ABSTRACT
Introduction The focus of this chapter is on how oppressive minority identities are produced in global contexts where minority groups feel under threat. In this context, both majority and minority populations may confront existential threats to the formation of their identities. As a consequence, each group seeks to securitise its subjective identity through the invocation of familiar tropes of religion or nation and through homesteading processes, often resulting in the emergence of parallel societies. In this chapter I use the case of Sweden to locate these dynamics within the larger context of ethno-cultural values and intergenerational complexity, coupled with notions of patriarchy. Generational conflict and issues of gender, religion and ethnicity have become particularly prominent in Scandinavia as a consequence of the rapid and location specific adoption of Muslim refugees. The chapter explores the central role of post-diasporic (second and subsequent generations) struggles and patriarchy in such processes of securitisation. It emphasises how generational conflict occurs within particular post-diasporic contexts and how these are predominantly gendered. Here the chapter accentuates how relations of patriarchy are produced and reproduced in minority groups’ struggles with the majority. Within this struggle between majority and minority, secularism and religion, and between the global and the local, Muslim women are increasingly being caught in the middle as visible symbols of religious and nationalist discourse. The chapter shows how women, and especially young girls, turn into burdens of representation rather than subjects in their own right as patriarchic relationships are reproduced in this struggle.
