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Journal of Intercultural Studies

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Queer Trouble: Centring Race in Queer

and Feminist Politics
Jennifer Petzen
Published online: 01 Jun 2012.

To cite this article: Jennifer Petzen (2012) Queer Trouble: Centring Race in Queer and Feminist
Politics, Journal of Intercultural Studies, 33:3, 289-302, DOI: 10.1080/07256868.2012.673472

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 Journal of Intercultural Studies
Vol. 33, No. 3, June 2012, pp. 289
302

Queer Trouble: Centring Race in Queer

and Feminist Politics
Jennifer Petzen
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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: Homonationalism; Critical Positionality; Queer Politics; Critical Whiteness

The collective labour of queers of colour and their allies over the last 30 years has
been particularly important in critiquing the politics of European gay and lesbian1
organisations that rely on lobbying and/or broad representative claims. The force
of this collective labour was obvious at the Berlin CSD2 2010, where after being
educated by local and transnational activists about majoritarian gay political agendas,
Judith Butler refused to accept the event’s prize for Civil Courage. Butler instead
announced to the audience that she might actually lose her courage if she were to

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. Correspondence to:
Dr Jennifer Petzen, Centre for Trans-disciplinary Gender Studies, Humboldt University, Unter den Linden 6,
D-10117 Berlin, Germany. Email: [email protected]

ISSN 0725-6868 print/ISSN 1469-9540 online/12/030289-14

# 2012 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07256868.2012.673472
 290 J. Petzen

accept the prize, given that the organisers of the CSD had failed to distance
themselves from racist political strategies deployed by larger political gay organisa-
tions in Berlin to which they have links. German papers and gay media quickly
branded her real act of civil courage a ‘‘scandal’’ although the reasons why it was a
scandal were not made clear. Was it that she was an ungrateful guest to her hosts
(heard in feminist and queer circles, which seems ironic considering that politeness
has not traditionally been a characteristic of radical queer activists)? That she spoke
of a problem that has plagued the politics of sexual emancipation from the outset?
Or was it because that a wildly popular (especially in Germany) queer theorist aca-
demic ally put her money where her mouth is and set an uncomfortable example
for the white queer and feminist progressive communities? The latter seems fairly
plausible as the biggest echo after Judith Butler’s refusal of the Civil Courage Prize
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was not the irrational (although to be expected) response/denial of the CSD organ-
isers and their contacts in the media, but rather the noticeable lack of engagement
with the organising activists and organisations mentioned in Butler’s non-acceptance
speech from the white-dominated queer and gender studies departments (or indi-
vidual activists) in Germany. After the event, one group whose name was mentioned
in the speech put out a press release on a blog (SUSPECT 2010), and quickly became
recognised as the hub of transnational solidarity that sprang up around the event.
While many groups and individuals from outside Germany posted on the SUSPECT3
blog site to show signs of solidarity, there were hardly any suggestions for political
action from German queer and feminist academics. It was a silence that belies the
genealogy of German queer of colour critique and the collective labour that effected
Butler’s action, a silence that sits uncomfortably on a very established and progressive
queer tradition of politics. This silence continues to be the most notable around self-
positioning or ‘‘the critical notion of positionality’’ (Erel et al. 2008: 267) that one
would expect of queer activists and feminists, and a concept on which I will further
elaborate below.
In this paper, I would like to employ four ethnographic accounts of queer and
feminist knowledge production to look at some of the ways in which queer theory has
been received and utilised to retain racialised hierarchies in both politics and
academic life. By looking more closely at actual contexts such as these where anti-
racist rhetoric is deployed, I hope to shed light on how racial hegemonies continue to
be insufficiently challenged by institutions and groups that claim to be in service of
their deconstruction. I draw on four examples: the Sexual Nationalisms conference
in Amsterdam in 2011; the Celebrating Intersectionality? conference in Frankfurt
in 2009, where white and white feminist scholars writing on intersectionality came
together to discuss the theoretical future of the concept; the Feminist Economy
Critique conference, where queer feminism met neo-Marxist theory; and Judith
Butler’s refusal of the Berlin CSD award in 2010.
This ethnography of reception and re-appropriation refers less to the reactionary
forces in homonationalist lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) politics
against which Butler was protesting4 and focuses on more white-dominated
 Journal of Intercultural Studies 291

progressive groups that seem unable to successfully engage with anti-racist and queer
and trans of colour critiques. The fact that German literature on intersectionality,
a body of theory developed by feminists of colour, is distributed and commented
on by mainly white academic practitioners of gender and queer theory is not an
exception to the typical structures of knowledge production in feminist and queer
studies in Germany and elsewhere, structures that silence ‘‘the knowledge produc-
tions and political activisms of trans people of colour, queers of colour, women of
colour and migrant women’’ (Erel et al. 2008: 265).

