44

Jindal Global Law Review JGLR / Vol. 4, Issue 2

Volume 4, Issue 2, November 2013

Beyond Hate:
Queer Metonymies of Crime, Pathology and
Anti/Violence
Jin Haritaworn*
This article questions the uninterrogated role of hate as the hegemonic paradigm for
understanding and organising against violence globally. While we have at our disposal
a range of analytics from affect studies to feminism to homonormativity to make
sense of dominant figurations of queer love and the neoliberal multicultural publics and
carceral landscapes that they render palpable, hate has not undergone similar challenges.
Using a transnational lens to document the arrival of the hate crime/violence discourse in
Germany, where languages such as Hassgewalt that attribute violence to hate are recent,
I argue that hate is a risky diagnostic to organise around, in that it always already sticks
to racialised bodies. Tracing figurations of violence, homophobia and crime through a
range of media, activist and policy texts, I argue that the drama of queer lovers and
hateful Others has unfolded in close proximity to wider crime discourses that are again
highly racialised and globalised. The two moral panics share a setting in the gentrifying
inner city, a psy profile, an arsenal of techniques of punishment and reform, and a bio-
and geopolitical horizon and orientation towards degenerate bodies and spaces that are
both disposable and sites of value extraction. This has implications beyond what kind
of languages we choose to use. The article calls for an abolitionist imagination that goes
beyond the prison and extends to institutional and other sites more often considered caring
and benevolent, including the communities we wish to build ourselves.

I. Introduction

I
n her lecture Death and Rebirth of a Movement: Queering
Critical Ethnic Studies, Cathy Cohen tentatively opens up the
possibility that from the ashes of a white conservative LGBT movement
another queer politics and theory might arise.1 This movement would

* Assistant Professor, Faculty of Environmental Sciences, York University, Canada

<[email protected]>. As always, this text has been born from community, though the
mistakes are all mine. Thank you Cengiz Barskanmaz, Sanchita Basu, Sirma Bilge, Rachel
Gorman, Charlie Haddad, Nadia Kanani, Mran Newroz, Jennifer Petzen, Milena Solomun
and Dana Thaler for variously reading drafts, inviting me to speak and write, and listening to
half-baked ideas with an interested and open mind. Special thanks to those queer/trans-of-
colour kitchen tables, for trusting I would do my best at archiving ideas that were very much
collectively elaborated. Many thanks also to the JGLR editors and to Praveen Chacko for their
vision, patience, and hard work.
1. Cathy Cohen, Death and Rebirth of a Movement: Queering Ethnic Studies, 37 (4) Soc. Justice
126-132 (2010/2011).

ISSN 0975-2498 O.P. Jindal Global University

2013 / Beyond Hate 45

be accountable to young people of colour who in a neoliberal context of

neglect, militarisation and institutional and interpersonal violence are
prepared for premature death, regardless of their sexual and gender
identity.2 In calling for such a politics that springs from the lives of
folks of color,3 Cohen once again challenges both the identitarian
assumptions of an institutionalised and professionalised social movement
that requires lives worthy of protection to look queer, and the post-
identity claims of a queer canon whose default position towards racism
is shaped by indifference or competition.
Given this lack of accountability, it may be unsurprising that the
setting for Cohens intervention is a Critical Ethnic Studies conference
rather than a queer or gender studies setting.4 This reminds me of the
stakes involved in doing radical queer-of-colour scholarship in variously
disciplined spaces.5 While Gender Studies is expanding in ways that often
repeat rather than interrupt the harnessing of dominant womens and
LGBT movements to the projects of nation and empire, Ethnic Studies
is facing a brutal backlash despite long-standing efforts by scholars to
perform themselves as and participate in the production of what Jodi
Melamed calls good multicultural citizens.6 As Critical Ethnic Studies
is re-invented as an insurgent knowledge formation that resists rather
than diversifies capitalism, colonialism and imperial war, it enters into
possibility as a site for anti-racist queer and trans scholarship.7
2. On premature death, see Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference:
Notes on Racism and Geography, 54 Prof. Geographer 15-24 (2002).
3. Cohen, supra note 1, at 131.
4. Cathy Cohen, Keynote Address at the University of California Riverside Conference: Critical
Ethnic Studies (Mar. 10-12, 2011).
5. While this describes inter/disciplinary formations in the U.S., we also need accounts of other
parts of the world, including outside the global north. In Germany, where social movements
have remained very white, gender studies has had some success in finding institutional
homes. Meanwhile, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, which were never institutionalised,
have begun to flourish outside the academic industrial complex. See, e.g., Decolonize the
City!: Berlin, http://www.decolonizethecity.de (last visited Sep. 15, 2013) (the Decolonize
the City conference that was organised by racialised graduate students active in the Berlin
Colloquium of Colour and attended by numerous queer- and trans-of-colour participants).
6. Jodi Melamed, Reading Tehran in Lolita: Making Racialized and Gendered Difference
Work for Neoliberal Multiculturalism, in Strange Affinities: The Gender and Sexual Politics
of Comparative Racialization 76-109 (Grace Hong & Roderick Ferguson eds., 2011); H-Net
Discussion Networks, Critical Ethnic Studies Conference, http://cesa.ucr.edu/general_info.
html (last visited Sep. 10, 2013) (ironically, the critique of Ethnic Studies in the first Critical
Ethnic Studies conference call for papers barely preceded the outlawing of ethnic studies in
Arizona.)
7. See the CESA Call for Papers 2013, supra note 6. Theorists and activists on these intersections
have made interventions where they could but it is interesting that while Gender and
Sexuality Studies have in some ways become more reluctant homes for women/queer/
trans-of-colour scholarship, Critical Ethnic, Race and Legal studies are at least promising to
become more open. This might reflect their lesser investment in narratives of progress, rights
and protections and their longer history of questioning how the criminal justice system,
46 JGLR / Vol. 4, Issue 2

One of the dominant political methods Cohen singles out besides

marriage and gays in the military is hate crime activism.8 She joins a
steadily swelling chorus of voices that critique the hate crime paradigm,
now one of the top issues for LGBT movements globally, for strengthening
a criminal justice system that disproportionately targets people who
are poor, of colour, or unable or unwilling to conform to norms and
standards around gender, sexuality, health and consumption.9 These
critical voices have so far been limited to the U.S., currently the leading
exporter of punitive methods and technologies.10 The experience there
suggests that those categorised as needing protection from violence
often end up criminalised themselves for supposed hate crimes against
whites, heterosexuals and other structurally more powerful people.11
As queer-of-colour organisations like the Audre Lorde Project and
Fierce have shown, this is compounded for sexually and gender non-
conforming people who are poor and of colour. For many, this was
amply demonstrated by the fate of CeCe MacDonald, an African-
American transgender woman who was first violently attacked and
then sentenced to prison after her attacker died in the ensuing fight.
Similar criminal injustice was done to the New Jersey 7, a group of Black
lesbians who likewise defended themselves and were subsequently, all
but one, sentenced to prison.12
even in its nicer faces, acts against oppressed people in a way that is neither accidental nor
aberrant. It remains to be seen whether Critical Ethnic Studies will expand to hold queer-
and trans-of-colour scholarship in particular, whose unique contribution to wider Race and
Ethnic studies lies precisely in its potential for dismantling the white gender and sexuality
norms that are at the heart of coloniality.
8. Yasmin Nair, Why I Wont Come Out on National Coming Out Day, (Oct. 9, 2008), http://
www.yasminnair.net/content/why-i-won%E2%80%99t-come-out-national-coming-out-
day-9-october-2008 (she calls this the usual Holy Trinity of Hate Crimes Legislation,
Marriage, and Dont Ask Dont Tell).
9. Against Equality: Prisons Will Not Protect You (Ryan Conrad ed., 2012); Dean Spade,
Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics and the Limits of Law (2012);
Dean Spade & Craig Willse, Confronting the Limits of Gay Hate Crimes Activism: A Radical
Critique, 21 UCLA Chicano-Latino L. Rev. 38-52 (2000).
10. Since the passage of the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act in
2009, LGBT and disabled subjects have been included in the list of protected populations. The
Act marks a shift particularly for trans identity, which was long treated as the innocent Other
of gay assimilation but is suddenly finding vitalisation within a regime that we characterise
as murderous inclusion. Jin Haritaworn et. al., Murderous Inclusions: Queer Politics,
Citizenship and the Wars without End, 15 (4) Intl Fem. J. Pol. (forthcoming December
2013).
11. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing
California (2007). As Gilmore might put it, the oppressive implementation of hate crime
regulations shows that this system does the work it was designed to do even or especially in
the face of efforts to reform it; Andrea Smith, Unmasking the State: Racial/Gender Terror
and Hate Crimes, 47 Austl. Fem. L. J. 47-57 (2007); See also M. Bassichis & D. Spade,
Racialised-Gendered Detention and a Politics Beyond Recognition, in Queer Necropolitics
(Jin Haritaworn et. al. eds., 2013).
12. See Background, Support CeCe MacDonald!, http://supportcece.wordpress.com/about-2/
2013 / Beyond Hate 47

Nevertheless, what I call the hate/crime paradigm the sticking of

criminality and pathology to bodies and populations that are always
already seen as hateful, where hate functions as a racialised psy discourse
must be further unpacked.13 The German context, where terms like
Hasskriminalitt (hate crime) and Hassgewalt (hate violence) arrived very
recently and are far from naturalised, may be instructive here. Until the
late 2000s, violent homophobia was not primarily understood as the
deed of hateful individuals or as something that is necessarily a cause for
incarceration. Foregrounding a transnational race, gender and disability
studies lens and placing it in critical dialogue with affect studies and
scholarship on biopolitics and necropolitics, I argue that the hate/crime
paradigm travels within a context where capital, identity moulds and
carceral and biomedical methods cross borders instantly while critiques
and alternatives often do not.
The pages ahead examine how the hateful homophobe, who in a
Northwest European context of war on terror and crime is immediately
recognised as Muslim, arrived in close proximity with another figure
of hate, the Intensivtter the multiple, chronic or intensive offender
that is in turn forged in close hybridity with anti-black methodologies
that target poor, racialised communities in the U.S. In the late 1990s,
he (sic) became the latest folk devil whose basic incapacity for empathy
and integration (often figured as mental and physical deficiency) has
produced consent not only for faster, harsher prison sentences for young
people but for the cultural exiling of barely nationalised populations
from the realm of human intelligibility and entitlement.
By starting with the proximities and overlaps between sexual and
criminal justice, carceral and biomedical discourses on hate, violence
and crime, and racialised, perverse and mad figurations, we may
background/ (last visited Sep. 1, 2013); Incite, Critical Lessons from the New Jersey 7,
New Left Turn, (September 2008), http://www.incite-national.org/media/docs/9908_
toolkitrev-nj7.pdf.
13. I draw the insight that emotions such as anger, terror and, I argue, hate stick to racialised
bodies in ways that orient them away from the community, from Sara Ahmed. Drawing on
anti-racist disability scholars such as Rachel Gorman, Nadia Kanani and Louise Tam, I further
propose that hate functions as a psy discourse that serves to normalise or segregate racialised
bodies or populations. Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004); Rachel Gorman,
Mad nation? Thinking Through Race, Class, And Mad Identity Politics, in Mad Matters: A
Critical Reader in Canadian Mad Studies (B.A. LeFranois et. al. eds., forthcoming); Nadia
Kanani, Race and Madness: Locating The Experiences Of Racialized People With Psychiatric
Histories In Canada And The United States, Critical Disability Discourse/Discours Critiques
dans le Champ du Handicap (2011); Louise Tam, Governing Through Competency: Race,
Pathologization, and the Limits of Mental Health Outreach (Nov. 29, 2012) (Masters
dissertation, University of Toronto) (on file with University of Toronto Research Repository);
On psy discourses, see Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self
(1989).
48 JGLR / Vol. 4, Issue 2

approach the ascendancy of queer, multicultural and disabled subjects

in a different way, one that abolishes rather than diversifies systems of
murderous inclusion and frees us to perceive, formulate and strengthen
radical alternatives. This has obvious implications for disciplinary
formations that more often than not are re-territorialised by the most
privileged constituencies and while opening the door keep the masters
house, in the oft-cited terms of Audre Lorde, intact.14

