Queer Trouble: Centring Race in Queer and Feminist Politics

Abstract

Abstract Those involved in queer politics were caught somewhat off guard when Judith Butler refused Berlin's Christopher Street Day (Gay Pride) Civil Courage Prize being awarded to her due to the failure of the organisers to distance themselves from a political programme that uses racist discourse for political gain. This paper will not focus on the homonationalist organisations associated with the festival organisers but rather on progressive queer and feminist groups who claim an anti-racist position yet do not change their white-dominated structures to engage in anti-racist praxis. It remains a challenge for white-dominated progressive feminist and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT)/queer groups to change racist structures. This has the effect of propagating an exclusionary white queer and feminist politics. To counter this, white allies need to commit to an accountable positionality. Keywords: HomonationalismCritical PositionalityQueer PoliticsCritical Whiteness Notes 1. I use the term "gay and lesbian" as a way to describe a single-issue politics of sexual emancipation, whether progressive or other, and which is also based on a modernist conception of homosexual identity. Often these organisations are dominated by majoritarian middle-class gay. 2. CSD stands for Christopher Street Day and is the annual gay pride parade/festival. The name refers to the street where the Stonewall Inn bar in New York City is located. For critiques on the way Stonewall has been interpreted, see Bacchetta (Citation2002) and Haritaworn (Citation2005). 3. I was affiliated with SUSPECT at the time. 4. I have written about this elsewhere (Petzen Citation2005, Citation2008) and also with Jin Haritaworn (Petzen and Haritaworn Citation2011). 5. In my work, I do not wish to give weight to claims of German exceptionalism and imply that racial regimes are better elsewhere. While national racist regimes are shaped by specific geographies and histories, claims of post-raciality is a stock mechanism with which the power of neo-liberal racial regimes is sustained. I am indebted to the participants of the European CRT Retreat in 2010 for their work on this point, especially Kimberlé Crenshaw and Cengiz Barskanmaz. 6. In addition to the conferences that are examined here, one can look at the Queer Again conference in Berlin, the conference on Gay Shame in 2003 (see Perez Citation2005), the lecture series "The Subtle [sic] Racialisations of Sexuality: Queer Theory, the Aftermath of Colonial History, and the Late-Modern State", in Berlin, where scholars of colour from North America or the UK are invited to speak about queer of colour theory by a white 'curator'. 7. See Barskanmaz (Citation2011) for an excellent deconstruction of German exceptionalism. 8. A detailed analysis of the problems of erasing the word "Rasse" is found in Barskanmaz (Citation2010). 9. http://www.feministische-oekonomiekritik.org/Programmheft.pdf (last accessed 30 October 2010). 10. The silence on the part of white scholars contrasts to the critique of some academics of colour who were concerned that a white queer academic was being credited with anti-racist work done by queers of colour (see, for instance, Puar Citation2010). Additional informationNotes on contributorsJennifer Petzen Jennifer Petzen is an interdisciplinary political anthropologist teaching queer studies and the sociology of migration at the Humboldt University in Berlin. She received her PhD in Interdisciplinary Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Washington with concentrations in anthropology and queer studies, examining how new knowledges of a 'Muslim' racial formation are articulated through moral panics surrounding sexuality and gender. Her most recent work includes "Contesting Europe: A Call for an Anti-modern Sexual Politics" in a special issue of the European Journal of Women's Studies; and "Invented Traditions, New Intimate Publics: Tracing the German Muslim Homophobia Discourse" co-authored with Jin Haritaworn