Critical Praxis of Positionality

In critically engaging my own ethnographic positioning, I want to acknowledge the
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intellectual and political partnerships that have made it possible for me, a white cis-
queer woman, to do this work. During my research, people of colour involved in
anti-racist queer politics have generously shared their time and knowledge with me.
Long conversations over the years with mentors such as Cengiz Barskanmaz, Sanchita
Basu, Mı̂ran Çelik, Esra Erdem, Jin Haritaworn, Asiye Kaya, Chandan Reddy, Lisa
Thaler, Nuran Yiĝit and Koray Yılmaz-Günay provided a kind of knowledge that
I otherwise would not have had. Acknowledging the work of straight, queer and trans
feminists of colour who have created this field of inquiry is a crucial part of a notion
of a critical accountable positionality, a concept that I will further discuss below, and
a political practice as much as it is a citational practice. A note would seem wildly
insufficient here, because these political and intellectual friendships have had such
an enormous impact on how I understand racial and gendered logics and strategies
of resistance as well as my own positioning. As for any inaccuracies and lapses in
analysis, those are mine alone.
In my observations of political and (non)critical practice, the lack of critical
positionings on questions of race confused me in a country that seems to devote
much of its time to disavowing its racist ‘past’. I began to see the avoidance of critical
positionality as the elephant in the living room: the white doctor of sociology at the
Social Science Institute in Berlin who told me that black and white was something
we had in the USA,5 the white graduate of Humboldt University’s Gender Studies
programme who matter-of-factly claimed that she had nothing to do with racism, the
popular understanding that racism is a problem of a few disturbed neo-Nazis living
in the countryside. These are things that I heard early on in my time in Berlin,
prompting me think about the different ways in which whiteness is coded in different
geographies but in a linked post/neo-colonial temporality claiming to be ‘post-racial’.
One crucial way in which whiteness has been said to retain its power in post-racial
times is by making itself invisible (Frankenberg 1993). However, as Sara Ahmed has
pointed out, it is only those privileged with whiteness who don’t see it. For everyone
else, ‘‘it is hard not to see whiteness; it even seems everywhere’’ (Ahmed 2004: 1).
Perhaps that is why Frankenberg eventually adjusted her position (2001), as it did not
seem plausible that the ways in which race structures contemporary life could be
 292 J. Petzen

invisible, even for people who will never have to imagine what life would be like as
the racialised other. Moreover, since the time of Frankenberg’s book, other white
practitioners of intellectual work on intersectionality or anti-racist political activism
have come to understand that a blithe process of ignoring whiteness will usually not
go unchallenged, so recognising and admitting white privilege has become the basis
of the typical positionality statement for white scholars. Yet if the recognition of
whiteness and other privileges have become standard academic practice, how do these
critical positionings continue to support exclusionary dynamics in spaces heralded as
inclusive?
I would like to draw on Sara Ahmed’s understanding of the (non)performativity of
anti-racist discourse and its relation to the production of the social (2004). In an
interrogation of certain ‘‘declarative’’ anti-racist claims made by white people, Ahmed
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examines how anti-racist rhetoric can be non-performative, or non-productive.