II. Hate as a Psy Discourse

While many are now aware that the label criminal, including in
its hateful variation, is more likely to stick on racially and sexually
oppressed people than on racists, homophobes and transphobes, few
have asked how the label hate may function in a similar way. This may
be to do with the sense that people have fought for this, as a senior
colleague from the U.S. stated to a group of queers of colour and allies
in Berlin, who asked what the recent arrival of the homophobic hate
crime discourse in Berlin might mean for racialised people.15 Even
those who reject hate crime as a model of organising often partly remain
within its logics. Thus while the crime part of hate crime is sometimes
debunked, its hate counter-part is rarely interrogated. While learning
immensely from the compelling anti-violence methodologies formulated
in radical women-of-colour and queer- and trans-of-colour activisms in
North America, including community accountability, prison abolition
and transformative justice, I am struck by how hate (now as hate
violence rather than crime) has survived as a rationale for much of this
work.
My intention is not to dismiss these important responses that have
taught me so much about community-building against multiple forms
of violence, including those carried out by the state as the most powerful
bully of poor, racialised and gender non-conforming people. Rather,
I wish to propose that we further expand our abolitionist imagination
by asking how hate is ascribed in tandem with not only crime but also
pathology, in ways that defend and expand not only the prison but also
psychiatry and other institutions of care and reform. In particular, I
argue that hate always already emanates from racialised bodies and

14. A. Lorde, The Masters Tools Will Never Dismantle The Masters House, in Feminist
Postcolonial Theory: A Reader 25-8 (Ryan Mills & Sara Lewis eds., 2003)
15. I am fully aware, of course, that white people are also racialised. Nevertheless, I follow
Canadian activist cultures in invoking racialised as an umbrella category that describes the
effect of racism across different geographies and processes of settler colonialism, migration
and exile, including in contexts where categories such as person of colour are not widely
accessible or understood.
2013 / Beyond Hate 49

minds in ways that call for their assimilation and segregation in the
form of treatment, education, policing, confinement and deportation.
In taking this further step and interrogating hate alongside crime
and pathology as twin pedagogies that educate us about the need for
murderous systems of inclusion, we may draw on affect studies as a useful
methodology to examine how meaning is ascribed to racialised bodies
and populations. Particularly helpful to me is Sara Ahmeds argument
that affect sticks to bodies differentially, producing affect aliens such as
the melancholic migrant who in his backward orientation towards
lost belongings and bad experiences stands in the way of multicultural
happiness.16 In considering the hateful Other as an affect alien who
threatens a nostalgic vision of a violence-free community, I am further
struck by the call for action that this figure demands from its onlookers.
It appeals to authoritative intervention and thus demands a distinctly
institutional critique. In particular, it is noteworthy that figures like
the melancholic migrant, the Black rioter and the hateful homophobe
invoke psychiatric authority the diagnosing, profiling and treatment
of depressed, schizophrenic or otherwise maladjusted populations
unable to control their impulses or function in a civilised society.17
Following insights by anti-racist disability and Mad Studies scholars, we
can trace how the discourse on the mental and physical inferiority of
racialised populations has informed successive projects of colonialism,
slavery, genocide and immigration, and continues to underwrite carceral,
biomedical, military and other regimes of control and reform.18
In paying closer attention to the sites where bodies are sorted into
populations according to evaluations of their stock, I am inspired
by current engagements in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies which
interrogate how subjects and populations are carved out for life and
death, often along older lines of degeneracy that must be understood
within ongoing histories of racism, eugenics, colonialism and genocide
and the spatial practices of segregation, confinement and deportation
that have arisen from them. Some of these engage with biopolitics and
necropolitics in asking how racialised bodies become recognisable as

16. Ahmed, supra note 13; Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (2010).
17. See Jonathan Metzl, The Protest Psychosis (2009); Franoise Vergs, Monsters and
Revolutionaries: Colonial Family Romance and Mtissage 185-245 (1999). This proximity
between the racialised and the mad subject further necessitates a more critical engagement
with affect that acknowledges its origins in psy discourse, see Rachel Gorman, Social Theory
in the Disabled Nation: Class and the quagmire of affect, Historical Materialism (paper
presented at Historical Materialism: Toronto Conference, 2012, on file with author) .
18. For an excellent overview, see Kanani, supra note 13.
50 JGLR / Vol. 4, Issue 2

those from whom, in Foucaults words society must be defended.19

If this is more apparent with regard to death-making processes, it has
equal purchase for the question of how subjects become viable for life,
public visibility and citizenship. In our introduction to Queer Necropolitics,
Adi Kuntsman, Silvia Posocco and I note that the vitalisation of (white)
queer subjects often stays close to the sites where queer and trans
people were (and often continue to be, post-homo/transphobic claims
to the contrary) sentenced to social or actual death. Gay assimilation
requires an ascent from insanity and criminality that is best performed
as expertise over those who properly belong segregated.20 What might
an abolitionist project look like that attends to caring alongside more
obviously punishing institutions and examines processes of exclusion
alongside processes of murderous inclusion?
Narratives of hate are instructive here. In the crime reports, activist
writings and media texts on violent crime and homophobic hate crime
that I review here, the two regularly appear alongside each other as
related labels invoked to profile working-class, racialised youth. They
work at each others service making those marked as hateful who fail at
emotional management appear destined to become violent, criminal
and in need of punishment or reform. The hateful personality resembles
the dangerous individual described by Foucault.21 In his reflection on
the growing presence of psychiatric experts in court, Foucault notes a
shift from the crime to the criminal, where what is punished is no longer
something that has already happened but something that might happen
in the future, a potential for harm that can be forecast by dissecting its
carriers inner workings. As Nikolas Rose and Dorothy Roberts have
each observed, this is currently rehearsed with the rise of biopsychiatry
and biocriminology and the renewed attempt to identify future criminals

19. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, in Lectures at the Collge de France, 1975-1976
239-264 (Mauro Bertani & Alessandro Fontana eds., 2003); Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics,
15 (1) Pub. Culture 11-40 (2003).
20. For a collection of emerging writings on queer necropolitics, see Haritaworn et. al., supra note
10; Queer Necropolitics (Jin Haritaworn et. al. eds., 2013); See also Strange Affinities: The
Gender and Sexual Politics of Comparative Racialization (Grace Hong & Roderick Ferguson
eds., 2011); Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Re-
create Race in the Twenty-first Century (2011); Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages:
Homonationalism in Queer Times (2007); Spade, supra note 9; For abolitionist writings on
prison and psychiatry, see Liat Ben-Moshe, Disabling Incarceration: Connecting Disability
to Divergent Confinements in the USA, 39 (3) Critical Soc. 385-403 (2011); Bonnie Burstow,
The Withering Away of Psychiatry: An Attrition Model for Antipsychiatry, PsychOut
Conference, (May 7-8, 2010), http://individual.utoronto.ca/psychout/papers/burstow_
keynote.html.
21. Michel Foucault, About the Concept of the Dangerous Individual in 19th-Century Legal
Psychiatry, 1 Intl J. L. & Psychiatry 1-18 (1978).
2013 / Beyond Hate 51

by their genes or forebrains.22 But while Roberts, from her Black feminist
perspective, highlights the survival of eugenicist discourses on race,
class and crime in experiments on Black inner-city school children in
the U.S., Rose, commenting on the same material but from a purely
Foucauldian perspective that misses race, comes to a different, somewhat
optimistic conclusion. Unlike the older criminological figure of the
born criminal, he argues, the new scholarship, about whose uses and
abuses he remains partly open, is distinctly post-eugenics in that it only
assumes a potential for violence which must first be triggered.23
I propose that this binary view of biology vs. social construction,
natural vs. social science, nature vs. nurture misses the point of how
publics are seduced into viewing some as less than human and come
to consent to their banishment from this category and its benefits. In
fact, the personality profiles that I will review next are all designed to
appear post-eugenics (and post-race) and distance themselves from
purely biological explanations. In media case studies as in statistical
reports, perpetrators are described as young men of colour who have
suffered family violence, school exclusion, failed social mobility and
discrimination. Moreover, marking the end of eugenics as the beginning
of social constructionism becomes problematic when we revisit accounts
by early twentieth century eugenicists that already fused social and
biological explanations and were less purely biologistic than we imagine
today.24 A more useful approach might therefore be to examine how
seemingly opposite frameworks of nature vs. nurture, punishment vs.
care (and we might add gays vs. Muslims) combine to script racialised
bodies as degenerate in ways that usher into consent highly diverse
constituencies, including those that position themselves on the right side
of power.
Narratives of hate which, as I will illustrate, is often described as an
emotion that is both caused by harm and harmful, are productive in
this. Hate is similar to anger which has been better explored and more
widely contested, including in anti-racist and feminist discussions of

22. Nikolas Rose, Screen and Intervene: Governing Risky Brains, 23 Hist. Hum. Sci. 79-105
(2010); Dorothy Roberts, Crime, Race, and Reproduction, 67 Tulane L. Rev. 1945-1977
(1993); For a genealogy of biopsychiatrist attempts to re-inscribe the link between race and
violence, see Peter Breggin, Campaigns Against Racist Federal Programs By The Center for
the Study of Psychiatry and Psychology, 1 (3) J. Afr. Am. Stud. 3-22 (1995).
23. See Ilina Singh & Nikolas Rose, Biomarkers in Psychiatry, 460 Nature 202-07 (2009).
24. See Alice Halmi, Kontinuitten der Zwangspsychiatrie (Continuities of Forcible Psychiatry),
http://www.irrenoffensive.de/kontinuitaeten.htm (last visited Sep. 10, 2013) (Alice Halmi
examines this with regard to early Twentieth Century German psychiatrist Bonhoeffer).
52 JGLR / Vol. 4, Issue 2

oppression and resistance to pathologisation.25 Both are often described

as responses to bad experiences and belittled as excessive, irrational and
misplaced. Yet unlike hate, anger has also been described as a righteous
reaction against oppression, as in this frequently cited Malcolm X
statement: Usually when people are sad, they dont do anything. They
just cry over their condition. But when they get angry, they bring about
a change.26 A prime gender studies example is the figure of the angry
Black feminist, whose anger is celebrated and glorified even as those who
are interpellated this way are also regularly demonised and pathologised.
Hate, in contrast, lacks in positive connotations and reclamations. It is
seemingly irredeemable and though constantly explained in proliferating
etiologies, it characterises the humanly inexplicable.
I will explore how case studies of violent perpetrators nevertheless often
take the generic form of empathy narratives, honing in on evidence of
child abuse, poverty, discrimination and other bad experiences that at
first sight may look like understandable reasons to feel bad. Nevertheless,
if the causes of hate are understandable, the hateful reaction and
subsequent action are not, rendering it immediately atrocious. This
serves to rewrite the old chain of race, class and crime as one of present
or absent empathy with suffering. To hate is to reveal ones impulsiveness
and irrationality as well as ones failure to perform oneself as a civilised
subject who has the capacity to master hir destructive impulses, empathise
with others pain, and prove hir potential for change.
In the personality profiles that follow, the hateful perpetrator appears
as the constitutive outside to the neoliberal citizen, who manages and
is able to talk abour hir feelings and expresses and takes responsibility
for hirself, thus constantly striving towards emotional intelligence,
communication and self-actualisation.27 If this is a strategy of
classification through which, as Beverley Skeggs argues, the white middle
class distinguishes itself from the reformable white working class, the
racialised perpetrator remains uncultivable.28 Hir hate is a failure to love
and forgive, to perform hirself according to the Christian values of an
avowedly secular community and as a peaceful subject in times of war.
Indeed, in the personality profiles and unassailable statistical regression

25. See, e.g., Bell Hooks, Killing Rage: Ending Racism (1996); Metzl, supra note 17.
26. Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements, Vol. 125 107 (G. Breitman ed., 1994);
Interestingly, googling this quote first pointed me to http://www.change-management-
coach.com/change-quotes.html. My point is that anti-racist states labeled as depression are
often pathologised even in anti-racist communities.
27. Rose, supra note 13.
28. Beverly Skeggs, The Value of Relationships: Affective Scenes and Emotional Performances,
18 (1) Fem. Legal Stud. 29-51 (2010).
2013 / Beyond Hate 53

analyses that I will examine, ones propensity to crime rises with ones
degree of religiosity for Muslims but not for Christians, as the love of thy
neighbour renders the latter more peaceful and tolerant.
Is it a coincidence that hate has become a Muslim property, that it is
gaining currency as the bulk of the racialised in Northwest Europe are
re-cast as Muslim, as one globally interchangeable population?29 What
bodies appear as hateful in different times and places? In the German
texts that I examine below, English-speaking studies of crime that have
been formulated in the anti-black context of the U.S. are effortlessly
assimilated into an anti-Muslim framework that is itself highly
transnational. How do the hateful criminal and the hateful homophobe
each bring home globalised spectres of Muslim terror and Muslim rage,
re-posing the seemingly unanswerable question -- Why do they hate us
so much? -- for diverse constituencies and at various scales? As I shall
explore next, the figure of the hateful Other has also been central in
the dual emergence of a respectable queer subject who is innocent and
worthy of inclusion and recognition, and of a gay-friendly community
that is willing to protect it. It is to this drama of queer lovers and hateful
Others that I turn next.

