A Norwegian feminist group awarded a Danish anti-immigration minister for restricting forced marriages

Evidence

In November of 2003, Human Rights Service, a Norwegian feminist organization fighting for immigrant women’s rights, announced that it had awarded the ‘Cow Bell of the Year’ to the Danish minister of integration, Bertel Haarder, for his efforts to tighten immigration laws as a means of limiting forced marriages in Denmark. (The logic of such initiatives is that young people, primarily of Muslim origin, are being forced into marriage with spouses from their parents’ countries of origin, spouses who then enter Denmark under the policy of family reunification.) The Danish government, Human Rights Service noted, had done more than any other European government to secure women’s rights. Interestingly, because Human Rights Service wished to acknowledge the connection between Mr Haarder’s efforts in the area of women’s rights and the creation of ‘a better functioning multiethnic society,’ the actual award given was not a cow bell but a camel bell, a change meant to signal that Human Rights Service worked in solidarity with Muslim women and wished, perhaps, to be culturally sensitive. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 256

Categorization

• CANDY: A feminist organization honoring an immigration tightener with a camel bell instead of a cow bell for ‘cultural sensitivity’ is a darkly funny, self-undermining gesture.
• SHARE: Worth sending to someone interested in how European feminist organizations have been co-opted by anti-immigration politics in the 2000s.