That is, it fails in its promise to change both racist structures and individuals because
‘‘The declarative mode . . . involves a fantasy of transcendence . . . to put it simply,
if we admit to being bad, then we show that we are good’’ (Ahmed 2004: 54). There
are myriad examples of white intellectuals who claim anti-racist positions, yet do not
seem to confront the racist power structures that give them so much privilege. For
example, an earlier version of this paper was solicited by a group of white German
editors for a volume on revisiting intersectionality. In that draft, I had critiqued the
politics of knowledge production that produced the book (which had mostly white
contributors); the editors refused to publish my chapter in the end. The lack of
reflection makes it difficult to interpret the publication of the book other than a
curatorial project generating currency in the service of an academic career. As I will
further elaborate in the examples below, a mere positioning of sympathy to feminist
and queer anti-racist politics is not enough. These positionings must be accompanied
by long-term commitments to a politics of disrupting power relations embedded in
knowledge production. Acting as white curators of knowledge produced by black
or postcolonial feminism has proven to be a name maker; the examples that could
be written about are too numerous to mention here. But it should be carefully noted
that this curating (or its attempt) is often made into a spectacle (see Haritaworn
2005, Perez 2005) at conferences where new intellectual knowledge is presented, as
with the case of the Sexual Nationalisms conference in Amsterdam in 2011, where the
original call for papers went out crediting two white scholars with building up the
field. The last minute tokenism on the part of the organisers to include the scholars of
colour whose path-breaking work has actually created a sea change in the field could
not make up for the catastrophic final panel in which one panellist, Gert Hekma,
claimed that Muslims were paedophiles. Apparently, in an email to the organisers
a week before the conference, Hekma positioned himself firmly within a white
gay politics (Stelder 2011). The organisers still hoped for ‘‘a stimulating discussion’’.
According to Mikki Stelder, ‘‘Instead of catering to the critique and taking it seriously,
the organisers rather take on the position of the innocent victim, instead of creating
the space for the important political and intellectual goals they claim to seek and
 Journal of Intercultural Studies 293

represent’’ (2011). In short, what these examples show is that not only do declarative
positionings by majoritarian intellectuals and activists run the risk of being non-
performative, they can also be power claims to a dominating, white intellectual
curatorship that actively hinders the goals of queer and feminist anti-racist politics.
By using Ahmed’s notion of non-performativity as a critical tool, I hope to expose
the gap between the critical positionality of some feminists and the performativeness
of their positions, and advocate thinking about what a performative positionality
and politics of alliance should entail: a public commitment to long-term political
engagement and a commitment to being held accountable. Without these commit-
ments, any critical positioning that remains solely declarative or curatorial cannot
be considered to be an advantage for queer and feminist anti-racist scholarship or
politics.
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Celebrating Intersectionality?
A conference in Frankfurt on intersectionality in 2009 exemplified the currency of the
concept in gender studies departments in Germany. Billed as the kick-off event for
the new gender studies department there, the conference invited several high-profile
feminists of colour to attend, including Kimberlé Crenshaw, who coined the term
in 1989, as well as several white German feminists whom Isabella Lorey credits for
importing the concept of intersectionality to Germany (2008: 11). In this case, the
categories feminists of colour and German apparently did not intersect, as the high-
profile feminists of colour (including Ann Phoenix and Gloria Wekker) who attended
the conference all came from abroad, a move often seen in conference organising.
This is not to minimise the excellence of their scholarship, but not giving any space to
local feminists of colour accomplishes several things. It elides the body of work these
feminists have contributed to intersectional analysis, such as the pioneers of Afro-
German feminist writing May Ayim and Katherina Oguntoye; Encarnación Gutiérrez
Rodrı́guez, who has written about the relationship between the effects of colonialism
and postcolonial knowledge production (2003); Fatima El-Tayeb, probably one of the
first people to write about gay racism in Germany (2003); Maisha Eggers and the
contributors to the volume on critical whiteness she co-edited with Grada Kilomba,
Peggy Piesche and Susan Arndt (2005); Esra Erdem, whose work focuses on migrant
women workers (2009); Asiye Kaya, who has written about the complex gendered,
racial and religious formations that arise through migration (2009); Koray Yılmaz-
Günay, who has been at the forefront of a queer intersectional critique in Germany;
and Jin Haritaworn, who has written extensively about gay imperialism and racism.
The choice to include people of colour only from abroad
a move repeated over
and over in gender studies conferences6
has the effect of relegating race and post-
colonial and/or anti-racist scholarship to a place outside Germany. Often scholars
from abroad are unfamiliar with neither the local reception of black feminism or
queer theory nor the local racial politics, and thus the organisers are usually rendered
immune from critique from their guests. This relocation of race to beyond the
 294 J. Petzen

national borders also allows the preoccupation with intersectionality to become an

