Beverly Weber‘s research and teaching interests include the intersections of race, gender, and migration in Germany and Europe; contemporary German literature and culture; and Islam in Europe. More recently she has also been interested in the role of race and gender in emerging European identities and cultures. Her interdisciplinary work is informed by cultural studies frameworks and theories of globalization, and incorporates analysis of popular media, literature, and film.
Her publications include articles on Germany’s headscarf debates, the literature of Emine Sevgi Özdamar, representations of Muslim women in Germany, and the work of Christa Wolf. Her current book manuscript, “Violence and Gender in the ‘New Europe’: Islam in German Culture” is under contract with Palgrave.
She received a PhD in Comparative Literature and a graduate certificate in Women’s Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst; MA degrees in Comparative Literature and German from the Pennsylvania State University; and a BA with majors in English and German from Gustavus Adolphus College.
Publications:
Book Manuscript
“Violence and Gender in the ‘New Europe’: Islam in German Culture.” Under contract with Palgrave. Series: Studies in European Culture and History. Series Editors: Eric D. Weitz & Jack Zipes.
Peer Reviewed Publications
“From Sex Shacks to Mega-Brothels: The Politics of Anti-Trafficking and the 2006 Soccer World Cup.” European Journal of Cultural Studies. Forthcoming. With Kirsten Isgro and Maria Stehle.
“German Soccer, the 2010 World Cup, and Multicultural Belonging.” German Studies Review 26.1 (2013). Forthcoming. With Maria Stehle.
Fereshta Ludin’s struggle to be appointed as a public school teacher while wearing a hijab received massive media attention in Germany, while the xenophobically motivated murder of Marwa el-Sherbini, who was eventually dubbed the “hijab martyr” internationally, elicited muted response. Yet interpreting the reactions to these two cases together reveals much about the existence of racism and Islamophobia in contemporary Germany. In this article I juxtapose the public discussions of these two cases to consider the potential for a critique of headscarf discourse. I suggest that interrogation of headscarf discourse is only possible by turning the very notion of critique against itself in order to interrogate the conditions of secularism.
“Work, Sex, and Socialism: Reading Beyond Cultural Hybridity in Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn.” German Life and Letters 63:1(2010): 37 – 53.
Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s work reveals and challenges two dominant images of the immigrant woman in circulation in Germany. When she superimposes the images of the headscarf and the cleaning woman, she reveals the often hidden intersections of representations of the veiled immigrant woman and her role in the German service industry. As ‘the Other’ within Germany, the Muslim woman’s veiled body constructs emancipated, democratic Germanness while effectively obscuring the role immigrant women’s labour has played in Germany’s globalised economy. This production of Germanness participates in a peculiar biopolitics that limits the terrain on which immigrant women, particularly Muslim immigrant women, can participate in German culture. In this essay I briefly sketch out one of the dominant discourses within which immigrant women have been represented in Germany. I then consider a novel by the Turkish German author Emine Sevgi Özdamar,?Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn?(1998),?in order to consider how her narrative of a ‘sexual’ coming of age also becomes a narrative that reveals and resists those discursive boundaries that circumscribe Muslim woman’s femininity and the possibility for ‘Islam in Germany’.
Das Werk Emine Sevgi Özdamars legt die dominanten Bilder von Frauen mit Migrationshintergrund in Deutschland offen, und stellt diese Darstellungen wiederum in Frage. Wenn Özdamar die Bilder des Kopftuchs und der Putzfrau zusammenbringt, enthüllt sie die oft versteckten Verschränkungen der Darstellungen der bedeckten Frau mit Migrationshintergrund und ihre wirkliche Rolle in der Dienstindustrie. Als das schlechthin ‘Andere’ fungiert der bedeckte Körper der muslimischen Frau, um ein emanzipiertes, demokratisches Deutschand zu bestätigen. Gleichzeitig verdeckt er die Rolle, die ihre Arbeit in der globalisierten Wirtschaft Deutschlands spielt. So eine Konstruktion von Deutschland wirkt bei einer seltsamen Biopolitik mit, die den Raum begrenzt, in dem Frauen mit Migrationshintergrund, besonders muslimische Frauen, mitmachen dürfen. In diesem Aufsatz skizziere ich zunächst ein wichtiges Diskursfeld, in dem die muslimische Frau dargestellt wird. Ich analysiere den Roman?Die Brücke vom Goldenen Horn?um zu zeigen, wie dieses Buch die Form eines sexuellen Bildungsromans verwendet, um die diskursiven Grenzen der ‘muslimischen Frau’ und ‘Islam in Deutschland’ in Frage zu stellen.
In recent years several bestselling autobiographies in Germany have reinforced a discourse in which domestic violence in immigrant communities is attributed to a backward, Muslim culture. The media as well as the German state turn to authors such as Necla Kelek and Seyran Ate? as “experts” who claim the right to represent immigrant women’s concerns, but their prominence obscures activists’ attempt to end both domestic violence and forms of cultural racism. This article contextualizes these autobiographies in a larger discourse of modernity that presumes secularism serves to regulate violence. I then analyze the discursive strategies employed by Kelek and Ate?, and juxtapose their narratives with Fadela Amara’s description of the French group Ni Putes ni Soumises. I argue that the popularity of narratives portraying violence against women as necessarily and intrinsically a part of Islam functions to silence many activists of immigrant heritage, preventing effective activism against violence as well as productive alliances between groups fighting violence in multiple forms.
“Beyond the Culture Trap: Teleopoeisis, Immigrant Women and New Subjectivities.” Women in German Yearbook. Vol. 21. Eds. Helga Kraft and Marjorie Gelus. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005. 16 – 38.
“Cloth on Her Head, Constitution in Hand: Germany’s Headscarf Debates and the Cultural Politics of Difference.” German Politics and Society 22.3 (2004): 33 – 63.
“A Literature of Theory: Christa Wolf’s Kassandra Lectures as Feminist Anti-Poetics.” German Quarterly 74.3 (2001): 259-279. Co-authored with Thomas Beebee.