Hypersexuality and Headscarves: Race, Sex, and Citizenship in the New Germany

Notes

155 155 Notes Prologue 1. I have used the form “re”unification here because, as other scholars have also pointed out, Germany did not return to its pre-1945 borders after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The notions of unification and reunification are persistently caught up in the production of imagined community. See Anderson 1991. 2. For an example of this type of claim, see Garton Ash 2009. 3. Mandel 2008 provides a detailed analysis and critique of the claim that Kreuzberg is an “immigrant neighborhood.” 4. While the conversation took place in German, I have translated it to English here. 5. While formally understood to be an isolated incident, in 2009 a pregnant Egyptian pharmacist was killed in a courtroom: Just before the knife attack on the Egyptian woman, Marwa el S. [Marwa alSheribini ], in the Dresden Regional Court, the perpetrator made known his sympathies for the NPD, according to Tagesspiegel’s information. Next, Alex W. [the defendant] asked the Egyptian woman in the courtroom, “Do you even have the right to be in Germany?” Then he added, “You don’t have the right to say anything here.” The Russian German became louder and threatened , “When the NPD comes to power, that will be the end. I voted for the NPD.” Just after that he toppled Marwa el S. and her husband and began stabbing them. (Tagesspiegel 2009a; my translation) 6. Although I was hired as an associate producer and directed some key scenes, my name does not appear in the credits. 7. This text is from the film. I have added some visual explanations. 8. Here, the Nazis cite Rosa Luxemburg. Introduction 1. Following Aihwa Ong’s (1996) definition of citizenship as a process of “self making and being made within webs of power,” I understand noncitizenship in similar 156 terms, although the noncitizen is being made and is making herself along a different trajectory than that of a citizen. 2. These numbers are drawn from a discussion with the Berlin senator Özcan Mutlu in 2008. While not differentiated by specific family background and somewhat obscured by the fact that people can be legally “German” without being understood as German by their teachers or the normative public, according to the official Berlin website, “Deutliche Unterschiede zeigen sich in den Schulabschlüssen von deutschen und nicht-deutschen Schüler/innen. Gingen in Berlin im Schuljahr 2003/04 unter den Schüler/innen deutscher Staatsangehörigkeit 9,2 Prozent der Schule ab, so waren es unter den nicht-deutschen Staatsangehörigen 20,5 Prozent.” (There are noticeable differences between the types of school degrees received by German and non-German students . In the school year 2003–2004 9.2 percent of pupils with German citizenship left school [without a degree], whereas 20.5 percent of students without German citizenship left school [without a degree].) http://www.berlin.de/lb/intmig/statistik/aus_bildung/ schulabgaenger.html?_=print, accessed January 15, 2009. 3. In this book, I capitalize Black and White, because I see them as political terms that are associated with discourses of belonging, but that are also potentially reductive discourses of social scientific analysis. In Germany, “White” is not frequently used as a social marker (see Eggers et al. 2005; Tißberger et al. 2006). I use it in this text as a way to mark the unmarked. “Whiteness” is both a historical and a situated production. As Michelle Wright points out: [R]ecalling Gobineau’s dizzyingly complex hierarchy of categories of whiteness (beginning with different types of Aryans and moving down in purity and superiority), as well as Hegel’s location of Germany as the most superior of all Western nations, we can understand how white Germans do not read themselves as racially [the] selfsame with other white Western Europeans but rather as a distinct Volk with a specific cultural and racial heritage. (2004: 184) I would add that the term race in the German context is not used without some selfconsciousness . With the exception of the extreme right or discussions about dog breeds, it is usually avoided. On the other hand, there are still racial effects of the contemporary politics of belonging. These effects are, of course, not just in Germany. On a visit to France as part of a Fulbright seminar for American university faculty, “Muslim Minorities in France and Germany,” I found the denial of racism in France to be pronounced. In Austria in the 2008 elections...