The Future of Difference. Sabine Hark
In this task, we understand texts and images, with Alex Demirović, as active ‘intervening’ entities which ‘seek to create constellations and contexts’.14
However, to assert that differences are performative – that is to say, made visible by texts and images – is not the whole story. For Demirović, a text or an image is always ‘fundamentally dialogic – practice-based – because its emergence inevitably changes the constellation of already-existing texts, the relationship between the said and the unsayable, and thus, the context itself’. Texts and images do not, therefore, acquire meaning by themselves, in themselves or for themselves; they do so only ‘as discursive processes, as specific events in a constellation’. By ‘being part of a force-field, they are themselves co-producing and shaping’, they ‘respond to one problem or another, arising in order to take something up, displace it, override it or change it’. Lastly, we will state a truism, but an essential one: images and texts determine neither perception nor reality. They co-constitute both, and this constituting depends in turn on people’s actual practices of appropriation in specific contexts.
It took less than a year from the emergence of that node called ‘Cologne’ for it to become part of Germany’s ‘objective’ history. ‘After Cologne’ is now a dividing line in our calendars that frames the time that has passed since – and possibly the time before it, too. In any case, that New Year’s Eve was the moment when the parameters of all kinds of debates shifted irrevocably: debates around culture, ‘race’, gender, religion, and morality; on the management of migration and asylum; on matters of sexuality and gender; on criminal prosecution policy around sexual violence; on the rights of immigrants; on relations between native Germans and foreigners; on the interconnectedness of racism, sexism and feminism; and on immigration, integration, and internal security.
The effects precipitated were complex and difficult to summarize under the heading of one common denominator. Upon closer inspection, though, it seems safe to say that the dynamics unleashed by Cologne have been characterized by a certain core ambivalence that is, in practice at least, always controlled and regulated by fundamentalist rhetorics. We are fascinated by these rhetorics. As we hope to show in the following chapters, sexual politics has once again become active in the service of the production of racist truths.15 Feminism is once more being used to bear witness to the ‘incompatibility’ of Islam with Western values (such as gender equality or tolerance for LGBTQI* existence and lifestyles) and to legitimize the violence of European border regimes.16
There is nothing remotely new about the construction of a zero-sum game involving feminism and the foreigner; nothing original about mobilizing resentment off the back of an imagined dichotomy between women’s rights (and those of other sexual and gender minorities), on the one hand, and everything non-Western or foreign, on the other. The unforgettable populist rallying cry of the German minister of the interior, Thomas de Maizière, in April 2015, ‘Wir sind nicht Burka’ – ‘We are not burka’ – was but one among a slew of fresh examples.17 To de Maizière and many others, ‘Cologne’ was the definitive proof and manifestation of Samuel Huntington’s otherwise widely repudiated view that the source of all twenty-first-century conflicts lies in ‘culture’ (the ‘clash of civilizations’ hypothesis).18 As that camp has, ever since, made a habit of asserting, any prospect of harmonious European or American coexistence with immigrants (especially Muslims) from the Global South is unfortunately fatally compromised – by ‘cultural differences’.
AMBIGUOUS ENTANGLEMENTS: RACISM, SEXISM, FEMINISM
This book represents our attempt to gain some purchase on these contemporary entanglements, these ambiguous imbrications of racism, sexism and feminism in the present moment. We regard it as an exercise in critical thinking in which we bring together our sociological knowledge with feminist theory, postcolonial analysis, queer and critical race studies, and border or migration studies. These fields are all part of the West’s internal critical tradition, a tradition which, as Foucault argues in Discourse and Truth, calls into question the very mechanisms by which the ‘truth’ is culturally produced.19 The paradigmatic starting point these academic domains hold in common (at least in theory) is essentially Marx’s insight that critique is always immanent, that is, it must appreciate that it is itself part of what it criticizes, such that the critique itself becomes subject to critique. In Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s words: ‘This impossible “no” to a structure which one critiques, yet inhabits intimately, is the deconstructive philosophical position.’20 In our view, it is the heterogeneous field of feminist thought, more than any other theoretical project, that has set itself the challenge of grappling with the aporias that arise when we acknowledge the immanence of critique, paying attention, in particular, to the risk of reinscribing an axis of difference – sexual and gender difference – in the very act of questioning it.
Feminist theory, therefore, has always considered ‘the critique of all discourses concerning gender’ vital to feminism, ‘including those produced or promoted as feminist’ – to quote Teresa de Lauretis.21 It has therefore not only rejected the concept of ‘the woman in general’22 but sought to ask who is actually represented by specific usages of the category ‘woman’, making the production of that sign of difference and discrimination itself the object of inquiry. The history of feminism is rich in examples of what we mean, dating back to the mid-nineteenth century. Famously, in 1851, at a gathering of white bourgeois American women fighting for women’s suffrage, the black abolitionist and former slave Sojourner Truth approached the congregation demanding to know whether or not she qualified as a woman. The question put to the gathering of women’s rights activists – ‘Ain’t I a woman?’ – drew logically from Truth’s experiences of toiling as hard and eating as much as any man, being flogged, and never once experiencing any of the paternalistic gallantry the white majority took for granted on the basis of their femininity.23 Ever since then, the question ‘Ain’t I a woman?’ has served as an effective tool for dismantling racialized, ethnocentric or heteronormative definitions of gender and femininity.24
Thus, ‘what appear as separable categories are, rather, the conditions of articulation for each other.’25 The resultant questions have been raised again and again in the history of feminist theory, as in Judith Butler’s formulation: ‘How is race lived in the modality of sexuality?’ and ‘How is gender lived in the modality of race?’26 And, equally: ‘How do colonial and neo-colonial nation states rehearse gender relations in the consolidation of state power?’ and ‘Where and how is “homosexuality” at once the imputed sexuality of the colonized, and the incipient sign of Western imperialism?’27
Ultimately, feminism has to be understood as a project defined by its internal contradictions, discontinuities and antagonisms; as a struggle over meanings. Feminist thought has no unitary canon, but rather represents a generative field full of disparate movements. More than the sum of its parts, feminism is not only the aggregate of disparate critical analyses of gendered social inequalities and exclusions, dominant discourses and cultural regimes; it is the materialization of a process of recognizing the situatedness of all knowledge production.
Of course, this principle of critical self-reflexivity – this fundamental methodological doubt – also informs many of the branches of the humanities and social sciences we borrow from in these pages. Indeed, all the ‘critical traditions’ (by which we mean disciplines that cleave to Marx’s orientation towards immanence in the broadest sense) – as well as the newer fields of systems theory, actor-network theory, science and technology studies, and cultural studies – direct their practitioners not to reify their own categories and to be wary of their (at least implicit) normative power. And yet, unfortunately, ‘problematic’ categories (and what would an unproblematic category look like, anyway?) do not simply give up and go away. Quite the contrary. We are stuck with negotiating the manifold problems of categorization and classification precisely because we know their power to generate worlds, and because, in the end, we think that concepts can actually mount a resistance to power.
Our reflections, in summary, are guided by the hypothesis that ‘Cologne’ is bound up in a series of highly effective ideological