III. Queer Lovers and Hateful Others

I was at a friends living room, all white people, there was a guy I had
known for a while, he had just finished taking hormones: he is a cis-
male now who was trans in the past. He had some spare medication
at home which he didnt need any more. I said Im having trouble
finding a doctor who would give me health insurance. Ill buy them off
you. And very kindly he gave them to me for free later on. The other
white people in the room asked him to share some of his experiences
as a white trans person in Berlin, he was living in Kreuzberg. So within
maybe 4-5 minutes he started talking about how the Turks in Kreuzberg
and Neuklln were looking at him when he was walking on the street,
make derogatory comments and so on. And I said Turks, what do you
mean by Turks? And then he said Oh yeah, and also the Arabs. I went
silent. There were three other people in the room they all looked at
me because they knew that what he said was disgusting, and they knew
that I would have a problem with him. And I mean Im not stupid, I
saw their eyes, and they were saying Let it go, that his pain is more
valuable, needs to be more visible than mine. So I let it go, but it built.
So a week later I said to the other three, Do you know how fucked up

29. On the globalisation of gendered figures of Islam, see Yasemin Yldz, Turkish Girls, Allahs
Daughters, and the Contemporary German Subject: Itinerary of a Figure 1, 62 (4) German
Life & Letters 465-481 (2009).
54 JGLR / Vol. 4, Issue 2

that was? When he was narrating that transphobic experience in the

street, how does that construct my own experience as a trans Arab? It
means Im transphobic. And if youre giving out medals, he has a right
to talk about transphobic experiences in the street, then honey give me
some medal. .... So they were talking about white injury at the expense
of perpetrating another injury in the same room, and rendering that
completely unspeakable. (Charlie Abdullah Haddad, interview in
summer 2012)
I begin with this statement by Charlie Abdullah Haddad, a trans-of-
colour activist living in Berlin whom I interviewed about the state of
queer politics there.30 I invoke Charlies words in order to make sense of
the processes that have enabled some queer narratives to find a public
while others get trapped in queer living rooms (or under queer tongues).
The experiences that are described here do not give us unmediated
access to violence against trans people, queers-of-colour or other
newly desirable subject positions that have become recognisable under
conditions of gay imperialism and homonationalism. Rather, Charlies
re-telling of different scenes of violence the street, the queer living room
invites us to question the very economies and relations of production,
circulation and exchange through which truths about violence are
manufactured and attachments to scenes and states of injury occur.
This re-telling enables us to understand violence narratives as
generating and distributing bio-value. Formerly degenerate subjects
find speakability, visibility, publicity and vitality in front of publics and
counter-publics that are able to come together for the first time on a
racialised terrain that is populated by violent, criminal and criminally
homophobic populations whose degenerate properties are much harder
to contest. Gay-friendly Berlin takes shape in affective landscapes and
biopolitical narratives of Kreuzberg and Neuklln as the dangerous
inner city that belongs to Turks Oh yeah, and also Arabs. Yet the
circulation of queer bodies and intimacies is uneven. While some bodies
become visible in this criminal setting, others disappear from view. And

30. See SUSPECT, Where Now? From Pride Scandal to Transnational Movement, Bully Bloggers,
(26 July 2010), http://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2010/06/26/where-now-from-pride-
scandal-to-transnational-movement/. My ongoing interviews with queer- and trans-of-
colour activists in London and Berlin so far suggest that queer-of-colour positionalities
that critique the racialisation of LGBT politics and cultures continue to be suppressed even
as the topic of German homonationalism, following the Pride racism scandal in 2010 that
became better known as Butlers refusal, has gained much international interest. I am also
interested in making sense of the simultaneous desire for queer-of-colour and transgender
bodies (largely figured anti-intersectionally) and the failure to examine the foundational role
of racism in vitalising much queer and trans organising in Northwest Europe at this moment.
Against this, I foreground a whiteness critique which in my view must precede the demand to
render queer and trans-of-colour lives transparent.
2013 / Beyond Hate 55

while some stories roll off tongues easily, others are best let go. The ones
that body forth are current and become currency (in Adi Kuntsmans
terms).31 They are rewarded, gain medals as Charlie puts it. They
accumulate bio-value by converting the suffering queer body into a
resource whose energies and injuries can be extracted to accumulate
capital.
Nevertheless, if the promise of inclusion is made to many, the returns
yielded from these intimate investments, as Agathangelou, Bassichis
and Spira put it, are not the same from all queer starting points.32
Charlies statement brings to the fore how the transgender body, whose
ascendancy from the prison and the asylum is painfully recent and
incomplete, becomes interesting within a changing landscape shaped
by gentrification, war on terror and moral panics over crime and
integration. Long excessive to LGB-fake-T politics, its spectacular
proximity to death (as the always already injured or dying target of hate)
makes it the ideal victim subject.33 This complicates earlier theorisations
of wounded attachments and traumatised citizenship.
Wendy Browns argument that claims to recognition are often made
in the cadence of the wound is helpful, especially in understanding the
global purchase of hate crime activism as the latest single issue politic.34
Nevertheless, wounded performances do different work for different
bodies. In the place of a universally injured subject, it may be more
helpful to examine the conditions under which some injuries become
spectacular while others appear self-inflicted or insignificant. This is well-
illustrated by the changing landscape of transgender recognition which,
as Charlie demonstrates, does not open equally to all trans people. While
it invites some as experts, consultants and coalition partners, often those
that happen to be less vulnerable to violence as a result of their race
and class privileges and professional qualifications, trans people most

31. Adi Kuntsman, Figurations of Violence and Belonging: Queerness, Migranthood and
Nationalism in Cyberspace and Beyond (2009).
32. Anna Agathangelou et.al., Intimate Investments: Homonormativity, Global Lockdown and
the Seductions of Empire, 100 Radical Hist. Rev. 120-143 (2008).
33. On the victim/subject, see Ratna Kapur, Erotic Justice: Law and the New Politics of
Postcolonialism (2005); On the LGB-fake-T, see Dean Spade, Fighting to Win, in Thats
Revolting!: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation 31-37 (Matt/Mattilda Bernstein
Sycamore ed., 2004); See Jin Haritaworn & Riley Snorth, Trans Necropolitics, in Transgender
Studies Reader Vol. II (A. Aizura & S. Stryker eds., 2013) (for a more detailed discussion of
the place of injured trans-of-colour bodies in transgender ascendancies).
34. Wendy Brown, Wounded Attachments, 21 (3) Pol. Theory 390-410 (1993); For an earlier
critique, see Glen Coulthard, Keynote Address at the University of California Riverside
Conference: Critical Ethnic Studies and the Future of Genocide (Mar. 10-12, 2011) (future
critiques could focus on how the figure as a wound reifies illness and disability as undesirable
and reduces them to a metaphor).
56 JGLR / Vol. 4, Issue 2

vulnerable to violence become if anything less capable of telling stories

that reach the status of the political and are capacitated mainly in their
(social or actual) deaths. According to Charlie, a trans Arab who refuses
to authenticate a racist etiology of violence has no value in this exchange
system. In the absence of a queer community that is willing to consider
trans-(especially trans-feminine)-of-colour lives as vulnerable and trans
women of colour as coalition partners, to participate in violence talk
in the queer living room would only mean to risk losing fragile ground.
In the space that is available to Charlie, violence and anti-violence talk
follow a racialised binary of perpetrators (non-trans people of colour)
vs. victims (white trans people). In the logic of this binary, to be a trans
Arab means to be transphobic.35
Indeed, as mentioned above, the case of the U.S., where hate crime laws
already exist, shows that gender non-conforming people of colour who
experience violence rarely receive protection from the criminal justice
system but are more likely to be criminalised themselves.36 The policing of
multiple forms of violence extends to the queer living room. Sharing ones
experiences of them not only fails to elicit empathy but makes one sound
mean, incoherent and undeserving of community. For queer and trans
people of colour, anti-racist, anti-violence talk can land us in a corner
where we are forced to watch the space around us contract, at multiple
scales: from the gender non-conforming body to the queer living room to
the gentrifying neighbourhood. In this economy of anti/violence, value
and pathology are not distributed randomly but follow the powerful lines
where populations are carved out, resources (from hormones to housing)
distributed and chances of life and death extended or withheld.37
Let us take a closer look at the queer intimacies that have appeared as
worthy of protection in this economy. In German publics, queer kisses
have mushroomed. One example is the photographed kiss between
two white men that adorned an article in a big daily newspaper on a
psychological study commissioned by the biggest gay organisation.38

35. Of course, trans Arabs, too, have been discovered as victim subjects that authenticate
racist and imperialist discourses in a way that has enabled white trans people to enter into
sovereignty as their rescuers and representatives. Nevertheless, this renders an anti-racist,
trans Arab positionality even more completely inauthentic and impossible.
36. See Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex (Eric Stanley & Nat
Smith eds., 2011) (this occurs at all levels of police, courts and prisons, which have themselves
been described as a site of massive and systematic gender segregation and gender violence).
37. See Gilmore, supra note 11; Spade, supra note 9.
38. Philip Grassmann, Migrantenkinder gegen Schwule: Homophobes Berlin (Migrant
kids versus Gays: Homophobic Berlin), Sddeutsche Zeitung, May 17, 2010, http://
www.sueddeutsche.de/panorama/migrantenkinder-gegen-schwule-homophobes-
berlin-1.335341.
2013 / Beyond Hate 57

The study compared migrant school kids attitudes to homosexuals

to their German counterparts, clearly marking the former as an alien
population.39 Another example is the state-sponsored kissing posters and
annual kiss-ins in Berlins problem areas, teaching their inhabitants (in
German, Turkish and Arabic) that Love deserves Respect!40 The reform
of the uneducable Other finds its material reflection in the regeneration
of the inner city. With the fall of the wall, the former Auslnderghetto
(foreigners ghetto) moved to the heart of the city, beginning its rebirth
as the multicultural inner city where the rich and upwardly mobile
now like to live, eat and work. As Charlies account documents, queers
with race and class privileges have been among the gentrifiers and have
left their marks on these areas by declaring them dangerous. In what
I call the drama of queer lovers and hateful Others, some become
a lovely sight and emerge as innocent and worthy of protection and
survival while others are re-inscribed as degenerate pathogens that must
be displaced from the areas to which they were once confined so that
these may recover.41
The queer lover who has barely escaped from the closet, the prison
and the asylum moves into the daylight through inscription into
neoliberal, national and transnational values, including whiteness and
gender conformity; privacy, respectability and beauty; freedom and
free choice; integration and security; security and protection; and
diversity and vitality. Lisa Duggans formulation of homonormativity,
as a new neoliberal sexual politics that does not contest dominant
heteronormative assumptions and institutions but upholds and sustains
them while promising the possibility of a demobilised gay constituency
and privatised gay culture anchored in domesticity, consumption and
privacy is instructive here.42 If the innocence and worthiness of the

