Rezension zu The Queer Intersectional in Contemporary Germany
Siegessäule, Oktober 2018
Rezension von Clarence Haynes
At the intersections
Just as the German-speaking left sometimes falls behind in
international political discussions, Berliners who don/'t speak the
language often miss out on crucial developments in local and
national current affairs. A collection of recent essays newly
translated into English aims to bridge that gap, with contributions
by Judith Butler, Züfulkar Cetin and other academic voices
Though the justpublished »The Queer Intersectional in Contemporary
Germany« sheds light on some of the critical discussions happening
nationwide, the work often focuses specifically on Berlin. Tie
essays were curated by Christopher Sweetapple, a sociocultural
anthropologist and University of Massachusetts PhD candidate.
Sweetapple lamented the reliance of many English-speaking arrivals
on Robert Beachy’s 2014 book »Gay Berlin« as a guide to the city
which, though offering a thorough overview of the Weimar Republic
era, doesn’t assess more current political realities. Sweetapple/'s
goal was to provide a platform for premier German scholars and
translators to reach an English-speaking audience and
simultaneously celebrate intersectionality. The concept was
emphasized decades ago by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw to
describe the interconnected oppressions facing black women, with
Queer Intersectional calling out Angela Davis/'s 1981 title »Women,
Race and Class« as an influential work as well.
Sweetapple sees the collection as »an invitation to appraise our
current Situation in all its complexity«, he said, citing a
societal need to move away from caricatured, oversimplified notions
of identity. The book offers »a model of, but also a connection to,
all of the ways that queer, anti-racist scholarship and activism
continue to flourish,« the editor tells SIEGESSÄULE, »and very
pointedly, very cleverly draw our necessary attention to some of
the complex ways that both liberation and oppression weave into
each other in our social space.«
With Sweetapple acknowledging Marxism as the lens through which
many German thinkers view their history, two essays appropriately
launch into the far-reaching historical implications of capitalism
and Europe/'s colonial legacy. A later article provocatively
examines the gay appropriation of narratives from Jewish victims of
Nazi persecution. The Hauptstadt takes center stage in Züruikar
Cetin/'s »The Dynamics of queer Politics and Gentrification in
Berlin«, which critiques homonationalism a concept in which Western
groups use LGBT-friendliness to wield historically oppressive power
– and offers glimpses of local controversies, including the
invisibility of historical immigrant activism in northern
Schöneberg as the Nollendortplatz area has been positioned as a
gay-bar mecca. Gentrification is a continued source of tension
throughout the city, and the piece also provides an example of
coalition building as seen in Kreuzbergs S036/Kottbusser Tor area,
discussing how trans*, queer and housing activists have
strategically banded together in the name of self-advocacy and
change. The shortest, most accessible pronouncements came at the
end of the collection: Cetin and Daniel Hendrickson deconstruct a
2017 report positioning younger male refugees providing sex work to
older, white German men as a scenario in which both parties are
distorted and dehumanized. And in »Defamation and the Grammar of
Harsh Words«, Judith Butler and Sabine Hark look at how certain
writers have maligned gender and queer studies as a flawed form of
scholarship, with said critics thus becoming part of the
hate-filled diatribe found in far-right discourse. Hark and Butler
assert that those in »progressive« camps can be just as guilty of
succumbing to a rhetoric of »toxic cultural ethos« – a reminder for
all to be vigilant, echoing Sweetapple/'s call for a world in which
vivid complexity should be seen as the new normal.
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