The Spaces of Identity: The Role of Marxloh Mosque in Shaping Turkish-German Women’s Performativity and Sense of Belonging
Judith Butler uses performativity to investigate the unconscious, unintentional and situational performances of gender through discourse. I argue that the built environment as a part of this discourse has the ability to transform and (re)produce identities. I focus on the diaspora mosque as the performative unit where multiple forms of gender and ethnoreligious identities are performed as everyday, embodied practices.
Using a feminist lens to analyze how gender, religion, and space intersect, I examine the Marxloh Merkez Mosque in Duisburg, Germany, as a cultural case study. Informed by ethnographic fieldwork conducted over a period of nine months between October 2018 and July 2019, I analyze how the performative character of the Marxloh mosque has come to shape Turkish-Muslim women’s everyday performances and sense of belonging in current-day Germany. More specifically, I examine Turkish-Muslim women’s discursive production and cultivation of ethnoreligious identities through gendered discourses produced in the Marxloh Merkez Mosque and the German public. I further explore how these gendered discourses influence Turkish- Muslim women’s spatial behavior, not only in the mosque space but also in the neighborhood of Marxloh and the urban space of Duisburg. The results of this effort identify heterogeneous patterns of identity reproduction, belonging, and boundary-making among different generations while simultaneously using the feelings of belonging developed through Turkish- Muslim women’s lived experiences to question the integration discourse that aims to forge belonging through top-down approaches.
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