Maria Stehle

White ghettos: The ‘crisis of multiculturalism’ in post-unification Germany

This article traces the shifts in German discourses about multiculturalism and the failed experiment of multiculturalism from the early 1990s into the 21st century by analyzing anxieties about emerging ‘ethnic ghettos’ and ‘parallel societies’ in Europe. In these discourses, ‘Europe’ functions simultaneously as an example for the failures of multiculturalism and as a bastion of western values in need of protection. The second part of this article shifts to a discussion on creative political interventions that expose these tensions and contradictions and emphasize the historic dimension of racialized exclusion in Germany and the European context. They describe the effects of social exclusion and propose (often syncretic) translocal forms of solidarity and activism. In their irreverent, playful and performative interventions, activists and artists develop strategies to counter the essentialist culturalisms that underpin the debates about European integration, multiculturalism and the crisis of multiculturalism in the German context.

From sex shacks to mega-brothels: The politics of anti-trafficking and the 2006 soccer World Cup

This article examines the discourses of forced prostitution that circulated in the US and European media and government publications in the context of the soccer World Cup in 2006. This analysis of the public discourse around prostitution reveals two themes: concerns about immigration and border security, and representations of gender binaries that serve to relegate migrant women to the status of victim. The fears of increased sex trafficking and the condemnation of so-called ‘sex shacks’ and ‘mega-brothels’ for the World Cup 2006 served as foils for other perceived crises produced by globalisation. The debates struggle with a marked ‘other’ that reveals new forms of racialised ‘othering’: dangerously white, understood as both of Europe and a threat to it. The 2006 World Cup historical moment has implications for how international sports, consumer culture and feminist activism inform and conceal human agency.

Digital feminisms: transnational activism in German protest cultures

Abstract This Introduction provides the context for the articles in this special issue and identifies a set of reoccurring themes. After offering some historical background on the developments of feminist activism and feminist movements in the German context, the editors particularly highlight two main and interrelated thematic strands: feminist activism under or in neoliberalism and the complexities of negotiating questions of race and difference between women in feminist activisms in the highly visually determined digital age. Reflecting on the arguments in the different contributions in this volume, this Introduction seeks to suggest ways in which the ambivalent messages that digital feminist activisms create in the contemporary political moment become politically productive.

Pop, Porn, and Rebellious Speech

In Excitable Speech, Judith Butler contends that rebellious speech constitutes a “risk taken in response to being put at risk, a repetition in language that forces change.” With this in mind, this article examines the politics of employing and altering the language and imagery of “porn” in texts and multi-media performances of (post-)feminist (pop-)artists. The discussions about Elfriede Jelineks novel Lust in the early 1990s exemplify the difficulties associated with transforming the language of pornography into rebellious feminist speech. The text received extensive media attention, but most critics felt ambivalent about Jelineks attempt to create artificial, repetitious, pornographic speech and questioned the texts ability to foster any kind of “change.” At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the multi-media performances of Charlotte Roche and Reyhan Sahin aka Lady Bitch Ray again triggered discussions about feminism, pornography, body politics, and sexual expression. Their provocative pop-performances use multiple media outlets, TV, music, and electronic media. They are commercially successful and mainstream media understand them as challenging social conventions. This essay critically examines the politics of Jelineks, Roches, and Sahins texts and performances and contextualizes the politics of their rebellious speech within discussions about social roles, gender, and sexuality.

Digital Feminisms and the Impasse: Time, Disappearance, and Delay in Neoliberalism

This collaborative essay considers the way feminist activism takes shape in the context of time-based feminist performance art. We argue that the formal and aesthetic interventions into digital culture of Noah Sow, Chicks on Speed, and Hito Steyerl articulate political resistance within feminist impasses and neoliberal circularities. Our analysis focuses on how these artists engage digital platforms to make visible otherwise imperceptible aspects of the present, including consumerism, wellness, imperial warfare as crisis ordinariness, and modes of digital hypervisibility, perception, and representation. Not only do these works uncover, grapple with, and potentially dissolve the bind of feminism, but they also work against the imperceptibility of neoliberalism as second nature or common sense. In the form of this essay (with comment bubbles and hyperlinks), we highlight our process of thinking about these works and expose the collaborative process of feminist academic writing in the digital age as yet another form of searching for spaces of political resistance and solidarity. Should be viewed with current versions of Firefox, Safari, or Adobe PDF viewer/reader.

