Protesting Asylum Seeker Centers: Sexualized Racism & Moral Panic About Refugee Presence in the Netherlands

Abstract

“If [refugees] will not rape you, I will!” During the protests against housing refugees and asylum seekers in the Netherlands in 2015, many racialized and sexualized threats were expressed towards those who took a moderate stance with regard to housing refugees. Specifically, a white Dutch female local citizen who sought to make a plea for housing refugees was targeted. The threat is multi-layered and uses of implicit and explicit knowledge about who ‘the refugee’ is and who ‘we’ are. Two dominant elements stand out. First of all, refugees are portrayed as potential rapists who are a danger to the Netherlands. Second, the white Dutch female to whom the threat was aimed is portrayed as a ‘race traitor,’ in need of discipline for her deviant position. How can we understand the uncanny juxtaposition inherent in the reversed rape threat aimed at the female fellow resident of the town? This thesis explores how nationalism manifests in the lived experiences of white Dutch citizens in the context of a sexualized and racialized moral panic about refugee presence in the Netherlands. For this purpose, I engage in a feminist anthropological analysis to understand the protests against building an Asylum Seeker Center in Steenbergen, the Netherlands, in 2015. I argue that both the intersectional portrayal of the ‘refugee other’ as bogus and a rapist and the portrayal of the deviant woman as ‘race traitor’ are part of older Dutch socio-historical ideological formations about the Dutch ‘self’ and the ‘refugee other.’ I argue for understanding both portrayals as structured by whiteness as technology of affect, that constructs Dutch self-representations as innocent and tolerant. The so-called ‘refugee crisis’ of 2015 reveals a moral panic about refugee presence in the country in which the imagined ‘refugee other’ has become the affectively charged object on which social anxieties are projected. By using moral panic as a political analytical tool in combination with whiteness as technology of affect, I demonstrate that the moral panic about the ‘refugee other’ simultaneously is a moral panic about the Dutch ‘self.’