Transgender Migrations

The Bodies, Borders, and Politics of Transition

Trystan Cotten

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415888462
• eBook ISBN: 9781136667442
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: Social Sciences

Transgender Migrations brings together a top-notch collection of emerging and established scholars to examine the way that the term "migration" can be used not only to look at the way trans bodies migrate from one gender to the (an?) other, but the way that trans people migrate in the larger geopolitical contexts of immigration reform, the war on terror, the war on drugs, and the increased policing of national borders.

The book centers trans-ing experiences, identities, and politics, and treats these identities as inextricably intertwined with other social identities, institutions, and discourses of sexuality, nationality, race and ethnicity, globalization, colonialism, and terrorism. The chapter authors explore not only the movement of bodies in, through, and across spaces and borders, but also chart the metamorphoses of these bodies in relation to migration and mobility.

Transgender Migrations takes the theory documented in The Transgender Studies Reader and blows it up to a global scale. It is the logical next step for scholarship in this dynamic, emerging field.

Part I

Affective Alien(n)ations and Queer(Re)territorializations

1

Colorful Bodies in the Multikulti Metropolis

Vitality, Victimology and Transgressive Citizenship in Berlin

Jin Haritaworn

This chapter positions itself within a growing body of critical feminist, queer and trans writings on racism, militarism, gentrification, and imprisonment.¹ Like others before me, I seek to scandalize the complicity of sexual and gendered politics in state violence and neglect, and the reinvention of practices such as the dismantling of the welfare state, the mass incarceration of the chronically unemployable, and the wars without end as signs of love, care, diversity, and vitality, often in the name of human (including women’s, gay and, in a much more complicated way, trans) rights. In this, I am drawing on Jasbir Puar’s queer necropolitics² to explore how new sexually and gender non-conforming citizenries are invited into life, to leave the realm of death, and of the perverse, to other “populations targeted for segregation, disposal, or death” (Puar 2007: xii). Puar draws our attention to the sexual productiveness of the “war on terror,” which enables the U.S. and other “western” nations to invent traditions of gay-friendliness and sexual freedom (despite continuing homophobia) against a common enemy whose monstrosity is fantasized as intimate im/property.

Here, I will extend this critique in two ways. First, how are exceptionalist ideologies and necropolitical techniques globalized? While feminist writers are paying increasing attention to the transnational, critical queer and trans studies tend to perpetuate an ethnocentric U.S. focus, which evades global inequalities and the unequal travel of political agendas around rights, protection and identity across national and continental borders (see Cruz-Malavé and Manalansan 2002). Nevertheless, I argue that examining the geopolitics of gender and sexuality is both necessary and insightful. For example, how do we make sense of the sudden ubiquity of hate crime activism all over the globe? How does this intersect with the globalization of affective regimes of terror, security and militarization, across different scales, of the national, global and local? This chapter will argue that intimate knowledges of race, class and space may work to bring the “war on terror” home, through locally emplotted stories of injured queers, colorful trans people, violent strangers, and the evocative setting of the “revitalizing ghetto.” At the same time, in the course of these stories’ circulation through transnational feminist, queer and trans counterpublics, wider familial identities of a coherent nation, Europe and West become imaginable through the fantasy of a shared constitutive Other, and boundaries policed by an increasingly diverse array of symbolic border guards.

Second, the relationship of the gender non-conforming subject to what Puar calls homonationalism (the growing convergence and complicity between nationalist and homonormative citizenship agendas) and its transnational variations has so far been acutely neglected.³ How have genderqueer and trans people been “included” in necropolitical regimes of hate crime and diversity policing, and how have exceptionalist arguments entered and shaped trans and drag spaces? My archive is limited to a series of homophobia and transphobia debates in late 2000s Berlin, which reassigns gender and sexual violence to “migrants.”⁴ Given the privileged space of Berlin as a global queer Eldorado, the speed with which local narratives of violence travel through transnational queer counterpublics, and the need to examine totalized notions of, on the one hand, queer and trans politics and identities, and on the other, Islam (which in West Europe interpellate the bulk of the racialized), against their local contexts and meanings, my close reading of these events should nevertheless allow some wider insights.