39. The term migrant was once forged in multi-generational and multi-diasporic struggles
against the racist construction of racialised people as foreigners but has since become
its euphemistic substitute. For a critique of the eternal migrant as a figure that keeps
Germanness white, see Fatima El-Tayeb, European Others: Queering Ethnicity in Postnational
Europe (2011).
40. The posters, which were funded by the local government in response to the Drag Festival,
are available at http://noasharfberlin.blogspot.com.au/2009/06/love-deserves-respect-
campaign.html; For a more detailed discussion, see Jin Haritaworn, Queer Injuries, 37 (1)
Soc. Justice 69-89 (2010-2011).
41. For analyses of queer gentrification, see Jennifer Petzen, Gender Politics in the New Europe:
Civilizing Muslim Sexualities (2008) (unpublished Ph.D thesis, University of Washington);
Decolonize Queer: From Gay Pride to White Pride? Why Marching on East London is Racist,
Decolonizing Sexualities Network, (Mar. 15, 2011), http://www.decolonizingsexualities.org/
decolonize-queer/; Christina Hanhardt, Butterflies, Whistles, and Fists: Gay Safe Street
Patrols and the New Gay Ghetto, 100 Radical Hist. Rev. 61-85 (2008).
42. Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on
Democracy 179, 190 (2003).
58 JGLR / Vol. 4, Issue 2

queer lover in these images is encoded in the terms of neoliberalism

through hir recognisability as like us (mediated through hir whiteness,
masculinity and gender conformity and in the aesthetics of global
consumer culture) hir sudden ascent into loveliness nevertheless occurs
in landscapes which are shaped by ongoing histories of racism that pre-
date neoliberalism and are irreducible to it.
This becomes clearer when we attend to the hateful Other as the
figure without whom, I argue, this ascendancy would not be possible.
We have at our disposal a range of analytics to make sense of the queer
lover and hir new desirability to the newly gay-friendly publics that
rally around hir. Besides homonormativity, affect studies in particular
critiques of romantic love have helped us understand why institutions
like marriage that were historically used to demonise queers not only
become objects of desire for queers but enable homonormatively figured
queers to become desirable as well.43 Yet unlike love, hate has so far been
insulated from critique. How might we de-naturalise its hold on anti-
oppressive imaginations?
A transnational analysis is insightful here. In contrast to the U.S.
where the hate crime discourse is associated with the legacy of the civil
rights movement, its arrival in Germany is more recent and reflective
of the asymmetric travel of political methodologies in globalising social
movements. Until the late 2000s, terms like Hasskriminalitt (hate crime)
and Hassgewalt (hate violence) were not widely used or even intelligible
in anti-violence activism in Germany. Attempts by anti-racist activists to
scandalise the pogrom-like outbreak that accompanied the integration
of the reunified Germany through the label hate crime did not stick.44
This contrasts with the LGBT hate crime discourse that hit the headlines
in 2008, arriving on a fertile ground ploughed in over a decade of
moral panicking over Muslim homophobia. We have described the
landmarks of this moral panic elsewhere but I will briefly repeat some
of them now.45 Its earliest incarnations are the press releases of the

43. Heather Love, Compulsory Happiness and Queer Existence, 63 New Formations 52-64 (2007)
(as Love argues, queerphobic institutions become desirable to queers due to their affectivity:
not simply do they promise normalcy, they also promise happiness); See also Lauren Berlant,
Love, A Queer Feeling, in Homosexuality and Psychoanalysis 432-51 (T. Dean & C. Lane eds.,
2001).
44. For more on the post-unification context, see Tina Campt, The Crowded Space of Diaspora:
Intercultural Address and the Tensions of Diasporic Relation, 83 Radical Hist. Rev. 94-113
(2002).
45. There are too many illustrations of this kind of LGBT organising and journalism to discuss
them all here; For a detailed historiographical account of the shift in mainstream sexual
politics to migrants and the conversion of homophobia into a Muslim problem, see Jin
Haritaworn & Jennifer Petzen, Invented Traditions, New Intimate Publics: Tracing
2013 / Beyond Hate 59

biggest gay organisations in Berlin in the late 1990s that presented the
phantom of migrant homophobia to an initially insubstantial public.46
By the mid-2000s, this public had expanded as these organisations
managed to strategically chain the newly born homophobic migrant
to bigger figures of honour killers, terrorists and integration refusers.
The homophobic migrant appeared prominently on the horizon of the
German nation with the debate around the Muslim Test, the proposed
citizenship exam that claimed to test the democratic, women-and-gay-
friendly propensities of a clearly denominated population against a
brand new set of invented traditions.47
By 2006, the above-mentioned Simon Study (2006) of Berlin school
kids, commissioned by the biggest gay organisation and carried out by
a white, gay psychologist at Kiel University scientifically proved by
then what everyone knew: that the migrants are more homophobic
that the Germans and that the twain shall never meet.48 Designed in
the plastic activism of the homo-assimilationist NGOs what I call
something that claims to be a mass movement but is really the work of
a handful of paid functionaries and their graphic designer the moral
panic over hateful, homophobic migrants nevertheless did not stay
there. It found its first bodies in 2008 in the radical queer alternative
scene, when a group of drag kings, trans people and queer women were
beaten up during the internationally publicised Drag Festival.49 The
the German Muslim Homophobia Discourse, in Islam in its International Context:
Comparative Perspectives 48-64 (C. Flood et. al. eds., 2011); For three journalistic accounts
that have participated in the racialisation of homophobia as a problem of criminally violent
migrant youth, see Jan Feddersen, Was guckst du? Bist du schwul? (Watcha looking at?
You gay?), Tageszeitung (Nov. 8, 2003), http://www.taz.de/1/archiv/?id=archivseite&d
ig=2003/11/08/a0081; Sascha Steuer, Homosexualitt: Die jngsten bergriffe machen
uns Angst (Homosexuality: The recent assaults make us fearful), Tagesspiegel (Nov. 6,
2008), http://www.tagesspiegel.de/berlin/landespolitik/position-homosexualitaet-die-
juengsten-uebergriffe-machen-uns-angst/1365758.html; Martin Reichert, Gewalt gegen
Schwule: Jetzt reichts langsam! (Violence against Gays: Enough Already!), Tageszeitung
(June 18, 2010), http://www.taz.de/!54213/.
46. See Fatima El-Tayeb, Begrenzte Horizonte: Queer Identity in der Festung Europa (Restricted
Horizons: Queer identity in Fortress Europe), in Spricht die Subalterne Deutsch? Migration
und Postkoloniale Kritik (Does the Subaltern Speak German? Migration and the Postcolonial
Critique) (H. Steyerl & E. Gutirrez Rodriguez eds., 2003).
47. I propose that we understand women-and-gay-friendliness as an invented tradition in
Hobsbawms sense; See Eric Hobsbawm, Introduction: Inventing tradition, in The Invention
of Tradition 1-14 (E. Hobsbawm & T. Rangers eds., 1983) (the Muslim Test failed in this
specified form but only after a productive media career).
48. See White Logic, White Methods: Racism and Methodology (Tufuku Zuberi & Eduardo
Bonilla-Silva eds., 2008) (by scientific, in this case, I describe how a non-academic discourse
gains value by being converted into academic knowledge. As Zuberi, Bonilla-Silva and their
contributors detail, racism, eugenics and scientific methods have a shared genealogy).
49. Elsewhere, I have described in depth how the Drag Festival incident was converted into
the deeds of variously Turkish homophobes or Turkish fascists. See Ivo Bozic, Das groe
Schweigen: Homophobe trkische Jugendliche und die Angst vor Rassismusvorwrfen (Big
60 JGLR / Vol. 4, Issue 2

ensuing debate, which immediately (and many argue, falsely) attributed

the incident to homophobic Turks first let the word Hasskriminalitt,
hate crime, roll off German tongues. What made the term hate crime
assimilable in the late 2000s as opposed to the early 1990s was not a
sudden outbreak of homophobia or even transphobia that dwarfed the
arson attacks on asylum seeker homes and migrant-owned shops in
the newly unified Federal Republic. On the contrary, the few cases
(which, once the new discourse was consolidated, largely disappeared
from public debate) were highly contested.50 Rather, I argue that the
criminally hateful homophobe became intelligible through his (sic) family
resemblance with other criminal figures. If the queer lover has become
recognisable through hir familiality with trans/national neoliberal ideals
of respectability and privacy, the hateful Other entered into the German
landscape by joining a rich archive peopled by dysfunctional families
from deficient communities in the degenerate ghetto.51 It is to this that
we shall turn now.

IV.The Hateful Homophobe and the

Intensive Offender: Uncanny Resemblances of
Sexual and Criminal Justice
I sometimes show my students two YouTube videos, next to each other,
in the same projection.52 One is from the year 2007 and is a TV news
clipping based on closed circuit camera shots. It is on the Serkan A. and
Spyridon L. case which, true to its status as a case, served to familiarise
German TV audiences with a new figure of moral panic: the Intensivtter
(intensive or repeat offender), a thus far administrative category whose
punitive application and criminalising impact on young people of colour

silence: Homophobic Turkish youth and the fear to be accused of being racist), 26 Jungle
World; Homophober Angriff in Kreuzberg (Homophobic attack in Kreuzberg), Indymedia.
org, (June 8, 2008), http://de.indymedia.org/2008/06/219458.shtml; Judith Luig, Ein Tag
als Drag King die tageszeitung (A day as a drag king), Tageszeitung, June 11, 2008, http://
www.taz.de/1/leben/alltag/artikel/1/und-dann-werden-wirbehaart/?src=SE&cHash=
71964b40bc; See Jin Haritaworn, Colorful Bodies in the Multikulti Metropolis: Trans
Vitality, Victimology and the Berlin Hate Crime Debate, in Trans-Migrations: Bodies,
Borders, and the (Geo)politics of Gender Trans-ing 11-31 (Trystan Cotton ed., 2011).
50. See Karriere Eines Konstruierten Gegensatzes: Zehn Jahre Muslime versus Schwule (Career
of a constructed opposition: Ten years Muslims against gays) (Koray Ylmaz-Gnay ed., 2011).
51. See Maria Stehle, Narrating the Ghetto, Narrating Europe: From Berlin, Kreuzberg to the
Banlieues in Paris, 3 (3) Westminster Papers Communication & Culture 48-70 (2006); Petzen,
supra note 41.
52. Brutale Mnchner U-Bahn Schlger gefasst (Brutal Munich subway bashers have been
arrested), Youtube, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zh5PW61S9Cw&playnext=1&list=PL
3F633C86147B7C4E; berwachungskamera Security Camera Social Spot Berlinale, Youtube,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvxR-OAGB-I.
2013 / Beyond Hate 61

has been compared to three strikes in the U.S.53 As Lauren Berlant notes
the case is pedagogical and exemplary in that it offers an account of
the event and of the world, and is the primary communicative action
through which biopower, in the name of experts, sorts individuals into
populations.54 The case is also crucial to moral panics over crime which,
according to Julia Oparah, need offending bodies primarily in order
to demonstrate the need for tough action regardless of actual crime
numbers.55 This is also the case with Serkan A. and Spyridon L. who
beat up an old white man on the Munich subway just before Christmas.
The media describes the victim as a frail pensioner who tells the judge:
I have been a teacher my whole life and then...56 For months, the
act is replayed on TV with an intensity and brutality that has its own
performative force.57 It is central in manufacturing consent for faster,
harsher sentences for young people and leads to debates about whether
criminal children who bring us to the end of our patience58 (in
the words of Judge Kirsten Heisig, who became a media star via this
moral panic) should be put in closed homes or education camps. This
is the second famous Intensivtter case after the Mehmet case, which
in November 2001 produced consent for the deportation of children
born and raised in Germany who until then had secure status. Both
are spectacular cases in Ruthie Gilmores sense59: their dramatic
mediatisation creates consent for new instruments of criminalisation
even as crime statistics are falling.60 But while less youth offend, their

