Time Travelers and Queer Heterotopias: Narratives from the Muslim Underground

This article suggests the existence of a spatio-temporal regime of knowledge production in Germany that configures racialized populations as a contradiction in terms, both spatially and temporally displaced within a heteronormative discourse of nation, gender, sexuality, and religion that assigns communities of color a position both outside Europe and outside modernity. This regime is currently most evident in discourses around the nation's Muslim communities as living in ostensibly archaic, anti-modern “parallel societies.” Using the trope of travel narratives and their employment of gender and sexuality, I trace the epistemological placement of “German” and “Muslim” as mutually exclusive opposites and end by proposing that this (dis)placement is not only a source of exclusion but also potentially the means by which alternative spatio-temporal models emerge that defy this opposition and the social logic behind it.