Queer Lovers and Hateful Others

Regenerating Violent Times and Places

Jin Haritaworn

• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781783712700
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios LGBT

Queer subjects have become acceptable in society only through being cast in the shadow of the new folk devil, the 'homophobic migrant' who is rendered by society as hateful and disposable. This book explores this concept of 'queer regeneration'. Queerness has entered a transitional phase as it becomes co-opted by neoliberalism to make punishment and neglect appear as signs of care and love for diversity. To understand this transition, Jin Haritaworn looks at the environments in which queer bodies have become worthy of protection, discussing the everyday erasures that shape life in the inner city (focusing on Berlin), and how queer activists actively seek out and dispel the myths of sites of nostalgia for the 'invented traditions' of women-and-gay-friendliness. The author explores a rich archive of media, arts, policy and activism, including posters, newspaper reports, hate crime action plans, urban projects, psychological studies, demonstrations, kiss-ins, political speeches and films. Through these sources, the relationships between Islamaphobia, racism within Europe and the United States, and the global war on terror serves to reinforce the politics of homonationalism.

1

SETTING THE SCENE¹

In the introduction, I argued that the queer lover comes to life in formerly undesirable spaces that are discovered for regeneration and prepared for ‘proper’ (middle-class, white or whitening) habitation. This chapter explores the setting of the drama of queer lovers and hateful Others by enquiring into the uneventful occurrences that accompany the production of degenerate bodies whose disappearance is a condition for the formerly degenerate area’s ‘recovery’. To set the scene and enter into the urban setting within which queers have become a lovely sight, it is useful to go back to the Khalass!!! manifesto, written by queer of colour activists in Berlin, with which this book began:

You consider yourself and your bourgeois squats to be ‘pioneers’ and you don’t even realize how colonial your language is, you do not see the civilizing mission you are part of and that you prepare the ground for other white settlers to come.

What are the stakes of bringing an analysis of racism and colonialism to a space where the history of colonialism has been successfully repressed, where racism is remembered only as a 1933–1945 phenomenon, and where mentioning the continuities with what came before and what has come since entails penalties (see Barskanmaz 2011; El-Tayeb 1999; Samour 2012)?

The evasion of racism and colonialism in discussions of queer space is not an exclusively German phenomenon. The literature on queer space, much of which has focused on the US, contains similar raced and classed omissions that the Khalass!!! manifesto and other queer of colour analyses usefully address. The chapter begins by revisiting discussions of queer space with regard to the rare entries that racialised and colonised subjects make into them. Through a close reading of seminal social movement theorist’s Manuel Castells’ (1983) famous study of the Castro, an early gay neighbourhood in San Francisco that has become foundational in global imaginaries of queer space, I illustrate how the assertion of the queer need for space has left in place a colonial paradigm that reinscribes the erasure of those who were there before. While a sustained focus on the policing and displacement of degenerate bodies from regenerating areas is missing, these early accounts already contain the seeds for later hate crime discourses that treat subjects of colour in areas of queer settlement as violent, queerphobic, and in need of targeted policing (see Hanhardt 2013).

The cognitive maps of queers of colour further provide an important corrective to accounts of the neoliberal city that focus on the homogenisation of spaces and identities that accompanies the branding of gay villages (see Fenced Out 2001; FIERCE 2008). Such maps have not only resisted the way LGBT subjects with race and class privileges have been incorporated into neoliberal visions of the creative class (Florida 2002), they are also able to account for differences within LGBT, queer and trans populations. This contrasts with a wider queer space debate that treats the most salient distinctions as those between ‘assimilated’ gays and ‘radical’ queers, and between homonormative ‘gaybourhoods’ and transgressive ‘mixed’ areas. While the former crystallise everything deemed wrong with LGBT communities – from racism to commercialism – the latter are presumably less affected by these wrongs.