53. So far, the Intensivtter is mainly an administrative category applied to youth who have
committed a given number of crimes (in Berlin, ten per year) or who are on their way
to becoming Intensivtter. Its main purpose, besides marking a young person out for
harsher, faster sentences in court, seems to be surveillance: thus, every Intensivtter is
assigned a personal police officer to watch over hir and hir surroundings (i.e., hir friends,
family and neighbourhood). In addition to youth penal law, people labelled Intensivtter are
governed through a (proliferating) arsenal of pedagogical, social/youth work and psychiatric
instruments, including forensic and youth psychiatry, secured childrens homes and boot
camps, anti-violence training, and Sicherungsverwahrung (safe custody), a mixed penal/
psychiatric form of confinement that has repeatedly been found in violation of human rights
by the European Court for Human Rights.
54. Lauren Berlant, On the Case, 33 (4) Critical Inquiry 663-72 (2007).
55. Julia Sudbury (now known as Oparah), Celling Black Bodies: Black Women in the Global
Prison Industrial Complex, 80 Fem. Rev. 162-179 (2005).
56. For a translation, see Von Amsperger, Die schlagen mich tot, Stern, June 24, 2008, http://
wap.stern.de/op/stern/de/ct/-X/detail/kultur/U-Bahn-Schl%E4ger-Prozess-Die/624986/.
57. See Ahmed, supra note 13 (on the visual performativity of September 11).
58. Kirsten Heisig, Das Ende der Geduld: Konsequent Gegen Jugendliche Gewalttter (The End of
Patience: Tough Against Young Violent Offenders) (2010).
59. Ruth Gilmore Wilson, Globalisation and US Prison Growth: From Military Keynesianism to
post-Keynesian Militarism, 40 (2/3) Race & Class 171-88 (1999).
60. The experts on intensive offenders admit to this; See Claudius Ohder & Lorenz Huck,
Intensivtter (Intensive offenders), in Berlin Hintergrnde und Folgen Vielfacher
Strafrechtlicher Aufflligkeit Teil 1 Eine Auswertung von Akten der Abteilung 47 der
62 JGLR / Vol. 4, Issue 2

criminal energy is so intense that we have to act quickly both hate and
intensity produce an affective urgency that justifies quick and ruthless
intervention.
The other video is called CCTV (berwachungskamera). It also shows
a terrible attack by young people marked as poor and racialised, this
time against two white men who are kissing in a night-time parking lot.
Unlike the first, CCTV is no documentary but an advertising film for a
local gay anti-violence NGO called Maneo (also author of some of the
posters and kiss-ins discussed above). It is shown at the Berlinale, on
public television and in the advertising programme at Berlin cinemas. It
precedes Serkan A. und Spyridon L. by a year yet its plot, visualities,
and technologies bear uncanny resemblances with this case. The hateful
Other exists even before the figure finds its bodies and materialises into
the very action it has been fore/cast to perpetrate.
In the videos, the homophobic migrant and the intensive offender look
identical. They are recognised through the same forensic media and the
same affective scripts. The frail pensioner and the bashed gay men slide
into one sentimentalised, white, victim subject. Their interchangeability
is confirmed by a growing army of experts who loyally repeat each other.
For example, the report Violence Phenomena among Male, Muslim Youth with
Migration Background cites the Simon study, which is in turn commissioned
by the biggest gay organisation LSVD (the Lesbian and Gay Association
Germany), who further made the above mentioned kissing posters.61 And
when Judge Heisig, long the most prominent expert on the Intensivtter,
dies (first we hear by suicide, then by Arab family clans), both the LSVD
and Maneo publish obituaries to a valuable partner and supporter.62
In the Simon study, the LSVD press releases, the articles and special
issues on the Drag Festival and the many reports on violent Muslim youth,
the profile is near identical. To stylistically retrace the formulaic manner
in which the hate/ intensive offender is profiled: He (sic) is badly integrated
and religious but only where he can be construed as Muslim. The most
influential of the violence reports, the Pfeiffer study, whose findings are
disseminated through headlines such as Young, Muslim, Brutal,63 goes

Berliner Staatsanwaltschaft, (Backgrounds and consequences of repeat offenses Part 1 of an

analysis of the files of division 47 of the Berlin prosecution) (2006).
61. Ahmet Toprak & Katja Nowacki, Gewaltphnomene bei Mnnlichen, Muslimischen Jugendlichen
mit Migrationshintergrund und Prventionsstrategien (Violence Phenomena Among Male,
Muslim Youth with Migration Background and Strategies of Prevention) (2010).
62. Jin Haritaworn, Queer Injuries: The Racial Politics of Hate Crime in Germany, 37 (1) Soc.
Justice 69-89 (2010-11)
63. Kriminologische Studie: Jung, muslimisch, brutal, Spiegel Online, June 5, 2010, available at
http://www.spiegel.de/panorama/justiz/0,1518,698948,00.html.
2013 / Beyond Hate 63

to particular lengths to highlight, in typical post-Christian/secular and

divide-and-rule manner, the positive effects of a Christian socialisation
(including for Christians who are not white Germans) in lowering rather
than increasing delinquent behaviour.64 Moreover, and synonymously, the
hate/ intensive offender is non-German. For Pfeiffer and colleagues, school
children who do not themselves have German nationality or were not
born in Germany, or to whose biological parents the same applies
cannot call themselves German.65 But when they tick No in answer to
the question if they perceive themselves as German, they are classified
as badly integrated. These studies are thus performative. They remind
both participants and readers that Germanness equals whiteness.66 In a
citizenship context that has only just let go of its blood principle and is for
the first time softening the biological borders of its nationality law, this
is crucial. The figure of the criminal (and the criminally homophobic)
migrant is a central technique by which the border is forcefully redrawn.
The border runs not only through blood but also through space.
The hateful/ intensive offender is described as coming from a rural-
patriarchal family.67 He is not from here, no matter how many
generations have been here before him.68 He is described as investing
in honour and thus placed in fertile kinship with honour killers. He is
from problem neighbourhoods or places of self-segregation where
immigrants form big proportions of the population.69 These are the
same areas that urban planners now praise for their good social mix.70
To live there means something else to the immobile, racialised subject
than to the mobile, white subject, whose arrival and displacement of

64. Dirk Baier et al., Kinder und Jugendliche in Deutschland: Gewalterfahrungen, Integration,
Medienkonsum (Children and young in German: Violence experiences, integration, media
consumption) (2010).
65. Id. at 12.
66. Ahmed, supra note 13.
67. LSVD, Schluss mit Diskriminierung und Gewalt: Migranten mssen Verhltnis zu
Homophobie klren (An end to discrimination and violence: Migrants have to come clear
about their relationship to homophobia), LSVD Press Release (18 Jul. 2003).
68. El-Tayeb, supra note 46 (see Fatima El-Tayebs critique of the figure of the eternal migrant,
which serves to keep the nation white).
69. Sonja Haug, Jugendliche Migranten Muslimische Jugendliche: Gewaltttigkeit und
Geschlechterspezifische Einstellungsmuster (Young Migrants Muslim Youth: Violence and
Gender Specific Attitudinal Patterns) 19 (2010); Ohder & Huck, supra note 60.
70. Topos, Sozialstruktur Und Mietentwicklung Im Erhaltungsgebiet Luisenstadt (SO 36)
(Social Structure and Rent Development in the Protected Area Luisenstadt), Berlin:
Bezirksamt Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg (2008). http://www.berlin.de/imperia/md/content/
bafriedrichshain-kreuzberg/abtstadtpg/amtstapl-verm_baa/stapl/stadterneuerung/luise_
endbericht.pdf?start&ts=1264082523&file=luise_endbericht.pdf; For a critique, see Loretta
Lees, Gentrification and Social Mixing: Towards an Inclusive Urban Renaissance?, 45 (12)
Urban Stud. 2449-70 (2008).
64 JGLR / Vol. 4, Issue 2

dangerous bodies and intimacies symptomatises the areas recovery

and regeneration. We must begin to deal with queer gentrification in
Europe as well as its transnational travels: how are queers with race
and class privileges who newly arrive in Londons or Berlins inner cities
greeted as pioneers in a settler colonial manner? How do queers from
all over Europe, Australia and North America immediately become
residents while those who were confined in these areas for generations
now lose all claims to them?
The hate/ intensive offender is further characterised by his pathological
attachments. He has few German (or, in Simon, homosexual)
friends, his whole gang is delinquent, which is further correlated to
the fact that their language of communication is Turkish or Arabic.71 If
bilingualism was briefly celebrated as intercultural competency, it has
now lapsed back to its older, deficient status. It signifies backwardness:
it is a bad orientation (in Sara Ahmeds terms) to bad objects, bodies,
communities and places.72
Another feature of the hate/ intensive offender is his adherence
to violence-legitimating masculinity norms (Gewalt-legitimierender
Mnnlichkeitsnormen, short GLMN), which in the qualitative studies is
generically scripted as the signifying chain of Oriental despotism: violent
dad, submissive mom, no communication skills, no impulse control.73
How does this clunky new label, mystifyingly abbreviated as GLMN
serve to reformulate larger debates about the correlation between
masculinity and violence? We might compare this account to feminist
accounts of the family as a site where violence is normalised and gender
difference is enforced and reproduced.
While criminologists have long assumed a higher tendency to be
violent in boys (i.e. male-assigned children), this is rarely accompanied
by a critique of male socialisation. On the contrary, formulae such as
GLMN work to insulate violence in chronically delinquent boys that
can be profiled and segregated from regular boys.74 Nevertheless, this
71. Haug, supra note 69; Baier et al., supra note 64. The term gang is used in English, invoking
U.S. anti-black imaginaries of the ghetto. Determined in highly arbitrary ways, it is another
globalising instrument that allows lawmakers and enforcers to criminalise young people
of colour through their proximity with other low-income youth of colour; See Betraying
the Model City: How Gang Injunctions Fail Oakland, Critical Resistance Oakland (2011)
available at http://crwp.live.radicaldesigns.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/CR_
GangInjunctionsReport.pdf.
72. Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (2006).
73. Baier et.al., supra note 64; Toprak & Nowacki, supra note 61.
74. Marcus Roth & Inge Seiffge-Krenke, Frhe Delinquenz und familire Belastungen in der
Kindheit (Early Delinquence and Family Stress in Childhood), in Jugendliche Intensivtter:
Interdisziplinre Perspektiven (Young Intensive Offenders: Interdisciplinary Perspectives),
2013 / Beyond Hate 65

distinction is not stable or secure, as shown by the ongoing attempt to

find objective criteria to tell boys whose violence must be acted upon
apart from those who are merely acting out and for whom violence is a
normal step on their normal path to masculinity.75 GLMN also offers
new solutions to the old eugenicist problem of how to identify families that
pass on violence. In particular, it is a variation on the old classist theme of
the bad child from the bad family.76 But while in the generalised trope,
delinquent children spring from excessive gender symmetry (working
mother and weak or missing father in the white or Black working-class
family), in its Orientalised variant, the intensive offender results from
excessive gender difference (weak mother, authoritarian father).77 As Black
feminists and queer-of-colour critics have argued with regard to the
cultures of poverty thesis, which blamed Black and Latino families
for producing dysfunctional children, racialised families are treated
as sexually and gender non-conforming regardless of their apparent
heterosexuality.78 And as anti-racist disability theorists have shown,
this view of racialised communities as deficient and as reproducing
problematically also naturalises disableism.79 The conceptualisation
of violence as GLMN thus serves to both repeat white middle-class,
heteronormative, non-disabled reproduction as the uncontested norm
and normalise the everyday, banal violence through which categories of
race, age, gender, disability and class are upheld.
Racism is also normalised and orientalised in other ways. While
both the hateful homophobe and the Intensivter are often discussed
in terms of underprivileged, underachieving and failed masculinities,
the Intensivter, as the older and better-researched figure, reflects this in
greater detail. He (sic) lacks in structural integration also measured
as educational aspirations. The high rate of children racialised as
Muslim who leave school without qualifications is not the responsibility
of one of the worlds most class-differentiated educational systems but
of deficient, uneducated parents who fail to integrate their children.80
These failures are measured ever more imaginatively. Besides the

255-276 (Annette Boeger ed., 2011).

