by PAUL MEPSCHEN
Sex seems to play a key role in the Dutch politics of belonging. Sex – especially homosexuality – is instrumentalized by the nationalist right who uses it to represent immigrants as ‘strangers’ who threaten tolerant, modern, Dutch society. Tolerance, power, and xenophobia come to be increasingly entwined in the Netherlands. A plea against ‘tolerance’ as the foundation for political and social struggle.
The Slovenian philosopher and sociologist Slavoj Zizek argues that tolerance constitutes a mystifying discourse veiling what is really at the heart of political and social struggle. There is good reason, Zizek argues, that someone like Martin Luther King didn’t make use of the concept. The struggle against racism is not a struggle for tolerance, but for social, economic, political, and cultural rights, and for changing unjust and undemocratic power relations. Zizek makes a parallel with feminism, asking if feminists struggle to be ‘tolerated’ by men. Of course not – from this perspective the concept of tolerance even becomes rather ridiculous.
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