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This study examines how the blog ein fremdwoerterbuch by Turkish-German and Muslim journalist Kübra Gümüsay represents the image of Muslim women and Islam in Germany. In her posts, Gümüsay complicates the image of Muslim women by denying her own identification with the stereotypical figure of the silent, oppressed Muslima and instead presenting herself as an emancipated female follower of Islam. Moreover, Gümüsay expands the discourse on violence beyond the context of aggression in Islam to include gender and racialized violence. She thus reveals the compatibility of Muslim and feminist identities and creates space for Muslim female activism against violence in the public sphere. Additionally, because of the unique genre of the blog and Gümüsay's move from alternative to mainstream media, this study focuses on the two-way production of representations, the idea of the blog as a counterpublic, and the longitudinal development of the blog as Gümüsay becomes a public figure.
Introduction
Picture this: a fourteen-year-old Muslim girl riding the subway in Germany is approached by a German woman and asked why she wears a headscarf. "Because I want to," she replies. This answer is met with an emphatic "No you don't!" and followed by a barrage of criticism invoking common associations with the headscarf like "violence against women," "oppression," and "honor killings."1 This specific memory belongs to Turkish-German blogger Kübra Gümüçay, but the experience is shared by many Muslim and/or Turkish women in Germany and, more broadly, in Europe.2 As Yasemin Yildiz explains, "Depictions of victimized Muslim women, in particular, have become prominent in many parts of contemporary Europe," and these "abused Muslim women function as facilitating figures in discourse and not as the focal point of concern. [...] Turned into reified figures, they are neither the subject nor the object of these discourses, but rather their vehicles" (76, 80). In other words, while mainstream German (and European) discourse often invokes the image of the Muslim woman and projects notions of abuse and oppression onto her, the voices of real Muslim women are often silenced in the public sphere. These women are trapped in what Beverly Weber dubs the "regime of gender violence," which is "a discourse [. . .] that insists on the representation of Muslim women as the victims of Muslim...