The Limits of Multicultural Tolerance? Liberal Democracy and Media Portrayals of Muslim Migrant Women in Germany

This article examines how Muslim migrant women's sexuality is instrumentalised to erect gendered and cultural boundaries of citizenship and liberal democracy in Germany. German newspaper articles on forced marriages and honour killings for a period of 10 years (1998-2008) are analysed to show how constructions of social, religious and spatial differences serve to homogenise the space of liberal democracy and the exclusion of Islam from it, thereby undermining such ideals of liberal democratic citizenship as equality.