are; or how these 'Others' respond to the powerful politics of belonging and alterity at the heart of Dutch nationalism. Neither have we started 24 analyzing the powerful processes of creolization that mark the state of flux we are in, thus at the appropriation of cultural canons by players of the game of culturalization, and the mixing up of all kinds of cultural repertoires and perspectives. ! To understand the erotics of persuasion we need to turn to the local, where controversy and conflict about different moral perspectives materialize and hybrid identities emerge in everyday life. By focusing on local settings - (state) institutions, neighborhoods, active citizens, schools, street politics - we can begin to grasp how the mass mediated images produced by Dutch nationalism as a cultural dominant are digested and appropriated; how citizens, in other words, deal with culturalization. Literature Appadurai, Arjun. (1996). 'Dead certainty: Ethnic violence in the era of globalization'. In: Birgit Meyer and Peter Geschiere (eds.), Globalization and identity: Dialectics of flow and closure. 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