The shortcomings of this spatial dichotomy are illustrated by the Berlin district of Kreuzberg, whose ‘mixedness’ is reflected in its ambivalent place in queer imaginaries as a counter-cultural paradise but also as a degenerate space that is rife with violence, crime and hate crime. Through an iterative reading of local histories of Kreuzberg, demographic studies of household changes in the district, activist and media productions of Kreuzberg as a degenerate space rife with violence, crime and patriarchy, and queer of colour interview accounts of the district as a place where it was long possible to be both queer and racialised, I argue that queer gentrification has been an important but often overlooked dynamic in the district’s development. Besides providing a corrective to this, the chapter suggests that the queer space of Kreuzberg must be understood in relation to its neighbouring districts: to its south-east, the district of Neukölln, which was long considered ungentrifiable; to its south-west, the ‘gaybourhood’ in Schöneberg, which is home to the homonormative organisations. While the three districts have long held opposing spatial meanings – as the transgressive multicultural neighbourhood, the ‘ghetto’ and the ‘assimilated’ gay village – these distinctions are nevertheless complicated by the ways in which each has been mobilised as a setting for the moral panic, with various degrees of success: scripted in the homonormative NGOs in Schöneberg, it is in the intensely racialised space of Kreuzberg, and in the genderqueer scene, that the hate crime panic finds its first setting. It is in the shadows of degenerate bodies, and the architectures of formerly degenerate spaces that queer regeneration occurs. As the old trope of the degenerate ‘ghetto’ converges with the new trope of the ‘recovering’ inner city, where the properly alive like to live, eat and party, a recognisable queer subject worthy of protection and visibility comes to life.

Given these omissions, convergences and complicities, it becomes necessary to revisit queer space through currents of thought and action that are able to explain racism and colonialism and account for queers of colour as placemaking subjects (El-Tayeb 2012; Fenced Out 2001; FIERCE 2008; Hanhardt 2008; Manalansan 2005; McKittrick 2006; Razack 2002a, 2002b; Teelucksingh 2002). Drawing on environmental justice principles, I propose to treat queer regeneration as a cultural as well as material process that inscribes actual places where people ‘live, work, play and worship’ (Bullard 1994; Teelucksingh 2002). In other words, urban spaces are not transparent or static (see Lefebvre 1991 [1974]), yet they are more than just figures, as the unequal chances of life and death in the inner city bring home (see McKittrick 2006). This renders it necessary to attend to ‘the alternative geographic formulations that subaltern communities advance […] that can incite new, or different, and perhaps not just, more just, geographic stories’, as Katherine McKittrick (2006: xix) maintains with regard to Black diasporic interrogations of white Canada. Indeed, the queer of colour interviewees who lived in Kreuzberg and Neukölln mapped the changing areas around them as sites where queer of colour survival and collectivity, however embattled, was long possible but now increasingly precarious. In these alternative maps, a different picture emerges that contests the celebration of queer vitality that pervades both neoliberal and alternative accounts of the city. For queers of colour, the environments featured in the mythos Kreuzberg have rapidly contracted at various scales – from the body to its physical and social surroundings, which are fast becoming inaccessible as a result of racism and gentrification.

‘GHETTOS’, ‘COLONIES’ AND ‘MIXED NEIGHBOURHOODS’

In order publicly to express themselves, gays have always met together – in modern times in night bars and coded places. When they became conscious enough and strong enough to ‘come out’ collectively, they have earmarked places where they could be safe together and could develop new life styles. But this time they selected cities, and within the cities they traced boundaries and created their territory. These boundaries were to expand with the increasing capacity of gay people to defend themselves and to build up a series of autonomous institutions. (Castells 1983: 138–39)

In the over three decades since Castells wrote about the Castro in San Francisco, a substantial amount has been written on queer space, yet attempts to theorise it in relation to race and class are fairly recent (see Gieseking 2013: 178; Nash 2013: 199 fn 8; Nash and Catungal 2013: 188). As Manalansan argues, the debate has tended to foreground ‘struggles to claim spaces by various gays, lesbians, and other queers’ (2005: 144). In contrast, scholars have variously ignored queer gentrification and racial profiling or actively participated in constructing homo/transphobic hate crime as a problem of racialised bodies and spaces (for a notable exception, see Hanhardt 2008, 2013). An example for this was the Urban Laboratory workshop ‘Backlash? The Resurgence of Homophobia in Contemporary Cities’, an event organised at University College London in 2010, the very time that a moral panic raged through London, culminating in the East End Gay Pride, a pink washing march organised by the far-right English Defence League (see Decolonize Queer 2011). The invite stated: ‘Recent attacks in London and other cities have brought homophobia to the surface of urban life, alongside other forms of hate crime and lines of social and cultural division.’ The programme featured several queer researchers and activists alongside a speaker from the London Metropolitan Police (UCL 2010).

