Queer Lovers and Hateful Others: Regenerating Violent Times and Places by Jin Haritaworn
In 2010 Judith Butler refused to accept Berlin Pride's Zivilcouragepreis, citing the explicit anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiments expressed by the [End Page 543] organizers of the Berlin Pride event Christopher Street Day and their racist and exclusionary tactics. Butler's refusal speech called attention to the instrumentalization of LGBTQ rights for nationalist and militarist projects and the complicity of LGBTQ groups and citizens in Germany and Europe—in the name of protecting those rights—with Islamophobia and other forms of racist hatred. In refusing the prize, Butler instead named several queer of colour groups in Berlin as especially worthy of attention for their pronounced civil courage in pursuing intersectional activist work against racism, sexism, and homo- and transphobia. Butler's speech has been credited with making homonationalism into a household word. Initially coined by queer of colour theorist Jasbir Puar in her book Terrorist Assemblages (2007), the term homonationalism draws on Lisa Duggan's influential conceptualization of homonormativity, which describes the privatization and depoliticization of gay life and culture, now anchored in domesticity and consumption, in the context of neoliberalism (see The Twilight of Equality, 2004). In Puar's terms, homonationalism refers to how the pronounced tolerance towards certain "properly homo" (homonormative) patriotic citizens in securitized, neoliberal societies serves to constitute—in order to profile and exclude—groups of racialized and sexualized subjects as "perverse," especially Arabs, Muslims, and Sikhs.
Building on the work of Duggan and Puar, as well as a range of theorists working in the European context, Haritaworn's important study trains the lens of queer-of-colour critique on the local context of Berlin, a context that—as reflected by Butler's speech—holds particular significance for understanding the rise of homonationalism. This significance derives from Berlin's historical status as, on the one hand, a home to migrants and LGBTQ people and a centre of queer and antiracist organizing, and, on the other, a locus of racist and antigay persecution—not least during the Nazi period but also, crucially, along a range of other moments—as a tactic for consolidating national sovereignty. The focus on Berlin makes Haritaworn's analysis especially significant for German studies scholars; by complementing approaches that have more often emerged in the context of North American culture and politics, the specific situation of Berlin also facilitates the intervention that Queer Lovers and Hateful Others makes into queer-of-colour critique. The unique socio-economic and political context of postunification Berlin allows the intertwined phenomena of gentrification, changing citizenship laws, the rise of hate-crime discourse, escalating Islamophobia, and queer nostalgia to stand out in sharp relief, facilitating Haritaworn's analysis of their implication in the emergence of homonationalism.
As both the capital of the Third Reich and the epicentre of neoliberalization in Germany, Berlin provides a unique crucible for the "placing side by side of past and present, objects and bodies, racism and homophobia" (152), in ways that articulate how, in contemporary German discourse, "Muslim homophobia" has become synonymous with the evils of National Socialism. In a horrible irony that is, Haritaworn underscores, often lost, the "hate crimes" of the Nazi past are now projected onto the racial/religious others of the present, so that the policing, [End Page 544] incarceration, and deportation of today's oppressed minorities are justified by the claim of preventing a recurrence of the Holocaust in Germany and Europe.
It is when identifying ironies such as these that Haritaworn's consideration of the intersections of racism, sexism, classism, and homo- and transphobia in Berlin is most trenchant. For instance, an examination of gentrification in both the "gaybourhood" of Schöneberg and the districts of Kreuzberg and Neukölln, the latter home to many Berliners with migration histories, demonstrates how queer gentrifiers refigure formerly disenfranchised neighbourhoods as "colourful" even as, in practice, their settlement of these areas ultimately entails the exclusion of the people of colour who were originally confined there. Similarly, Haritaworn lays bare how white LGBTQ populations are made visible and valorized as "queer lovers" who give expression to neoliberal values of individuality, freedom, and choice, while also benefiting from moral panics over race and violence. At the same time, queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming people of colour often fail to receive state protection when they experience violence but instead are more likely to be criminalized themselves, alongside the racialized populations of "hateful others" who are demonized as homophobic and excoriated for failing to accede to neoliberal regimes of self-management and personal responsibility.
Haritaworn emphasizes the fact that gay partnership was instituted in Germany around the turn of the millennium, the same period in which the right to nationality based on blood (jus sanguinis) was reformed, meaning that marriage benefits and citizenship privileges were broadened to encompass new groups only after these benefits and privileges had already been shrunk to a minimum owing to neoliberalization and the dismantling of the welfare state: "I will propose that we think of the queer lover as not merely a link, but a 'transitional object' between the welfare and the neoliberal regime, which ushers us into consent with death-making techniques and horizons by queerly regenerating them as progress and love of diversity" (93). The figure of queer regeneration, a key contribution of the book, describes the spectral encounters and movements that occur when bodies, times, and places formerly deemed degenerate are revived from social death, giving rise to the ironies and paradoxes outlined above.
Haritaworn's methodology is integral to the mapping of these contradictions. The book is based on interviews with fifteen queers of colour that took place around kitchen tables in Berlin, excerpts of which are interwoven with a range of case studies that draw on legal, social scientific, and media discourse to chart the rise of homonationalism and especially the ongoing and renewed role of racism across all gender, sexual, political, and national identities today. Haritaworn theorizes the site of the kitchen table—a significant historical locus for women-of-colour feminism, not least in Berlin, as well as a potentially safe space in the face of the racism and gentrification of dominant LGBTQ movements—as a "good starting point to begin to tell better stories of gender and sexuality, which refuse to diversify the murderous status quo" (12). Queer Lovers and Hateful Others brings [End Page 545] these stories to voice in a compelling and insightful way, offering an urgent critique that is necessary reading in these precarious and resurgently racist times.
