Dangerous Muslim Masculinities and the Attack on Misogyny in Law: Changes in German Rape Law after the Cologne New Year’s Eve Events

In a number of debates regarding Muslims in the global north’s superdiverse societies, Muslim women’s varied experiences are homogenized and they are rendered “weak by law” because their male counterparts are seen as incapable of respecting women’s rights or outright hostile to them. In this paper, I analyze how Muslim men are portrayed as incapable of adopting the necessary relationship to law required of law-abiding citizens as a key part in the dynamic that renders racialized women weak by law. I turn to the attacks on New Year’s Eve 2015 in Cologne and the subsequent changes in German rape law to analyze how this dynamic spills into general protections for women. This law was changed to remove the requirement that women can prove active resistance for a case to be prosecuted as rape. Thus we see how understandings of Muslim masculinity spill over into efforts to address continued misogyny written into existing law, even as these efforts also reinscribe racialized understandings of dangerous masculinities and women as weak subjects.