In this, I will both draw on and complicate existing critiques, which have located the trans subject largely at the receiving end of nationalism. For example, trans people have been described as the (unraced and mistaken) victims of counter-terrorist surveillance at airports and other sites of compulsory identification (e.g., Thaemlitz 2007; Wilchins 2003). Other critiques have rightly highlighted the exclusionary workings of a “homonormative” politics of respectability (Duggan 2003) which has employed gender and sexual conformity as key strategies for assimilation, thus leaving behind trans people alongside the movement’s other embarrassing margins (e.g., Namaste 1996; Rivera 2002). Efforts to include the trans often remain, in Dean Spade’s (n.d.) terms, “LGB-fake-T,” and are haunted by a long tradition of sacrificing trans rights and protections for quick legislative gains. While all this is true, I will argue that we need to depart from an essentialist notion of trans suffering, which cannot account for race, class and other power divisions between trans people, and sometimes perpetuates rather than contests the problems associated with assimilationism (see also Lamble 2008). I will suggest instead that white trans and genderqueer people have actively inserted themselves into racialized debates on neighborhood and nation, often by directly mimicking the very gay identity politics which exclude them. Homonationalism, in this, has been an important route to belonging.⁵

This forces us to re-examine trans agency in ways which trouble dichotomies of “assimilated gays” v. “transgressive trans people,” and to think through the shifting and unstable relationships between various processes of belonging and abjection around race, class, trans/gender and sexuality. How does exceptionalism justify the state of exception (Puar 2007), where “our freedom” must be protected, if necessary by force, from Others who “hate” it? What are the emotional politics (Ahmed 2004) of sexual and gendered exceptionalism? How do affective readings of “liberated trans people” and “homo/transphobic Muslims” serve to realign bodies and spaces, stitching the enfranchisement of some to the disenfranchisement of others, often within the same citizenship discourse (e.g., around health, security or diversity)? How have trans activists contested, expanded and co-authored ideas about “Islam” as a particularly gender-oppressive “culture”?

In examining trans and genderqueer reworkings of the “Muslim homophobia” discourse, I am especially interested in how this discourse at once circumscribes and enables trans agency. While collapsing trans-ness back into homosexuality, it also labors towards a public that embraces, maybe for the first time, gender diversity as its property, in order to constitute itself as post-phobic and superior to “homophobic and transphobic societies.” I describe this public as an intimate one, as it is saturated with and constituted by affect (Ahmed 2004; Berlant 2008; Cvetkovich 2003). As I will show, different intimacies circulate through it at different volumes and speeds, in spectacles of gender and sexual freedom that invite new performers and audiences to the public stage.

Queer Lovers and Hateful Others: The “Migrant Homophobia” Archive

The hate crime discourse made its entry onto the German scene in 2008. It found its first bodies on the genderqueer scene: In the summer that year, a group of visitors and performers at the Drag Festival Berlin were involved in a violent incident which was quickly attributed to men of Turkish origin, and gave rise to a series of media and policy responses which introduced the term “Hasskriminalität” to a wider German public. The privileged place which the gender non-conforming body assumed in the institutionalization of the hate crime framework may at first surprise. Racialized violence discourses were certainly not alien to white-dominated queer and trans scenes, yet the actors who invested in them most systematically followed a homonormative politics. The figure of the victim of transphobia nevertheless became instantly legible as the offspring of an already-existing migrant homophobia script, whose full genealogy must be addressed elsewhere, but whose main landmarks and figurations I will briefly map out.⁶

