A Corpus-Assisted Analysis of the Discursive Construction of LGBT Muslims and Jews in UK Media
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Abstract
According to the Jewish Chronicle, on December 1, 2021, a group of Jewish bus passengers on their way to celebrate Chanukkah in London were attacked by a mob, spit upon, verbally abused, and subjected to Nazi salutes.1 Similarly, the monitoring group Tell MAMA reported that in the week after the Daily Telegraph published a column written by the then prime minister Boris Johnson, in which he compared Muslim women to “letterboxes” and “bank robbers,” Islamophobic incidents in the United Kingdom rose by 375 percent. In December 2019, a fourteen- year- old Muslim girl was violently attacked on her way home from school. The same month, a rabbi waiting in the Stamford Hill overground station was beaten by two men who shouted, “fucking Jew, dirty Jew” and “kill the Jews”; a month earlier a Jewish father and his two young sons were the targets of antisemitic abuse on the London Underground. While these forms of generalized Islamophobia and antisemitism have unfortunately become commonplace in the United Kingdom , there exists a largely unexamined form of antisemitic/Islamophobic violence perpetuated against LGBT Muslims and Jews— double minorities. In this chapter, I examine discourses present in the British print media that may contribute to a framing of LGBT Muslims and Jews in ways that can lead to the demonization of members of both communities. Robert Phillips My focus here is in the collective representation of double minorities by the British press. In choosing this focus, I should point out that those minorities who are the targets of harassment are targeted largely due to the saliency of their difference. As noted above, women wearing head or body coverings of any degree and men and boys wearing what are perceived to be “Muslim” or “Jewish” clothing or hairstyle (head coverings/payot) are often targeted. This includes Sikh men and boys wearing turbans, in that some may incorrectly identify them as Muslims. Because of outward appearance, many of the victims of these crimes may also be perceived to be observant in their faith and perhaps even threatening to national security and identity. This chapter is concerned with members of these communities who also identify as LGBT, positioning them as double minorities. As with members of other diasporic communities around the globe, LGBT Muslims and Jews have assumed unique types of identity forged through a combination of factors brought about by, among other things, processes of transnational migration. As both Muslims and Jews form some of the smallest ethnic communities in Britain, they are far outnumbered by more dominant Anglo groups and share a type of liminal subjectivity. Gay Muslim and Jewish men are both an ethnic and a sexual minority, further complicating this relationship. This dual-minority status has had a distinctive effect on how nonminority British view these individuals. For instance, Yip focuses on kin relations when examining the narratives of non-heterosexual British Muslims and suggests that within these communities , there is a perception of homosexuality as a “Western” disease that did not exist in the family’s community of origin. They also point out the fraught negotiations between parents and children, complicated further by sociocultural and religious factors, when it comes time to marry and the subsequent strategies employed by the children. In terms of how the nation views Muslims in Britain, Jaspal and Cinnirella position such subjects as a hybridized threat— British Muslims are positioned solidly as “other” while simultaneously being framed as a threat to the survival of the “in- group.”
Topics
Main Topic: Other LGBT Antisemitism: Discourse Attitudes to Jews Islamophobia Jewish - Muslim Relations Discourse and Discourse Analysis
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Page Number / Article Number
127-144
ISBN/ISSN
9780814350881
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Link to book (paywalled), Religious Life Is Life Together: Ritual, Liminality, and Communitas among Queer Jews in Postsecular Britain
Bibliographic Information
A Corpus-Assisted Analysis of the Discursive Construction of LGBT Muslims and Jews in UK Media. 2024: 127-144. https://archive.jpr.org.uk/object-4243
