Work, Sex, and Cigarettes: Gender and the “Good Citizen” in Orientation Classes for Immigrants in Germany

The article, based on ethnographic and interview-based research in Germany, looks at how citizenship classes for adult immigrants use normative messages about gender practice and ideology to discipline prospective citizens and to draw symbolic boundaries that define the nation. These gendered practices and ideologies fall into three categories: those linked with work; those associated with sex, relationships, and body display; and those connected to smoking. Each of these sets of behaviors has become salient in response to Germany’s largest migrant group, Muslims, but each has also been used as a gendered resource in past citizen-making projects. The article thus explores how discipline and exclusion in modern Germany are twinned, historically situated processes that draw heavily on gender and racialized framings of religion and culture. It concludes with an examination of the strategic ways that immigrant students themselves use gendered rhetoric to make their own inclusion and exclusion claims, and a discussion of both the benefits and pitfalls of embracing feminist principles as features of national identity.