75. I thank Nina Mackert for our conversations about this.
76. Rose, supra note 13.
77. Toprak & Nowacki, supra note 61.
78. See Cathy Cohen, Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer
Politics?, 3 (4) GLQ: J. Lesbian & Gay Stud. 437-465 (1997).
79. See Gorman, supra note 13.
80. For a typically riddled response to Germanys bad results in international comparisons of
educational achievement such as the PISA study, see Armin Himmelrath, 10 years of PISA
testing: Taking Stock, Goethe Institut, http://www.goethe.de/wis/fut/sul/en8729860.htm
(last visited Sep. 10, 2013).
66 JGLR / Vol. 4, Issue 2

tried and tested pathologisation of bilingualism, experts bemoan that

racialised parents doom their children to a limited horizon, limited
verbal and emotional skills and limited social capital, by failing to
play parlour games with them or to send them to Schtzenvereine and
Trachtenvereine (rifle and traditional costumes clubs).81 Integration here
becomes the nostalgic performance of a petty-bourgeois Germanness
that exists mainly as a Heimatfilm fantasy.82 If this parochial landscape
seems an odd site for the reproduction of the globalised affects of
neoliberal citizenship (imagine learning conflict resolution skills at the
local rifle club!), this is in part enabled by the Intensivtters spectacular
performance as an affect alien who is unable to talk about hir feelings
and to express hirself other than through violence. He is the constitutive
outside of a neoliberal citizen whose autonomy, self-responsibility and
emotional intelligence are evidenced by hir capacity to constantly work
on hirself. This narrative is at least as much about the integration of the
national into the transnational as about the integration of the migrant
into the nation. The dis-integrating migrant, who is redundant to both
the national and the global, becomes the container into which these
trans/national anxieties are displaced, enabling the nation to globalise
without losing its identity.83
Besides his bad attachments to bad places and intimacies, the hate/
intensive offender suffers from perceptions of discrimination.84 This trait
again brings home the workings of bio- and necropower in the invention
of this population. Violence is always already in those thus labelled, as
well as in anyone who could be caught in this extensive profile. It cannot
happen to you; to mention or even perceive it in its most toned-down
version (as discrimination rather than racism) increases your risk of being
criminalised as well as pathologised as paranoid. We can contextualise
this with the punishable status of anti-racist discourse more generally.
In Germany, use of the term racism is largely confined to the 1933-
1945 era.85 Auslnderfeindlichkeit (hostility against foreigners) has been a
common euphemism which nevertheless psychologises and de-politicises

81. Toprak & Nowacki, supra note 61; Baier et. al., supra note 64.
82. This genre became popular after WWII and typically depicts a sentimental world set in the
mountains, where white, gender-conforming boy romances girl. It is nostalgic for an innocent
Germany unspoilt by racial or sexual Others.
83. See Rose, supra note 13; Skeggs, supra note 28; See also Toprak & Nowacki, supra note 61.
84. Haug, supra note 69, at 19.
85. Cengiz Barskanmaz, Rasse Unwort des Antidiskriminierungsrechts? (Race taboo term
in antidiscrimination law?), Kritische Justiz 382-389 (2011); Claus Melter & Paul Mecheril,
Rassismustheorie und forschung in Deutschland. Kontur eines wissenschaftlichen Feldes,
(Theory and Research on Racism in Germany: Contour of a Scientific Field) in Rassismuskritik
Vol 1 13-22 (Claus Melter & Paul Mecheril eds., 2009).
2013 / Beyond Hate 67

racism as a somewhat natural reaction to foreign bodies that are by

definition outside of and antithetical to Germanness. Even this limited
frame is turned on its head in the figure of the Intensivtter and the wider
debates about migration and integration that it has mediated. In these
debates, the real problem, from which the politically correct obsession
with hostility against foreigners has apparently distracted us, is revealed
to be hostility against Germans (Deutschenfeindlichkeit).86 Set in the school
yards of Kreuzberg and Neuklln, this drama lets the taboo word
racism finally enter the German language but only to turn the victims
into perpetrators and anti-oppression discourse into both completely
unspeakable and punishable language. We must understand this drama
in its institutional logics whose murderous orientation Angela Davis aptly
sums up as the school-to-prison pipeline.87 In Germany, too, schools
prepare many children for social death rather than enhancing their life
chances and thus participate in what Liat Ben-Moshe calls the trans-
institutionalisation of surplus populations between institutions of care,
punishment and reform.88 This again intersects with the pathologisation
of the political as Deutschenfeindlichkeit or homophobia, a term that queer
scholars have often contested and yet continually repeat.89
In the Simon study of migrant vs. German school children,
homophobia finally becomes a phobia a psychological tendency
to react to homosexuals with a negative evaluation which includes
negative affects or feelings, negative cognition and negative behavioural
tendencies.90 The conversion of sexual oppression into a psychological
problem of dysfunctional youth radically invisibilises from view the
everyday and institutional stuff that makes the world, in so many ways,
hard to survive for sexually and gender non-conforming people. Instead,

86. Yasemin Shooman, Der Topos Deutschenfeinlichkeit, in Rechtspopulistischen Diskursen (The

trope of Deutschenfeindlichkeit in right-wing populist discourses) (forthcoming); Baier et. al.,
supra note 64. Pfeiffer and colleagues also mention Deutscheinfeindlichkeit as a common
trait among their subjects. The theme of reverse racism is a globalising phenomenon as the
prosecution of anti-racist activist Houria Bouteldja for anti-white racism in France also
illustrates; See Alana Lentin & Gavan Titley, Diane Abbots Tweet and the Red Herring
of Anti-White Racism, The Guardian, 6 January 2012, http://www.guardian.co.uk/
commentisfree/2012/jan/06/diane-abbott-tweet-anti-white-racism.
87. Angela Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete (2003).
88. Ben-Moshe, supra note 20.
89. See Karl Bryant & Salvador Vidal-Ortiz, Introduction to Retheorizing Homophobias, 11 (4)
Sexualities 387-296 (2008).
90. Unter einer homosexuellenfeindlichen Einstellung ist die psychologische Tendenz, auf
Homosexuelle mit einer negativen Bewertung zu reagieren, gemeint. Diese Bewertung
beinhaltet negative Affekte oder Gefhle, negative Kognition und negative Verhaltenstendenz.
Bernd Simon, Einstellung zur Homosexualitt (Attitudes to Homosexuality), Zeitschrift fr
Entwicklungspsychologie und Pdagogische Psychologie, 88 (2007), http://arbeitsblaetter.
stangl-taller.at/news/104/einstellung-zur-homosexualitaet.
68 JGLR / Vol. 4, Issue 2

it turns it into a property of deficient bodies who are precluded from life
chances on the basis of their mental and physical traits. The metonymy
between the German and the homosexual victim is highly productive
in sexually expanding and racially contracting a German identity that no
longer needs to feel guilty for the Holocaust but itself becomes its victim.
For gays, too, were persecuted, and the hatred of homosexuals carries
the same name as the hatred of Germans: German pig, German
whore, gay pig, pig eater.91
The ghosts of a past which, as Black German theorists and mad
activists in particular maintain, began long before national socialism
and reaches far into the present, haunt both the hate crime and the
wider violence discourse.92 The first conjures them loudly. I lack the
space to discuss the coincidence of hate crime and remembrance
activisms in the same organisational and temporal setting. Nevertheless,
some brief thoughts on the activism surrounding the Memorial for
the Homosexuals Persecuted under National Socialism, erected in
2008, will illustrate my point. In many LGBT commemorations, the
homosexual victim of National Socialism is put in competition with the
Jewish one, an (anti-intersectional) metonymy which serves to inscribe
the homosexual subject into the foundational myth of a free democratic,
post-racist Federal Republic. This happens through mimicry: the
Homo-Memorial as it is often called endearingly, perfectly imitates the
older Memorial for the Murdered Jews in Europe, completed in 2004.
It is built with the same material, the same colour and shape. Yet
as Haakenson points out, instead of the 2711 grey slabs, we have to
make do with one, which is bent (not straight).93 The Homo-Memorial
hosts several of the kisses and kiss-ins we have already come across: one
is continually projected inside, in a film of gay kissers that is an in-built
part of the sculpture. Others are performed outside, in remembrance

91. M. Heyl et. al., U-Bahn-Schlger Spricht Im Knast: Mein Vater hat mich geprgelt!, Bild,
Jan. 3, 2008 available at http://www.bild.de/news/vermischtes/vater/schlaeger-3399928.
bto.html; Jan Schutz, Kriminelle Auslnder: Diese mutige Richterin redet Klartext, Bild,
Jan. 23, 2010, available at http://www.bild.de/news/vermischtes/richterin/redet-klartext-
ueber-kriminelle-auslaender-5879218.bild.html; Anja Weber, Homophobie-Expertin der
Berliner Polizei: Gewaltfngtnicht an, wennesblutet, Taz, available at http://www.taz.de/1/
leben/koepfe/artikel/1/gewalt-faengt-nicht-an-wenn-es-blutet (we may understand these
revisions alongside the Orientalisation of an anti-semitism which in Germany has become a
property of Muslims (Barskanmaz, personal communication in summer 2009)).
92. See Fatima El-Tayeb, Schwarze Deutsche: Der Diskurs um Rasse und Nationale Identitt
(Black Germans: The Discourse on Race and National Identity) (2001); Halmi, supra note 24;
On haunting, see Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matter: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination
(1996).
93. Thomas Haakenson, Queers in Space: The Queer Art of Michael Elmgreen and Ingar
Dragset, Queer Futurities Symposium, Berlin: Finland Institute, 18-19 May, 2009.
2013 / Beyond Hate 69

ceremonies and kiss-in actions that commemorate the dead and place
them in continuity with todays injured lovers.94 Todays victims (of
homophobic migrants) seamlessly join a teleology of Never Again! The
irony that the memory of a past of incarceration and deportation should
orient us to a future of more of the same, so that the Holocaust will not
repeat itself, is lost.
In contrast to the hate crime debate, which loudly claims its historic
heritage, the noisy hauntings of the wider violence debate remain
unspeakable to the point of punishment. The intensive offender appears
as a new phenomenon that requires new methodologies. The blunt spatial
and cultural figures of the patriarchal family in the ghetto are joined
by a multitude of statistics that correlate integration index, religiosity
scale and other factors of influence (such as violence in the family,
family in proximity to poverty and life in disadvantaged housing areas)
in countless regression analyses.95 The numbers thus produced must be
understood in a historical context that simultaneously birthed racism,
eugenics and statistics as kindred white logics and white methods. As
Zuberi and Bonilla-Silva show in their book of the same name, these
indeed have the same fathers in scientists such as Francis Galton.96
The memory of this history enables us to understand violence
narratives and their numerologies in their racist, classist and eugenicist
echoes, as well as in their transnational travels. This is why seemingly
disparate and parochial debates such as the (currently revived) Cultures
of Poverty thesis in the U.S. and the crime and integration panics
in Northwest Europe produce easily transposable explanations that
nevertheless appear intrinsically local and authentic.97 How might we