In comparison, Castells’ discussion of the Castro was decidedly benign. It evaluated the area’s transition into a gay neighbourhood in remarkably positive terms, as it allowed gay men to claim an urban terrain where they could enter into visibility, autonomy and community. Castells went to great lengths to imagine the effects of discrimination and invisibility as a ‘major obstacle to finding sexual partners, discovering friends and leading an unharassed, open life’ (1983: 145). Since then, a burgeoning literature, which has been in fertile engagement with queer theory, has mapped various sexual urban formations. Investigators have often focused on the factors motivating non-heterosexuals to move to the city and form ‘gaybourhoods’ and other, increasingly dispersed, sexual spaces, which, besides gay men, soon also included lesbians and self-identified queers (Ingram et al. 1997; Nash and Catungal 2013; Rubin 1984; Weston 1995). While the tenet of the early texts was distinctly celebratory, more recently critical attention has been paid to the ways in which such ‘queer migrations’ are informed by a ‘metronormative’ binary between ‘progressive city’ and ‘backward country’ (Halberstam 2005; Tongson 2007). In addition, the emphasis on territorialisation and property ownership in the Castellian ‘neighbourhood’ paradigm has been critiqued as masculinist (Gieseking 2013). Fewer questions have been asked about the racial and colonial assumptions embedded in discourses on queer and other urban spaces, including the ‘gay ghetto’, the ‘ethnic model’ and the ‘urban frontier’ (but see Petzen 2008).

In many queer and allied writings, the association of queers and the city has been decidedly celebratory. Early queer writings assert an undifferentiated queer need for safe spaces in the city that recalls Castells’ highly sympathetic account. Cities are described as havens from a small-minded, homophobic country and suburb, and as important grounds for community development. Many of these early writings focus on North America, particularly San Francisco and later the rest of the Bay Area and New York. In Gayle Rubin’s foundational essay ‘Thinking sex’, young queers used all kinds of routes (including the armed forces) ‘to get out of intolerable hometown situations and closer to functional gay communities’ in San Francisco (1984: 24). A decade later, Kath Weston (1995) questioned this ‘Get thee to a big city’ narrative of urban exceptionalism. Not only are city and country relational concepts, but we must examine the role played by ‘the urban/rural contrasts in constituting lesbian and gay subjects’ (Weston 1995: 255). Drawing on interviews with a heterogeneous sample of gay and lesbian migrants to the Bay Area, Weston shed a critical light on the biopolitical and geopolitical imaginaries that inform gay migration: ‘How did “we” come to believe that others like ourselves existed? Even more puzzling, what led us to conjecture that those “like” others were to be found in urban centers?’ (1995: 258). While treating the biographies that propel queer migration respectfully, she asked us to question a sexual geography in which ‘the city represents a beacon of tolerance and gay community, the country a locus of persecution and gay absence’ (1995: 282). In the light of current events, we can go further, by interrogating how queer migration, both nationally and transnationally, assumes a mobility that is often denied to racialised people. As Fatima El-Tayeb (2012) shows with regard to the German figure of the eternal migrant, the latter are hindered or pathologised in their mobility as a result of racial profiling, gentrification and border control. Thus, in the panics over ‘dangerous places’ in queerly gentrifying cities such as London or Berlin, queers from all over the global north become residents the minute they arrive, while those who have been there for generations are erased from dominant multicultural maps (Decolonize Queer 2011).

Ten years after Weston, Jack Halberstam (2005) coined the term ‘metronormativity’, also taken up in Karen Tongson’s (2007) discussion of queer of colour socialities in suburban LA, in order to highlight the dislocation of the countryside from neoliberal imaginings of queer life. The concept takes issue with ‘the conflation of “urban” and “visible” in many normalising narratives of gay/lesbian subjectivities’:

[T]he metronormative story of migration from ‘country’ to ‘town’ is a spatial narrative within which the subject moves to a place of tolerance after enduring life in a place of suspicion, persecution, and secrecy. (Halberstam 2005: 36–37)

This chimes with an older literature (d’Emilio 1993 [1983]) that explored queer movement building in conjunction with capitalism, urbanisation and, we must add, colonialism. If queer spaces have arisen in the architecture of the city, the rise of the city, long a dystopic spectre of upheaval, was itself far from straightforward. As Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson (2010) remind us, the link between queers and the city was long decidedly negative. Queers, along with immigrants and communists, embodied eugenicist anxieties about an industrialising society turned unnatural and immoral. These anxieties went hand in hand with the invention of the wilderness as the place where the natural order of things was preserved: the artificial city caused its inhabitants to become degenerate, while the country was the place where (white) men could still be men (Mortimer-Sandilands and Erickson 2010: 14–15).