interesting theoretical puzzle, saving its practitioners from having to actually apply it
to a relevant social problem. Moreover, while it is clear that feminists of colour face
significant structural barriers to professorships in German universities, it does not
mean that there are not enough qualified feminists of colour who write on this issue
(unfortunately an argument heard from a white feminist).
Feminists of colour in different geographies have often remarked how their
work is often regarded as mere raw material, which is then turned into theory by
white theorists (Alexander and Mohanty 1997, Moya 1997, Haritaworn 2005) or even
belittled as ‘mere’ experience that has no theoretical value (Ng 1997). As Jacqui
Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty stated in their critique of academic
feminism in the USA:
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Token inclusions of our texts without reconceptualising the whole white, middle-
class gendered knowledge base effectively absorbs and silences us. This says, in
effect, that our theories are plausible and carry explanatory weight only in relation
to our specific experiences, but that they have no use value in relation to the rest of
the world. (1997: xvii)

The conference organisation reflected this tendency in its programming. The

introductory panel with Crenshaw scheduled at the beginning of the conference
(she was apparently not invited to give a keynote address) focused more on empirical
development of the concept of intersectionality and concluded with a theoretical
panel dominated by white theorists. The title of the panel was ‘‘What is to be done?
Towards the Development of a Full-Fledged Theory’’, as though the present state
of intellectual inquiry using the concept of intersectionality was a dead end and
that it needed developmental assistance to move to a higher theoretical level. One
speaker, Cornelia Klinger, even titled her talk ‘‘When the Celebrations are Over . . .
Intersectionality and the Long Road to Theory’’. A year later at a lecture in Berlin,
Crenshaw added that the question mark at the end of the conference title was also
mystifying, signifying that intersectionality was something that perhaps should not
be celebrated. Crenshaw then presented her original case study and why she drew
the conclusions that she did, making clear that her theory of intersectionality had
relevance because it had come out of a case study. My interpretation is that Crenshaw
wanted to emphasise that her deductive analysis was a critique of the limitation of the
ways in which the particular legal categories of gender and race could be used in anti-
discrimination law and not a theoretical blueprint or inductive tool for predicting the
ways in which intersectional identities might be formed.
Some white German speakers at the conference seemed to want to pursue the idea
of how intersectionality might and should be better theorised or made more
complicated, or if it should be celebrated at all, as opposed to giving credit to the
original work and entering into dialogue with it. As Alexander and Mohanty note,
this does not equal to a serious engagement with the work at hand:
 Journal of Intercultural Studies 295

. . . serious intellectual, analytic, and political engagement with the theorisations

of women of colour has not occurred. Instead, this work has been largely appropri-
ated and often erased, and thus does not figure in the institutional memory for
canonical formulations of Women’s studies knowledge. (1997: xvi)

The German context is different here in that one can speak of a fetishisation of
intersectionality (Barskanmaz 2010), whereby white feminists positioning themselves
as theorists, take up texts written by people of colour and use them, as well as their
experiences, as raw material for theoretical exercises or profit from them (Moya 1997,
Schwarzbach-Apithy 2005, Wollrad 2005). Reading white German literature on
intersectionality, one senses the frustration of writers as they wrestle with attempts
at cognitively and spatially mapping out the prescriptive geographic lines of what a
theoretical intersectional analysis would look like (one paper at the conference
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deduced that 14 different intersections could possibly occur). In contrast, Crenshaw’s

