Palestinian women on demonic grounds: Holocaust museums, religious difference, and the struggle for citizenship in Germany

This article takes a human geography approach to demonstrate that Palestinian women are placed on “demonic grounds” as that which can cause unpredictable destruction to Germany. The notion of demonic grounds is expanded in this article through the notion of religious difference to ask how geography and religious difference work together to offer a different form of analysis about Palestinian feminism, secularism, and the struggle for citizenship in Germany. The article focuses on the co-construction of race and religious difference of Palestinian women, gendered and spatialized in Holocaust education, and accounts for how Palestinian women are subjugated as Muslim women. Their navigation of Holocaust education in place, however, alters the terrain and enables them to emerge as agentive Palestinian feminist subjects, who upset the cartographic order of German secularism. The article shows that the struggle for citizenship in Germany is entangled with Palestine, enabled and denied through Holocaust education.