These critical spatial imaginaries can be extended in three directions. First, how has the mutual constitution between queer subjects and the city shaped not only queer movements and subjectivities, but also the very urban spaces where queers have settled? I will examine this by revisiting the earlier literature on gay gentrification which, while largely anti-intersectional, at times paid greater attention to racialisation than later writings on queer urban space. Second, how can we extend this analysis to scales other than the city? The rural–urban dichotomy, which posits the urban as where queer and transgender people come to life, and the rural as where diversity dies, has arguably been transposed onto a bigger global map. I argue that the global north – still epitomised by its cities, but cast through larger scales of nation, Europe and ‘West’ – now figures as the prime site of queer life, while the south and the east have come into relief as terrains of queer death. Third, it is time to unpack the racial and colonial metaphors that thread themselves through queer and other alternative urban imaginaries – from the ‘gay ghetto’ (or, ironically, considering our rampantly anti-Muslim climate, the ‘queer mecca’, see Petzen 2008), to its critique as an ‘ethnic model’ (Epstein 1987), to the metaphor of the ‘colony’, where ‘pioneers’ open up hitherto uncultivable territory.²

Writers on queer urban spaces go some way towards addressing these questions. This includes reflections on the rise and fall of ‘gay neighbourhoods’ (e.g. Ghaziani 2010; Gieseking 2013), and on the nostalgic mobilisations against their perceived decline in places like Toronto (Catungal 2010). One important area of investigation is the recasting of queer space in the neoliberal city, and the ways in which gay assimilation, or the homogenisation of queer spaces, coincides with gentrification, or the homogenisation of inner city spaces (Binnie 1995; Doan and Higgins 2011; Schulman 2012). Bell and Binnie (2004) explore this with regard to the emergence of gay ‘neighbourhoods’ in the global city (see also Brenner and Keil 2006; Marcuse and van Kempen 2000). As cities begin to compete for tourists and investors, the local state turns from ‘an agent of redistribution to a promoter of enterprise’ (Bell and Binnie 2004: 1809). In order to ease the mobility of capital, the entrepreneurial city rebrands itself and homogenises its areas. This leads to the formation of cloned spaces, as each city requires its own gay village, ethnic towns and other themed quarters. Existing queer spaces, in turn, become internally homogenised and are desexualised in order to make straight visitors and consumers comfortable (Binnie and Skeggs 2004). As a result, ‘the “gay public sphere” [is reduced] to consumption spaces and gentrified neighbourhoods only’ (2004: 1811). The authors show how this homogenised concept of queer space has entered into dominant policy models such as Richard Florida’s (2002) creative class. In a thesis that has been highly influential among urban policy makers globally, Florida claims that the spatial concentration of gays, called the ‘gay index’, along with other ‘creative classers’, like ‘people in design, education, arts, music and entertainment, whose economic function is to create new ideas, new technology and/or creative content’, correlates with an area’s potential for gentrification (2002: 8).³ Queer counter-publics and public sex scenes, meanwhile, which do not fit sanitised ideals of gay space, are pushed out: ‘For many assimilationist gays … gay male sex zones are seen as an embarrassment that must be cleaned up’ (Bell and Binnie 2004: 1815).

A similar observation is made by Sarah Schulman (2012), who places the gentrification of parts of Manhattan, including by gay men with race and class privileges, into a context where previous queer formations have been erased as a result of the AIDS crisis. Rather than in the homogeneous gay neighbourhood, Schulman sees promise in the mixed neighbourhood, which revalues ‘multiculturalism [sic], gender non-conformity and individuated behavior’, as well as ‘[i]nnovative aesthetics, diverse food traditions [and] ease with mixed race and mixed re...