work actually maps out how racial legal categories can be deployed to erase particular
subject positions by refusing to recognise or name them or allow them a legal
existence. Her work is much less concerned with trying to map out and precisely
determine in advance how to define a particular subject than tracing the ways certain
subjects are made illegible given the categories created by majoritarian discourse.
However, defining subject positions seems to be more a privilege of white feminists
than of feminists of colour, as Paula Moya has pointed out in her analysis of Donna
Haraway’s post-structuralist notion of the cyborg. This is why Roderick Ferguson
noted at the Queer Again conference in Berlin in 2010, the critiques of identity
politics by white post-structuralists and feminists of colour are not the same. That is
to say, when white feminists critique identity and identity politics as being an
essentialist move that cannot be called representative or liberatory, they are speaking
from a structural position of racialised power that allows them to define what a
universally understood feminist, non-identitarian politics might be. When feminists
and queers of colour critique the practice of identity politics, they are critiquing this
very power structure, which poses its exclusiveness as inclusiveness. It attempts not
only to be universally prescriptive, but prescriptive in a way that condescendingly says
we know the value of your experience better than you do. In other words, it is an act
of claiming universal validity for white experience, despite theoretical protests against
the use of experience in forming political demands, which has the end effect of
discounting the incredible violence done to people of colour.
The literature on intersectionality that I reviewed for this paper (see Degele and
Winker 2007, Dietze et al. 2007, Walganbach 2007, Lorey 2008) fascinates me because
it seems to work very hard to discuss the theoretical implications of intersectional
analysis without applying it empirically. In other words, there seems to be a lot of talk
about how to do intersectionality and what is the best way to theorise it, but the ways
in which it has been taken up and given a particular genealogy cause one to think
about how intersectionality is actually being applied, and what its actual function
is in academic circles. The neo-liberal conditions of the knowledge production
advocate the commodification of resistance in intellectual work: theoretical musings
 296 J. Petzen

on intersectionality can be co-opted into a particular kind of academic and political

currency. Lucy Chebout asks if the counting of women of colour in this context is
‘‘more than a rhetorical strategy that serves as an immunisation against critiques of
their own power positions’’ (2010: 55).
Umut Erel et al. outline the ways in which the post-war feminist movement in
Germany has ignored critiques of black and anti-racist feminists in Germany (2008:
273
275). Isabell Lorey exemplifies this continuing citational violence when she
cites the year 2005 as the first time that intersectional approaches were taken up in
German debates on gender
albeit by white theorists (2008: 11). Formative works
by black and anti-racist feminists employing intersectional analysis such as Farbe
bekennen (Opitz et al. 1986) are not listed here, nor are more recent contributions
such as Spricht die Subalterne deutsch? (Steyerl and Rodrı́guez 2003) and Mythen,
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Masken und Subjekte (Eggers et al. 2005), although the latter is cited separately
as literature on critical whiteness. Thus, intersectional work produced by scholars
of colour is curiously taken out of the intersectional genealogy and categorised as
a related but separate field of study (Lorey 2008: 1
2). By adhering to a strict
classification of works on intersectionality as those which trace their genealogy
directly and solely from Crenshaw’s work, instead of seeing it as a part of broader
transnational feminist discourses of black women, women of colour and women from
the Global South, the global significance of these feminisms and the implications
for white-dominated institutional feminisms in Europe are elided. In short, black
feminisms and the feminisms of the Global South are written off the page as being
constitutive of a major social movement. One must consider, then, ‘‘a link between
the positions of power held by white women in Women’s Studies, the subject of their
theorising, and the kinds of analytic tools they deployed’’ (Alexander and Mohanty
1997: xvi).
Another problem with this particular way of framing intersectional analysis is that
it is situated in ‘feminist’ thought and something that belongs in (white) gender
studies instead of being a part of post-colonial or even anti-racist critique. Fore-
grounding gender as a category of analysis allows the concept of intersectionality to
become palatable to white-dominated gender studies departments and universities,
and made less threatening, especially when ‘ethnicity’ is substituted for ‘race’. As such,
the anti-racist critique in European work on intersectionality tends to suffer at the
hands of some theorists who tend to favour the other intersectional ‘axes’ of (white)
gender and class, and recently sexuality (Dietze et al. 2007). Race has been difficult
for white theorists to talk about in the European context, with some authors going
so far as to say that because of Germany’s past it would be better not to use this as
an analytical category (Chebout 2010: 54 citing Degele and Winker 2007).7 On the
contrary, it is precisely due to its history in Germany that contemporary racial
formations should be paid attention to and not divorced from the historical processes
that bore them. Indeed, throughout the conference white European feminists referred
to ethnicity and not race.8 The erasure of race is also a reoccurring problem in the
way intersectionality has been received in Europe (Chebout 2010).
 Journal of Intercultural Studies 297

