Circumcising the body: negotiating difference and belonging in Germany

ABSTRACT

The circumcision debate in Germany in 2012 is an exemplary case for symbolic struggles over national boundaries. The debate became a site for the negotiation of traditions practiced by religious minorities. We ask, first, how the clinical gaze constitutes Muslim and Jewish others. Second, we investigate how ‘writing around’ the debate’s center, bodily integrity, became meaningful through analogies to other practices said to harm it. We compare newspaper coverage in Germany, Israel and Turkey, and reveal transnational discursive dynamics that transgress national boundaries. We show how ‘otherness’ of Muslims and Jews remains present in a self-perceived secular, liberal imaginary.

KEYWORDS:

• Mnemotechnic
• Jews and Muslims in Germany
• clinical gaze
• discourse
• ring composition

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Irit Dekel is Research Associate at the Jena Center for Reconciliation Studies, Friedrich Schiller University, Jena, and Visiting Researcher at the department of Diversity and Social Conflict, Humboldt University of Berlin. She works on collective memory in Germany and Israel, migration and ethnicity, media and democratic plurality. Among her publications are “A living place: On the sociology of Atmosphere in Home Museums”, European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology 4:3 (Dekel I. with and Vinitzky-Seroussi V., 2017), and “Subjects of Memory? Holocaust Memory in two German Historical Museums” in Dapim: Studies on the Holocaust 30 (Dekel I., 2016).

Bernhard Forchtner is a Lecturer at the School of Media, Communication and Sociology, University of Leicester (United Kingdom). He has been working on the far right, environmental communication and in the field of critical discourse studies. His recent publications include ‘Being Skeptical? Exploring Far-Right Climate-Change Communication in Germany’ (with A. Kroneder and D. Wetzel in Environmental Communication, 2018) and The Routledge Handbook on Language and Politics (edited with R. Wodak, 2017).

Ibrahim Efe is a Lecturer at the Department of Public Administration and Political Science, Kilis 7 Aralik University (Turkey). He has recently been working on the representation of refugees in media and political discourses. His research focuses on the use of critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics in the fields of media, politics, and education. His recent publications include A corpus-driven analysis of representations of Syrian asylum seekers in the Turkish press 2011–2016 <https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1750481318801624> (in Discourse and Communication, 2019) and A corpus-based discourse analysis of the vision and mission statements of universities in Turkey <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07294360.2015.1070127> (with Ö. Özer in Higher Education Research & Development, 2015).

Notes

1 It is important to separate the discussion on male circumcision and female genital mutilations (see Earp, 2015).

2 This is not to indicate that significant Jewish and Muslim life is only to be found in ‘their’ respective countries, but instead, to illuminate the debate from two pragmatically chosen perspectives which affected it and were affected by it.

3 Scholarly studies from a German perspective can be found in edited volumes of Heil and Kramer (2013) and Blumenberg and Hegener (2013). There is also an informative pamphlet by Bodenheimer (2012). A mostly juridical, a medical ethical perspective on the debate, and the law in which it resulted, can be found in Merkel and Putzke (2013) and Aurenque and Wiesing (2015).

4 Munzer, 2016 and Widmann, 2012 also consider this date as the beginning of the debate.