The homophobic migrant is crafted in the late 1990s, when the big gay organizations turn to “migrants,” hitherto marginal to mainstream gay politics, in search of new constituencies, new raisons d’être, and an expanded public which will recognize sexual politics as part of a broader, national agenda. Rather than incidental or a natural result of migrant particularity, the racialization of gender and sexuality which constitutes the ground on which the hate crime discourse arrives is the result of performativity, of a labor which, as Sarah Ahmed puts it, conceals itself through repetition and affective proximities (see Ahmed 2004: 91–92). The homophobic migrant fits this family well—he is instantly adopted as a newcomer whose resemblance makes him seem to have been here forever. The ease with which the homophobic migrant becomes common sense in 2000s Germany belies the decade-long Efforts which go into crafting this figure: From the simultaneous integration debates and the Europe-wide “crisis in multiculturalism,” blown up into a panic big enough to include even gay expertise (an assimilation which occurs by performing an Other as unassimilable); to a domestic violence paradigm which is increasingly Orientalized as a function of “Muslim” cultures and gender relations, thus creating space for new metonymies between Muslim sexism and Muslim homophobia, and women of color and white gay men, who suffer from identical forces; to the so-called “Muslim Test” of German nationality, which attempts to shore up a belatedly reformed law of the blood, or ius sanguinis, by enlisting new border guards, and inventing new traditions, or “core values,” of women-and-gay friendliness; to the Simon study, a quantitative psychosocial study of homophobic attitudes in “migrant” v. “German” pupils in Berlin, commissioned by the biggest gay organization, funded by the state, and disseminated by the mainstream media, which renders scientific and respectable what by then everybody knows: that “migrants” are more homophobic than “Germans,” and that the twain, as the unhyphenable categoric opposition under comparison already suggests, shall never meet.

The Simon study (2008) flags the changed terrain of visibility which resulted from this decade of media activism. There is much to say about the research project’s flawed methodology: from its reification of the homosexual as the undefined and undifferentiated, pre-constituted victim of hateful attitudes, quantifiable through five-point scales and digital values, to its racist categorization, which instructed interviewees they could only be German if they had four German grandparents, and pitted “homosexuals” and “migrants” in a mutually exclusive, competitive stance. Most problematically, the study converts oppression into a “psychological tendency” (“negative affects,” “emotions,” “cognitions,” and “behavioral tendencies”) which has nothing to do with the myriad ways in which gender and sexual identities are assigned, produced and policed in everyday as well as institutional encounters of, often, banal violence (Simon 2008: 88). Instead, oppression is redesigned to become a bad affect which can be clearly located in bodies already known to be “Muslim.” Thus, most of the variables and “items” used for measuring and correlating homophobic attitudes, including religiosity, traditional masculinity, perceptions of racist discrimination, and deficient integration, are recognizable, to both research objects and readers, as crude stereotypes of people of Turkish and Arab origin.⁷

Here, I am especially interested in the visual politics of the study. Several of the newspaper articles reporting on it were accompanied by gay kisses.⁸ The images broke with a convention of privatizing, criminalizing and pathologizing same-sex intimacy, and constructed at least some queer intimacies (a qualification we will examine) as a pleasant sight. They mediated a new kind of affective knowledge of gay lovers as part of a public willing to protect its minoritized citizens from the hate of Others.⁹ Let us take a look at one such kiss, which adorned the aptly-named article “Migrant Kids Against Gays” in the liberal/left-leaning broadsheet Süddeutsche Zeitung (Grassmann 2007). (This image can be viewed at the following website: http://www.sueddeutsche.de/panorama/migrantenkinder-gegen-schwulehomophobes-berlin-1.335341.) The two bodies chosen to visually mediate Simon’s findings bear a particular “orientation” (Ahmed 2006) towards us. The non-trans men seem incidental to the text, their photo taken maybe from one of the online Pride archives now often circulated. They remain anonymous but nevertheless look comfortably familiar in their gender presentation as well as their whiteness. Their muscle tees hug their gym-built torsos tightly, swelling and folding in just the right places. There is no baggy excess, no angled planes hiding badly-fitting binders. Their hair is short but slick, their 1970s sun shades signify Camp rather than sissy: an aesthetic but virile masculinity that a straight girl might wish for in a boy-friend who could dress a little better.

