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The Future of Difference
The Future of Difference
Beyond the Toxic Entanglementof Racism, Sexism and Feminism
Sabine Hark and Paula-Irene Villa
Translated by Sophie Lewis
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
UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG
US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
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
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