94. LSVD, Feier zum Tag des Gedenkens an die Opfer des Nationalsozialismus (Ceremony on
the day of remembrance of the victims of National Socialism), http://www.berlin.lsvd.de/
cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=450&Itemid=82 (last visited Sep. 5,
2013). This 2009 commemoration speech asked us to remember a long-term, middle-class
relationship that ended in a love death during national socialism. The same speech also cited
the litany of racialised hate crime cases that were circulating at the time and warned us to not
let the past repeat itself. Another example of how the hate crime discourse has been invoked
to wed the terror of the present with the terror of the past (and white gay men as victims
of both) is the annual kiss-in of the anti-violence organisation Maneo that was performed in
front of the memorial that year, after targetting problem neighbourhoods in the previous
years.
95. Baier et. al., supra note 64 (these are the factors cited by the Pfeiffer study); For other
reports, both quantitative and qualitative, that have repeated similar themes of integration,
religiosity, inner city background and inherited violence and poverty, see Haug, supra note
69; See also Toprak & Nowacki, supra note 61.
96. Zuberi & Bonilla-Silva, supra note 48.
97. The Cultures of Poverty theory was popularised in the 1960s and attributed poverty among
Black and Latino people to the dysfunctional structures of their communities and families.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (1965). For a
critique, see Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction and the Meaning of
70 JGLR / Vol. 4, Issue 2

turn around the gaze and begin to travel, too, borrowing analytics that
help us come to grips with these highly mobile racist scripts of bodies,
minds and spaces? For example, Sherene Razacks analysis of race, space
and Canadian settler colonialism has purchase for the European inner
city. In Razacks analysis, the racialised inner city and the reservation are
cast as degenerate spaces producing degenerate bodies: the indigenous
and racialised people who live there are always already cause and origin
of violence (both in the figure of the racialised perpetrator and in
that of the non-rapeable woman of colour).98 Race, class, gender and
colonial violence thus disappear and become utterly unremarkable, self-
inflicted phenomena which naturally inhabit racialised bodies and their
surroundings.

V. Profiling the Intensivtter

The search for the Intensivtter does not stop at constructionist
explanations. Besides criminological, sociological and pedagogical
expertise, he is also the subject of the psychologists and psychiatrists.99
In the descriptions of the psy experts, he becomes a type, a personality
profile, a genus. No longer at stake is the punishment of deeds that have
already been done. In risk profiles, at risk children aged five or younger
are prepared for early detection. This is Foucaults shift from the crime
to the criminal. In the collection Intensive adolescent offenders: Interdisciplinary
perspectives, a youth psychiatrist complains that the Diagnostic and Statistical
Manual of the American Psychiatric Association (DSM, which long included
homosexuality and gender identity disorder, and still lists many queer
and trans practices and identities as mental disorders) has no diagnosis
specifically for intensive offenders.100 At the same time, the existing
DSM, whose menu of diagnoses has grown exponentially since its first
edition (from 60 to soon over 400), is invoked continually. Among the
existing labels, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and
Anti-Social Personality Disorder (ASPD) are cited repeatedly.
While a genealogy of these diagnoses is beyond the scope of this
paper, both resound heavily with eugenicist spectres of degeneracy

Liberty (1997).
98. Sherene Razack, When Place Becomes Race, in Space, Race and Law: Unmapping a White
Settler Society (Sherene Razack ed., 2002).
99. On the dispersal of psy discourse to other disciplinary and professional formations and
throughout neoliberal therapeutic culture, see Rose, supra note 13.
100. Wilfried Huck, Intensivtter aus jugendpsychiatrischer Sicht (Intensive Offenders from a
Youth Psychiatric Perspective), in Jugendliche Intensivtter. Interdisziplinre Perspektiven
(Young Intensive Offenders: Interdisciplinary Perspectives) 143 (Annette Boeger ed., 2011).
2013 / Beyond Hate 71

and are deeply raced and classed in their application. Rachel Gorman
describes hyperactivity as the successor of moral imbecility which was
frequently attested to children of colour considered turbulent, vicious,
rebellious to all discipline; they lack sequence of ideas and probably
power of attention.101 More harmlessly it seems, the Intensivtter debate
invokes ADHD as a prognostic tool to spot future chronic delinquents
as difficult babies.102 In North America, the widespread diagnosing of
ADHD and commonplace medicating of children has been linked with
the aggressive marketing of pharmaceutical companies.103 The expansion
of this diagnosis onto unsaturated European markets must be observed
against the background of a medical industrial complex (M.I.C.) which,
in Jasbir Puars terms, capacitates bodies anew.104 We must ask how the
M.I.C., as many working on the intersection of race and disability have
shown, treats bodies differentially.105 We must further interrogate how
it renders surplus populations productive beyond their labour power. In
the context of neoliberal racism, bodies labelled chronically delinquent
are not incidentally the ones affected disproportionately by the exodus
of manufacturing and the resulting mass unemployment.106
This is also apparent in the second diagnosis cited in the Intensivtter
debate: Anti-Social (or Asocial or Dissocial) Personality Disorder. On
the checklist of this diagnosis are traits such as failure to conform to
social norms, lack of the capacity for empathy, irresponsibility and
disregard for social norms, impulsiveness, low threshold for discharge

101. Gorman, supra note 13 (she also highlights the bifurcation of ADHD into hyperactive
children of colour (who) are segregated in special education, while attention deficit middle
class youth are provided with specialised computers and tutors).
102. Roth & Seiffge-Krenke, supra note 74, at 256. This is not the only diagnosis currently deployed
to profile racialised children as future delinquents. According to Nadia Kanani, this bears
similarities with the diagnosis of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) used specifically to target
indigenous people [in Canada] and, particularly the reproductive capacity of indigenous
women under the guise of preventing congenital disability, or as you say difficult babies. The
supposed symptoms of FAS are also behavioural, including inability to tell right from wrong,
having a limited understanding of the consequences of ones actions, trouble following rules.
(personal communication of 6 March 2013).
103. Peter Breggin, Talking Back to Ritalin (1998).
104. Jasbir K. Puar, The Cost of Getting Better: Suicide, Sensation, Switchpoints, Racialization,
Neoliberalism and Queering Public Spheres Symp., UC San Diego, 22-23 Apr., 2011.
105. Christiane Hutson, Unverschmt Wir im Spannungsfeld von Rassismus, Hetero-/Sexismus
und Ableism (Shameless We, in the force field of racism, hetero/sexism and ableism), (13
May 2009), www.zedis.uni-hamburg.de/wp-content/uploads/hutson_rassismus_sexismus.
pdf (paper presented at Hamburg University); Roberts, supra note 97.
106. There is anecdotal evidence in activist communities in Germany that children labelled
difficult or disruptive, often those racialised and gendered as Turkish or Arab, are now given
this diagnosis at school (Racism and Mental Health workshop at the Decolonize the City
conference in Berlin, 23 September 2012). I am grateful to Cengiz Barskanmaz and Meral El
for sharing preliminary findings from their research in Berlin schools that further confirm
this trend (summer 2012).
72 JGLR / Vol. 4, Issue 2

of aggression, including violence and incapacity to experience guilt.107

Not only are the carceral and the biomedical here intertwined in a
manner that recalls older eugenicist notions of the innate criminal, but
personality disorders are generally considered incurable. In the words
of two psychologists in the same collection who support the view that
chronically delinquent youth represent their own type (the LCP or
life course persistent type), it can hardly be assumed that individuals
of the LCP type will learn pro-social behaviours as adults.108 Both
chapters cite the increasingly popular brain and gene theories which
treat violence as hereditary. This may occur either biologically or socially
aggressiveness can also be caused by violent damage to the head!
Recalling the debate over the born vs. socialised criminals, this logic
fuses not only nature and nurture but also science and Christian morality:
the frontal brain is the seat of both impulse control and conscience. It also
brings to mind the scandals over proposals to experiment on children in
Black and Latino neighbourhoods in the U.S. in the name of preventing
violence and rioting and the recurrent calls for brain scans and gene
tests to screen and intervene.109 In the U.K., researchers have begun to
assemble risk profiles that include bio-markers alongside social factors
such as alcoholism, poverty, experiences of violence and ethnicity and
may soon become available to judges, teachers and doctors for diverse
purposes.110
Again, a transnational perspective is important here. While the
German experts rely heavily on the English-speaking literature on
ASPD, which interchangeably describes an anti-social, dissocial or
asocial type, I have not so far spotted the term asozial in the German
literature possibly because this was the exact term that the Nazis used to
mark poor people, sexual deviants and Roma and Sinti for sterilisation
or internment. Nevertheless, we can take Sherene Razacks thoughts
on the degeneracy of racialised bodies and spaces, which are only
ever perceptible as origins and never as targets of violence, further
by attending to the return of explicit eugenics to Germany: from
the racist theory of German politician Thilo Sarrazin that people of
Turkish origin have lower and Jewish people higher IQs which hit the
headlines around the same time as the Intensivtter panic and are cited in
the debate to the panic over the cultural practice of cousin marriage
107. Anti-social personality disorder, Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisocial_
personality_disorder (last updated Sep. 18, 2013) (these are assembled from the DSM and
from the checklist of the World Health Organization).
108. Roth & Seiffge-Krenke, supra note 74, at 255-6.
109. Breggin, supra note 22, at 3-22; Rose, supra note 22.
110. For a somewhat uncritical account, see Singh & Rose, supra note 23.
2013 / Beyond Hate 73

and violence reports that open with demographic prognoses about the
disproportionate growth of migrant populations.111
These are narratives of decline which locate the social and biological
downfall of the nation in the reproduction of racialised populations.
Following queer-of-colour theorists such as Rod Ferguson and Cathy
Cohen, we may juxtapose these improper heterosexualities with queer
investments in reproduction and regeneration through figures such as gay
marriage, rainbow families and the queer lover who comes to life in the
shadow of the degenerate bodies and the regenerating buildings of the
gentrifying ghetto. The vitalisation of the queer subject is necropolitical
in that it occurs in or close to the very death worlds from which Others
are ghosted.112
The queer subjects new vitality contrasts with the inescapably
asocial heritage of the Intensivtter. So far this appears to occur in a
random rather than systematic manner. A study by Ohder and Huck, a
criminologist and a psychologist who reviewed files kept of youth with
this label at the prosecution service in Berlin, highlights constructionist
explanations but suddenly begins to list the physical, mental and
social conspicuities of the surveyed individuals.113 These include:114
impairment speaking (stammering, mute), motoric conspicuity
(hyperactivitiy, coordination problems), chronic visible physical
conspicuity (stunted growth, limping), brain organic conspicuity (early-
childhood brain damage, Down syndrome, epilepsy), conspicuities with
harm of others (extraversion) or of self (introversion), (delusional)
distortion of perception, running away from home, prostitution and
suicide attempts.
While the figure of the Intensivtter has disability, class and race
written all over it, his innate deficiency physical and mental inferiority,
poverty, social and sexual deviance, a criminal, mad or alcoholic
genealogy distinguishes him from the recognisably disabled subject,
the homonormative subject, the reformable working class subject and
the good multicultural subject. The eugenicist ghosts that haunt him
are starkly different from the distinctly post-genocidal landscape of the
speeches by the Homo-Memorial.
111. Haug, supra note 69, at 5; Thilo Sarrazin, Deutschland Schafft Sich Ab (Germany does away
with Itself) (2010).
112. Haritaworn et. al. (eds.), supra note 11; Haritaworn et. al., supra note 10; Mbembe, supra
note 19, at 40.
113. Ohder & Huck, supra note 60.
114. Many of the terms in the following list, such as Aufflligkeit (conspicuity) sound odd in
German too. I argue that the choice of a more random, less medically precise vocabulary
serves to obfuscate its eugenicist hauntings.
74 JGLR / Vol. 4, Issue 2