The bodies of the two kissers claim space, open up towards us. Their kiss takes place in public, on a square maybe. To a queer observer the spectacle might evoke nostalgia, reminding “us” of the kiss-in of the late 1980s (whether or not we are of its time and place), that icon of radical queer history and AIDS activism which, queer historiographers tell us, gave birth to Queer (Seidman 1996). It is the ultimate symbol of transgression, of in-your-face direct action, which claims space in a hostile public that is far from friendly towards queer and trans people and would carelessly watch “us” die (Cvetkovich 2003).¹⁰

The public kiss in front of our eyes, too, has an audience, but one that is far from hostile. “We” appear to stand close-by, with more witnesses gathered opposite in the background, gathering around the two lovers. As readers and onlookers, we become witnesses to their queer love. Not only do we approve of it, we would protect it even, from Others who lack “our” openness, who are excluded from view.¹¹ In Puar’s terms, the two gay men, formerly marked for death through AIDS, are “folded (back) into life” (Puar 2007: 36). In contrast to the 1980s kiss-in, this performance of queer sexuality draws its spectators in without repelling “us,” or repressing “them.” The kiss we are watching is not diseased, pornographic or repugnant, but is out in the open. It is drawn out and savored, no quick fumble hidden away in a public toilet, or a closet. It is uncensored; proudly displayed under the rainbow flag.

This imag/ining of sexual liberation as always-already achieved belies, of course, the recency with which full humanity was, formally, extended and is, substantively, still sorely lacking (see Haritaworn 2008). I would argue that the gay kiss, and the new desire to flaunt, sponsor and circulate it, fulfills a specific role in allaying and displacing continuing anxieties around queer intimacies. “We” are able to witness this love communally because of Others who abstain from this communing, who may even need to be kept away, because their intrinsic hatred makes them want to injure this love. Our stance, in contrast, is not necessarily a loving one. Nowhere in the accompanying article are we asked to love queer people (who remain curiously absent from it); rather, we tolerate them as an inevitable byproduct of a free society. Our stance, then, is a protectionist one. “We” can come closer because Others hate them. By positioning its heterosexual audience oppositionally—white bodies that open up intimately, versus brown bodies that shrink back, backwards even—the kiss thus turns us towards a new kind of membership ideology, which enfranchises a new (sexual) subject but in the same breath disenfranchises (racial/religious) Others.

The queer intimacies which become a pleasant sight in the visual field staked out by Simon and his funders, commissioners and mediators differ markedly from the bodies involved in the Drag Festival incident. In its whiteness, its coherence, its liberated desires, and its normative desirability, the innocent victim of “Muslim homophobia” repeats hegemonic values of the neoliberal nation (privacy, respectability, beauty, freedom, choice) in ways which will be complicated for the gender non-conforming subject. Nevertheless, the drama of the queer lover and the hateful Other carves out an affective territory big enough to include bodies and desires which transgress the bounds of respectability. This, as we shall see next, is partly an effect of its setting: “the ghetto,” the quintessential scene of crime, danger and sexual violence.

Dysfunctional Ghetto, Diverse Metropolis: Setting the (Hate) Crime Scene

Before turning to the Drag Festival incident and its various mediations, we must attend to its geographical setting, Kreuzberg. The Berlin district has since the 1970s been a predominantly migrant working-class neighborhood, which nevertheless underwent mass...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Migration and Morphing
• Part I: Affective Alien(n)ations and Queer (Re)territorializations
• Part II: Trans Aesthetics, Counterpublics and Spatiality
• Part III: Transectionalities: Mapping Multiple Migrations
• Part IV: Troubling Trans and Queer Theory
• Contributor Biographies
• Bibliography
• Index