Jin Haritaworn (Chapter-3)
Jin Haritaworn (Chapter-3)
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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
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.