What work does the comparison with the Jewish victim do in making
a (certain) queer subject respectable? How does the orientation towards
the concentration camp (an institution of the past, whose inmates were
innocent and respectable) turn us away from other sites of social and
actual death, like the prison or the psychiatric institution where the
first were gassed, and the last (officially) killed in 1948,115 an institution
of care and reform that was never de-Nazified through which far
more sexually and gender-non-conforming people have gone?
Again, the hate/ intensive offender remains ungrievable in this
landscape of commemoration and the futures that open up from it.
While his prognosis seems bleak he is at first sight also an object of
care and reform. In media representations of hate/ violence, offenders
own experiences of abuse are described with apparently sensitive detail.
Toprak, thus far cited as an expert of the Intensivtter, is in the aftermath of
the Drag Festival debate invited to apply his tried and tested diagnostics
to hateful homophobes who indeed stem from the identical suspect
group. In an interview in the Berlin queer magazine Siegessule, he states:
Similarities consist in offenders difficulties to talk about their emotions.
They never learned to talk about their inside and to resolve conflicts,
since this isnt considered masculine.116
Serkan A. and Spyridon L., the well-mediatised Intensivtter case
discussed above, have likewise suffered. Serkan A.s father is violent,
his mother mentally ill. Serkan A. was in a childrens home, Spyridon
L. in a youth psychiatric institution. Yet our empathy contrasts with
their emotional coldness, as in the following profile of Serkan A. in Stern
magazine:
The Munich crime policemen were speechless faced with such coldness.
Psychologists speak of a shallowing of affect. [A violence researcher is
cited:] These youth have difficulty talking about their feelings. We dont
know if its a deficit in language or a deficit in experience.117
This empathy narrative nevertheless orients us away from Serkan A.
Our empathy with him contrasts with his lack of empathy, his utter
lack of emotion, which is firmly rooted in him.118 His dismissal from the

115. Alice Halmi, supra note 24.

116. Interview with Prof. Dr. Ahmet Toprak, Machtausbung (Exercise of power), Siegessule,
November 2011, at 15, www.siegessaeule.de/uploads-img-printausgaben-sis_11-09.pdf.
117. Rupp Doinet et. al., Der Fall Serkan A.: Eine klassische Karriere (The case Serkan: A classic
career), Stern, January 13, 2008, http://www.stern.de/panorama/:Der-Fall-Serkan-A.-
Eine-Karriere/607151.html.
118. See also Ohder & Huck, supra note 60, at 23; Toprak & Nowacki, supra note 61; Huck, supra
note 100; Roth & Seiffge-Krenke, supra note 74, at 255-6.
2013 / Beyond Hate 75

realm of humanity and the humanly intelligible nevertheless occurs in

the name of reform. The pedagogues and masculinity researchers in
particular occupy themselves with the question of how we may teach
the intensive offender in spite of everything to manage his anger and
his hatred and develop empathy for his victims. Our speechlessness
nevertheless already points towards the futility of such attempts.119 As
we are left to fill the dots, the question that comes to the fore is indeed
how well-meaning efforts may not be completely wasted on young minds
so deeply steeped in hate.

VI.Conclusion: Towards an Abolitionist Imagination

The framing of harm as a problem of bad individuals who need to
be exiled is one that appears again and again, not just in our criminal
punishment systems, but in schools, employment settings, organisations,
activist formations, neighborhoods, groups of friends, families.
Abolitionists are trying to build models for dealing with harm that do
not rely on exile, expulsion, or caging, but instead examine the root
causes of harm and seek healing and transformation for both people
experiencing and people responsible for harm
- Dean Spade.120
A transnational feminist disability studies perspective will force us to see
that the embattled bodies of (disabled) (third world) women wear scars
that speak of centuries of violence representational, physiological, and
material and still live to tell their stories in the breathless whisper of
exploding bodies and shattered bones. As witnesses to this violence, our
only recourse is to forge a transnational theory and praxis that would
work across the boundaries of race, class, gender, disability, and sexuality
to end this violence now
Nirmala Everelles.121
What lessons are there in thinking through the queer metonymies
of sexual and criminal justice, carceral and biomedical knowledges,
119. Liat Ben-Moshe, Resistance to Incarceration: The Intersections of Prison Abolition, Anti-
psychiatry and Deinstitutionalization, PsychOut Conference: Toronto, (May 7-8, 2010),
http://individual.utoronto.ca/psychout/abstracts/ben-moshe.html; Besides analysing how
the disposability of youth-of-colour is euphemised through emotional narratives like these,
we must attend to the institutional practices that govern the intensive offender. In this, Liat
Ben-Moshes concept of trans-institutionalisation is helpful: How are surplus populations
funnelled in a cycle of incarceration and reform? While the intensive offender is amply
studied, no research has been done into what actually happens to people with this label. See
Ohder and Huck, supra note 60, at 23.
120. Spade (2012), supra note 9, at 196-197.
121. Nirmala Everelles, Embattled Pedagogies: Deconstructing Terror from a Transnational
Feminist Disability Studies Perspective, in Critical Theories, Radical Pedagogies and Social
Education 13-24 (A. DeLeon & W. Ross eds., 2010).
76 JGLR / Vol. 4, Issue 2

and racialised, perverse and mad figurations that I have traced in this
article? Beginning with a queer-of-colour critique of queer whiteness,
I have ended up with an institutional critique that is inspired by an
abolitionist imagination of (in Angela Daviss words) a world without
prisons or at least a social landscape that is no longer dominated by
the prison.122 This abolitionist imagination must extend to psychiatric
and other institutions of care in ways that resist nostalgic longings for
a welfare state that, for racialised people, was always ambivalent.123 In
the place of any wishful thinking that young people labelled violently
hateful are simply in the wrong institution, we should attend to the
symbiotic relationship between punitive, biomedical and other helping
apparatuses which each serve to administer surplus populations that
profiled by one become recognisable to the other. This is especially
relevant for racialised and colonised populations whose conformity to
white norms (especially of gender and sexuality) and identities has always
been the remit of experts of punishment as well as of psychiatrists and
other experts of care.124
Besides understanding the close relationship between criminalisation
and pathologisation across multiple formal and institutional sites,125 an
abolitionist imagination might also involve attending to how punitive
and pathologising logics undergird informal sites, including those that
identify as alternative, radical or progressive. I have suggested anti-
violence organising against hate as one such site which, given the global
spread of hate crime activism and the twin carceral and biomedical
paradigms that undergird it, demands a transnational critique.
122. Angela Davis & Dylan Rodriguez, The Challenge of Prison Abolition: A Conversation, 27 (3)
Soc. Justice 212-218 (2000).
123. Efforts to resist prison abuse by highlighting the high incidence of mentally ill prisoners
who should really be in a mental institution often heard in the U.S., where many psychiatric
institutions were closed as a result of neoliberal austerity measures, reify hegemonic notions
of mental illness and ignore how psychiatric institutions, too, have been exposed as sites
of confinement. Psychiatric system survivors have long argued that the same circumstances
almost always lead to longer time spent in psychiatry than in prison and that in the place
of a clearly defined sentence the psychiatric patient is at the whim of doctors who have
full discretion to confine hir until they declare hir cured. Massregelvollzug/Forensische
Psychiatrie (Forensic Psychiatry), Dissidentenfunk, (13 January 2005), http://www.
dissidentenfunk.de/archiv/s0501/index.html.
124. Franoise Vergs, Monsters and Revolutionaries: Colonial Family Romance and Mtissage
(1999); Wendy Chan, Dorothy Chunn & Robert Menzies, Women, Madness and the Law: A
Feminist Reader (2005). For an inspiring example of such trans-institutional analysis, see
Dorothy Roberts, supra note 97.
125. On the overlaps of U.S. prisons and military, see Avery Gordon, Abu Ghraib: Imprisonment
and the War on Terror, 48 (1) Race & Class 42-59 (2006); On the transformation of the
big psychiatric institution into mental health services in the community, see Jijian Voronka,
Rooting out the Weeds: Resisting White Settler & Psychiatric Supremacy Through a
Critique of The Review of the Roots of Youth Violence, PsychOut Conference, (May 7-8,
2010), http://individual.utoronto.ca/psychout/papers/voronka.html.
2013 / Beyond Hate 77

I propose that hate is a problematic sign to organise under for several

reasons. First, describing violence as hatefully motivated partly misses
the point. What of the many acts of violence accompanied by glee,
indifference or solidarity with others rather than by hate and lack
of empathy? The most powerful face of violence may indeed not be
hateful at all but indifferent and neglectful towards those who must have
inflicted it upon themselves or appear unworthy in a meritocratic system
that will give you equal opportunities if only you try hard enough.
Hate thus has the same individualising, depoliticising tendencies as
neoliberal discourse overall. Most worryingly, its usefulness as an anti-
violence method is limited by its tendency to stick to racialised bodies
that are unable to perform a global multicultural citizenship fit for
neoliberal subjectivity, to borrow from Jodi Melamed. It serves as the
latest descriptor of disposable populations marked as monocultural,
irrational, regressive, patriarchal or criminal, a marking that following
Everelles we must further identify as disableist.126 Besides producing
consent for ever more de-humanising measures and representations,
the figure of the hateful Other also becomes the ground against which
all racialised people must perform conformity to our oppression. I
have described it here as a psy discourse that disciplines but it is also a
productive ingredient of governmentality in that it incites us to become
docile subjects who labour hard to not appear hateful when confronted
with this de-humanisation.
While critiquing victim/ subjecthood as a political paradigm, my
analysis complicates an account of injury as universally experienced and
mobilised. For example, Wendy Browns discussion of the wounded
attachments of dominant identity politics is helpful in explaining the
global purchase of hate/ crime.127 Nevertheless, the drama of queer
lovers and hateful Others brings to the fore the differential status and
effects of these figures of violence and anti-violence. How do narratives
of injury perform different work depending on their authors? Why
do trauma narratives attached to homonormative victims/ subjects
circulate at such volume and speed while experiences of racism, poverty
or police violence remain unspeakable and unremarkable? To return to
Charlie Haddads sobering analysis, how do white transgender injuries
become grounds for citizenship claims while trans-of-colour injuries

126. Melamed, supra note 6, at 87.

127. Brown, supra note 34; See also Glen Coulthard, Keynote Address at the University of
California Riverside Conference: Critical Ethnic Studies and the Future of Genocide (Mar.
10-12, 2011) (for his critique of Brown which argues that for Native people in Canada, it is too
early to let go of resentment, and concludes: Lets wallow in it.).
78 JGLR / Vol. 4, Issue 2

must be managed in private, buried under the tongue, because to

voice them would be to lose ones small claim to queer community and
the meagre resources that come with it?128 The examined personality
profiles bring home the immense pressures on the survivors of race and
class oppression to present themselves as unscathed by it and to bear it
as its containers and recipients.
In formulations of queer necropolitics that go beyond a happy
inclusion framework of sexual citizenship, the paradox of who must
die so that we can live (or rather, who must live so that they can be
killed with impunity) is clearly brought to the fore. While focusing on
the forces that are death-making, we must simultaneously ask what a
queer and trans politics would look like that genuinely fosters survival, a
task that may well begin with race and class oppression rather than with
hetero- or even homonormativity. Such a politics would create spaces
where safety is not won by bolstering regimes of exploitation and neglect
and where the violence of the most powerful is scandalised more loudly
than the acts of those subjugated, who need not be innocent in order to
deserve solidarity, and for whom healing and transformation would take
much more than the diversification of the unbearable status quo.

128. While Charlie Haddad and others in Berlin have in the meantime found queer- and trans-of-
colour kitchen tables where intersectional violence can be shared, these remain embattled
and exhausted and I do not wish to overstate their presence here.