Culture, Reproduction, and the ‘Muslim Question’: The Use of ‘Mixed’ Marriage As a Proxy for Integration in the Netherlands

This paper critically looks at the practices of demographic and statistical knowledge production on so-called ‘mixed’ marriages (gemengde huwelijken) and partner-choice, and uses this as a prism to understand the connections between the statistical representations of intimacy, imaginaries of the nation, and processes of racialization in the Netherlands. First, I trace the social etymology of the dominant contemporary Dutch definition of what a ‘mixed’ marriage is, and the historical developments that contributed to the institutionalization of the practice of assessing and publishing the number of ‘mixed’ marriages among migrant populations as a standard proxy in Dutch integration research. Second, I analyze how knowledge production on ‘mixed’ marriages and partner-choice as part of integration research has a twofold of entangled underlying problematizations that became hegemonic in the field of (policy oriented) integration research after the 1990s: the ‘problem’ of cultural (in)compatibility and the ‘problem’ of reproduction. This continuous affirmation that the integration of migrant populations can be achieved through ‘mixed’ marriages, reaffirms whiteness as the norm, and represents migrant populations as non-belonging. The paper demonstrates how representations of statistics on ‘mixed’ intimacy and partner-choice play a profound role in social scientific knowledge production on migration and migrant populations in the Netherlands, and shows how racialized and gendered these norms of family formation are. The paper concludes that in particular, this entanglement of culture and reproduction in discourses on ‘mixed’ marriages and integration contributes to the further racialization of specifically Muslim populations, producing the contemporary Dutch ‘Muslim Question’ through the assertion that Muslims ‘refuse to mix’ with the white ‘autochthonous’ population.