The Future of Difference. Sabine Hark

      The translation of this work was partially funded by Technische Universität Berlin.

      This English-language edition published by Verso 2020

      Originally published in German as Unterscheiden und herrschen:

       Ein Essay zu den ambivalenten Verflechtungen von Rassismus,

       Sexismus und Feminismus in der Gegenwart

      © transcript Verlag 2017

      Translation © Sophie Lewis 2020

      All rights reserved

      The moral rights of the authors and translator have been asserted

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       Verso

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      US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201

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      ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-802-6

      ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-801-9 (HBK)

      ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-803-3 (UK EBK)

      ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-804-0 (US EBK)

       British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

       Library of Congress Control Number

      2020932047

      Typeset in Minion Pro by Hewer Text UK Ltd, Edinburgh

      Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY

      Contents

Preface to the English Edition

Preface. Other and Rule

Acknowledgments

1. ‘The Rotten Present’: A Plea for Friendship with the World

       2. ‘The Night That Changed Everything’: Othering and Ruling

       3. In the Name of Liberty, Take Off Your Clothes! On Body Politics

       4. What Might Alice Schwarzer and Birgit Kelle Have in Common? Feminism in the Maelstrom of Racial and Cultural Essentialisms

       5. Outsiders Within? A Dialogue with Differences

       Epilogue. ‘Differences Inside Me Lie Down Together’: Thinking in Difference

       Bibliography

       Notes

Preface to the English Edition

      ‘Germany shocked by Cologne New Year gang assaults on women’, reported BBC News on 5 January 2016 after the assaults had taken place against women in Cologne.¹ The New York Times, for its part, declared ‘Germany on the Brink’.² These were just two of many international headlines covering the incidents in Germany’s fourth most populous city on New Year’s Eve 2015, during the festivities of which hundreds of women are thought to have been mugged and/or sexually attacked, including raped. Over the course of the following days, the ‘Night That Changed Everything’,³ as the German daily Welt am Sonntag decided to dub it, went global. All too quickly, ‘Cologne’ became an internationally recognized shorthand for the already heated debate seething at the nexus of gender, migration, religion, race, and sexuality. So, what, if anything, did change on that infamous ‘night that changed everything’? That is the question we pursue in this book.

      But is it really still necessary, especially for those of us beyond Germany’s borders, four years after the event, to concern ourselves with ‘Cologne’? Is ‘Cologne’ really something people uninvested in domestic German politics should concern themselves with, readers in the Anglosphere might well ask. We think the answer is ‘yes’. As we see it, ‘Cologne’ has become a universal referent in the global spectacle that is the ‘migration crisis’, the flashpoint around which, in Kobena Mercer’s words, ‘ethnic chauvinisms, neonationalisms and numerous fundamentalisms strive to close down the symbolic boundaries of group belonging.’⁴ ‘Cologne’ is not just a cipher, then, but a caesura: it stands for the alleged failure of refugees to integrate, for the supposed collapse of multiculturalist daydreaming into a living nightmare of violence and insecurity, and for the putative erosion of ‘our’ public order by the excessive presence of those of African, Muslim or otherwise somehow ‘not German’ origin.

      The stage for this ‘clash of civilizations’ (in Samuel Huntington’s model) was Cologne’s Domplatte – the space around Cologne Cathedral. And, as we hope to show, it was no coincidence that the clash occurred along the fault lines of sexuality and gender. As Michel Foucault contends in his History of Sexuality (1980), gender and sexuality should not be understood as antitheses of politics and power, but precisely as ‘dense transfer points for relations of power’.⁵ It is in no small part in relation to these two terms that humanity’s collective coexistence is presently being negotiated. Sexuality, Foucault shows, ‘is not the most intractable element in power relations, but rather one of those endowed with the greatest instrumentality: useful for the greatest number of manoeuvres and capable of serving as a point of support, as a linchpin, for the most varied strategies.’⁶

      As with sexuality, so with gender. Certainly, there are several other fields of experience relevant to everyday life that could lay claim to such instrumentality, such as ‘crime’, ‘violence’ and ‘terrorism’ (categories whose very diffuseness seems to make them more effective). Yet sexuality and gender seem to be especially amenable for use as a container for other, affectively charged, intensely controversial questions. They are social order issues: determining how we live alongside one another, in general, and particularly in public; which is to say, they are questions of ethical coexistence. How will – how can – we live together? How shall we accomplish this, when it comes down to it? How shall people in a pluralistic democracy speak to one another about this, including when it is necessary to really thrash things out? How do we want to speak? Who can, and who will, participate in this conversation in a globalized world shot through, whether we like it or not, with inequality, danger, precarity, religion and borders? Ultimately, these are the disquieting, difficult and fundamental questions that Cologne highlighted anew.

      And these are the debates to which we – as sociologists, feminists and politically committed citizens – wished to contribute in writing this book. It seemed to us that public political discourse around the big questions of our time, post-Cologne, had become incredibly toxic: frequently (albeit not always) enacting the mere appearance of a debate. This was equally true of mainstream news features and talk shows; formal reportage and the blogosphere, vlogs, Twitter and other social media; parliamentary debates, seminar discussions, conference panels; political rallies,