Feminist Economy Critique

In 2010, a neo-Marxist group of mostly white cis-women feminists and queers
formed a collective in northern Neukölln, a ‘‘problem’’ (i.e. ‘‘migrant’’) district in
Berlin that is rapidly gentrifying. With funds from a major university, among
others, they held a series of events: first several open houses in their collective and
then a three-day conference entitled ‘‘Who Cares? Critique of Economy and Queer
Feminism’’ [Who Cares? Ökonomiekritik und Queerfeminismus],9 where they took
up the hefty relationships between the neo-liberal order and hegemonic, hetero-
normative systems of gender and sexuality. Queer feminism was represented in panels
ranging from a NGO supporting male survivors of sexual abuse to queer feminist hip
hop. The kick-off event was simply called the Forum and was a panel discussion with
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two moderators and eight participants, consisting of two academics (white) and
representatives of NGOs whose work focuses on gender and sexuality. The setting for
the event was decidedly conspicuous as a case of ‘slumming’: a youth centre in a so-
called ‘problem neighbourhood’ (Problemkiez) of Rütli in Neukölln, itself a large
district also often in the news due to its apparent problem population of migrants
who refuse to integrate. The centre is across the street from the Rütli School, whose
white director infamously appealed to the Berlin Senate in an open letter to do
something about the problem of out of control migrant youth. The large room was
full, seating at least 150 people, of whom the overwhelming majority appeared to be
white, young and alternative.
The panel started with an introduction round, where people explained what
their organisation is about or their academic research. Several NGOs working on
gender and sexual equality were present, such as AB Queer, a group that does gender
education in schools, GLADT e.V. and LesMigraS, two queer of colour groups who
have worked to bring an intersectional analysis to political praxis, Tauwetter and
Wildwasser, who advocate for victims of sexual violence and its prevention, and
several other organisations. The director of the youth centre, a white male, was also
on the panel, along with an employee of the centre, a social worker with a ‘migration
background’. Social voyeurism (the thrill of having proximity to the classed, racialised
and gendered sexual Other) reached its peak when the director began to explain
the kind of social work the centre is involved in. It quickly became a litany of the
problems of the inhabitants of the neighbourhood, most of whom ‘‘barely speak
German’’ and have severe integration problems. It is, in fact, a repetition of the most
common racist stereotypes associated with ‘migrants’, but because it came from a
white liberal obviously trying to effect social change, heads nodded in agreement.
His employee, the social worker with the ‘migration background’ remained silent;
the moderators did not only fail to point out the obvious problem with political
representation, they did not even ask him to speak. He did not utter one word for the
duration of the event. Even though the organisers had worked to include queer of
colour groups at the event, in the end they were unable or unwilling to confront the
dominance of majoritarian racial discourse.
 298 J. Petzen

Sceptical activists who have seen this type of anti-racist theatrics many times before
were angry but not surprised. Prior to the event, there were concerted lobbying
efforts to get self-organised migrant groups to cooperate on the panel, but that is
significantly different than asking them to be equal partners in the planning process,
which would have required giving up their central role in the programme. If this kind
of cooperation cannot be imagined at the outset, it follows that there will be an
inability to foresee and react to the typical exclusionary dynamics white progressive
groups create in spaces devoted to questioning racism. By locating their critique of
neo-liberal politics in a poor, migrant neighbourhood, the organisers were trying to
bolster their credentials of racial and class solidarity, a tokenistic move to include
the migrants in an elite, white, political activity. While liberating white anti-racists
from their consciences, it does nothing for the people who actually suffer the brunt
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of racist ideology. Being a white anti-racist myself, I am intimately familiar with the
defensive urge to fight off any association with racist behaviour, speech, thought or
politics. Refusing to own up to one’s racism stems from the fact that much of anti-
racist work done by white people is a project about creating an anti-racist identity
and hence has white people’s feelings at the centre of the project. This identity must
be protected at all costs, because to not occupy this position would of course mean
occupying a racist position. Critiques of white anti-racist politics usually result
in denial, defensiveness, evasiveness, counter-attacks of racism and the eventual
exclusion of people of colour who bring up these critiques in white queer and
feminist spaces.
It is clear that these declarations are performative in the lay dramatic sense of
the word but not in an Ahmedian one. It is here that we see the breakdown of
any effectiveness of critical positioning and where we see the urgent need for a
performative positionality, that is, a critical positionality that is productive (in that it
does something other than reinstating white privilege) and held to be accountable.
Of course, this does not occur in a vacuum. In a country where the popular
understanding of racism is Nazi and neo-Nazi ideologies, where brutal colonial
histories and legacies are ignored or belittled, where white people insist they are not
white and think they are victims of racism when you tell them they are, in a country
where people complain about still having to talk about the Holocaust, where people
who are born here are deported and have their citizenship revoked, perhaps it is not
so surprising that a post-racial order is so strongly defended. The vocal urge to save
and the consequent political actions like the one described above become quieter
around other anti-racist actions where white people are not centred as beneficiaries.
The question is how scholars of colour are treated when they do not conform to
the grateful performances expected of them by daring to articulate critiques of
racist knowledge production. Reactions range from questioning the quality of their
scholarship to accusing them of refusing dialogue, in contrast to how white scholars
are usually treated. For example, when Judith Butler openly confronted the racism
connected with the CSD, she was accused of being ‘‘misinformed’’ and even of being
‘‘a diva without glamour’’, but her scholarship was not questioned (Feddersen 2010).
 Journal of Intercultural Studies 299