A Transnational Travelogue: Borders, Misunderstandings, and the Telecafés in Berlin

The article proposes a transnational feminist perspective that borrows from feminist political geography and the artistic concept of Psychogeography for a critical and self-reflexive approach to concepts of nation in the twenty-first century. Interactions and misunderstandings in Berlin telecafés are used to guide the reader through theoretical and political disorientations and different kinds of border crossings in the urban landscape of the German capital and in the field of feminist German studies. The proposed theoretical tools for reading contradictory scripts of nation and transnationality intend to open up spaces for counter-topographies and counter-narratives of nation and globalization. (MS)

Digital media and feminist futures: awkward cooptions in the impasse

no longer on reality television? That remains to be seen. But we also should not have to wait for people to ascend to what may be perceived to more legitimate social spaces before we pay attention to them and value what they say. If we give so-called low-brow popular culture such as reality television and social media the same consideration that we do more widely accepted genres in pop culture we might find the value in the representations and the feminist work that is happening across all forms of media.

‘Happy Object’ Europe? The search for Europe in essayistic documentary films

Abstract Die Mitte (S. Mucha, 2004), Visions of Europe (2004), and seven years later, the film Abendland (N. Geyrhalter, 2011), are essayistic documentary films that, visually and narratively, depict a search for the ‘Happy Object’ (Sara Ahmed) Europe. Each film offers a different approach to this search: In Mucha’s Die Mitte, a camera team sets out to find Europes geographical center, which leads them from Germany and Austria into increasingly rural, eastern parts of Europe; Visions of Europe is an eclectic collection of short films by filmmakers from different European countries that try to present – or document – their ‘visions’ of Europe; and Abendland, released seven years later, is a collage of scenes from a night in Europe, which includes, among others, images of border patrols, of hospitals and nursing homes, of the Oktoberfest is Munich, of extensive state surveillance systems, and of people dancing away the night. This essay analyzes how these cinematic searches for Europe construct and contest notions of European belonging. Gender and race as categories of belonging play a crucial role in these constructions. The essayistic forms of the films allow the filmmakers to depict the search for the ‘happy object’ Europe as ambivalent, multi-layered, and complex. In the films, Europe appears as a space that is at the same time too vast and too small and Europe emerges as an idea that is simultaneously too amorphous and too narrowly defined. These tensions play out differently in the different films, which illustrates the evolution of the concept of Europe and the political fears and hopes that are associated with this concept.

Riot Grrrls, Bitchsm, and pussy power: interview with Reyhan Şahin/Lady Bitch Ray

Abstract Dr phil. Reyhan Şahin—also known as Lady Bitch Ray—earned her M.A. in Linguistics, German Literature, and Education in 2004 and her doctorate in Linguistics in 2012 at the University of Bremen. Her alter ego, Lady Bitch Ray is a rapper, performer, fashion designer, and author. The following interview introduces Şahin’s work as a performer and as an academic and sheds light on the negotiation of feminist politics in a neoliberal context as well as how the complex politics of difference play out in contemporary, digital feminisms in the German-speaking context. By speaking in two voices, the academic and the performer/artist, the interview emphasizes the playful possibilities of the urgently political.

Two Generations in Motion: Negotiating the Legacies of the West German Student Movement

The legacy of the West German student movement continues to be a debated topic in Germany today: Did the call for political and social change bring about a new and truly democratic Germany or did it trigger a backlash that determined the politics of the 1980s and 1990s under conservative chancellor Helmut Kohl? Did the activists themselves “sell out” and betray their own ideals? How did the student movement influence the next generation growing up in Germany? These questions about the social and political effects of the student movement influence discussions about pedagogy, violence in schools, and about how young Germans today understand political change and social activism. Media often paint a simplistic picture of both, of what became of the generation of activists in 1968 and of their “children” who were born in the 1970s and came of age in the 1990s. Not only conservative voices since the late 1980s support the idea that members of the student movement of the 1960s brought up a generation of confused young people without clear values and moral guidance. The question of whether the ideals of liberal education failed led to heated debates within the Green Party in the 1990s. An article in the news magazine Der Spiegel cites Beate Scheffler, a forty-year-old teacher and Green Party delegate: