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Since the early eighties, the Netherlands has pursued an active policy to further the integration of ethnic minority groups in Dutch society. Subsequent governments put scientific experts to work to investigate the history, socio-economic position and cultural background of different minority groups – investments which testified to a strong belief in social engineering and the ´makeability´ of Dutch society. In this paper, I will discern four significant genres of discourse within Dutch minorities studies that use different rhetorical strategies to make their readers ´face reality´.

In the early 1990's, many feminist philosophers found that the practice of the women´s movement as well as those of other new social movements, could be articulated most adequately in terms of citizenship. The classical political vocabulary of citizenship seemed to offer a viable alternative to the vocabularies that until then had been dominant in feminist political theory: the individualistic, rights-oriented discourse of liberalism, and the structuralist, interest-oriented perspectives of socialism and marxism.

This article uses a study of the life-story narratives of former classmates of Dutch and Moluccan descent to argue that the constructionist approach to intersectionality, with its account of identity as a narrative construction rather than a practice of naming, offers better tools for answering questions concerning intersectional identity formation than a more systemic intersectional approach. The case study also highlights the importance of the quest for origins in narratives. It demonstrates that theories of intersectionality are not justified in subsuming the issue of belonging under the identity marker of ethnicity, when all identities are performatively produced in and through narrative enactments that include the precarious achievement of belonging. The case study demonstrates that if narrative accounts of a (singular or collective) life fail to achieve narrative closure regarding roots, attempts to trace routes are seriously hampered.

This article traces the emergence of one particular genre of discourse, the genre of "new realism", in the Dutch public debates on multicultural society from the early 1990s till Spring 2002. The focus upon different "genres" implies an interest in the performative power of discourse, i.e. the way in which any discourse, in or by its descriptions of reality, (co)produces that reality. Four distinctive characteristics of "new realism" are detected in three subsequent public debates, culminating in the genre of "hyper-realism", of which the immensely successful and recently murdered politician Pim Fortuyn proved to be the consummate champion.

This article discusses the viability of a feminist constructivist approach of knowledge through the careful reading of the work of the feminist scholar and historian of science and technology, Donna Haraway. Haraway proposes an interpretation of objectivity in terms of "situated knowledges. " Both the subject and the object of knowledge are endowed with the status of material-semiotic actors. By blurring the epistemological boundary between subject and object, Haraway's narratives about scientific discourse become populated with hybrid subjects/objects. The author argues that the ethics of these hybrid subjects consists of an uneasy mixture of a Nietzschean and a socialist-Christian ethic. The article concludes by setting out why Haraway's project constitutes an inter esting effort tofuse postmodern insights and feminist commitments.

Violent incidents that took place in 2004 and 2005 in the Netherlands and the UK respectively prompted people to claim that multiculturalism had failed. This claim requires an assessment of the effect of the policies that were drafted based on this political philosophy. In this study, the author analyses two sets of policies developed from multiculturalism: policies of anti-discrimination of minorities and their labour market participation. The effect of these policies is assessed by studying the policy objectives and their results. Based on this review, the author concludes that while there is still much to achieve in the fields of anti-discrimination and labour market participation, multiculturalism did not fail in the UK. On the contrary, it created a positive public perception of diversity and a high participation of minorities in the labour market. This contrasts with results achieved in the Netherlands where policies have fluctuated in such a way that the public attitude towards diversity is ambivalent and the participation of minorities in the labour market is much lower than that of their native counterpart.

Within a short period of time, the Netherlands transformed itself from a relatively tolerant country to a nation that called for cultural assimilation, tough measures and neo-patriotism. The discursive genre of `new realism' played a crucial role in this retreat from multiculturalism, and that had a dual effect for immigrant women. Whereas formerly they were virtually ignored by both the integration and the emancipation policy, since the triumph of new realism they are in the centre of both policy lines and there is now more policy attention for their needs and interests. Yet in the public debate the culture card is drawn frequently and immigrant women are portrayed as either victims or accomplices of their oppressive cultures. Policy makers and practitioners in the field, however, succeeded in avoiding cultural stereotyping by developing cultural-sensitive measures, while naming them in culture-blind terms.