In contrast, when a critical piece on white gay activists was published by people of
colour in (Haritaworn et al. 2008), the publisher (ironically named Raw Nerve Press)
folded to pressure from white gay activists and cancelled the second printing of the
book, citing factual errors as one reason. The censorship was scandalised, with a
special issue of Feminist Legal Studies being devoted to queer anti-racist critique
(Douglas et al. 2011), but the book remains out of print.
Judith Butler’s work is widely popular in gender and queer studies in Germany,
perhaps because her work offers the possibility to queers of reinventing themselves
through new explorations of gender and sexuality (although she herself has spoken
out against this kind of interpretation). Given gender and sexuality’s relationship to
race, of course, an implicit promise of racial reinvention accompanies/underlies her
work. Eske Wollrad argues that for white German academics, the theorising
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of the categories ‘‘body’’ and ‘‘gender’’ that the ‘‘Butler boom’’ produced completely
elides the racialising dynamics that constitute them (2005: 417) and even predicts
that whiteness will become a merely discursive category (418). Butler’s refusal of
complicity in racialised queer politics, then, was actually recognition of white identity
and its dominance, perhaps an ironic surprise given her critiques of identity (1990) as
well as the critiques of her work by scholars of colour (Moya 1997, Ng 1997, Wollrad
2005). Considering the international attention the blog got from queer of colour
groups and that the blog itself has been cited in various online bibliographies,10
the paucity of white queer and gender studies academics and activists writing on
the SUSPECT blog or in the mainstream press is fairly puzzling, raising the issue
of what white feminists and/or queer activists have to lose or gain from such
interventions. It is worth noting that in the examples I mentioned, racial knowl-
edge being imparted from white people is noticed, while the knowledge of people
of colour is systematically ignored, erased or disparaged. This is not coincidental,
anecdotal or complaining; this is a structural problem and it needs to be attended
to as such.
A more promising vision of a queer politics committed to social justice would
have anti-racist attached to its political practice, not just its name. It is not enough
to claim a critical positionality. Allies must have a commitment to an accountable
positionality, which goes beyond declaring one’s racial, class and gender position-
ing and moves to a public commitment to be held accountable, a commitment
to support queers, trans people and feminists of colour in their political struggle
and not just use their bodies and theories to advance their careers. There must
be a willingness to take risks, such as taking public positions when it is very
uncomfortable to do so, and even where there is the possibility of serious backlash.
This needs to be done when it is obvious that queer and feminist of colour
scholarship is being tokenised, appropriated, derided or sidelined. Not naming
this commitment publicly and loudly will not only hinder transparent production
of knowledge but also continue to support racist structures, making ‘queer’ and
‘feminist’ politics merely white politics.
 300 J. Petzen

Notes
[1] I use the term ‘‘gay and lesbian’’ as a way to describe a single-issue politics of sexual eman-
cipation, 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 (2002) and Haritaworn (2005).
[3] I was affiliated with SUSPECT at the time.
[4] I have written about this elsewhere (Petzen 2005, 2008) and also with Jin Haritaworn (Petzen
and Haritaworn 2011).
[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
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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 2005), 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 (2011) for an excellent deconstruction of German exceptionalism.
[8] A detailed analysis of the problems of erasing the word ‘‘Rasse’’ is found in Barskanmaz
(2010).
[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 2010).

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