 this evening's seminar. So my name is Kallin Ali and I'm a member of the Center for Gender Studies here at SOAS. It's my great pleasure to chair this evening's talk. I should say that when I first met Alyosha in July 2014, which now, as we most agreed, seems to be alive a long way, it's so many things that happened since then. She was interviewing for a post-Asteroop to replace the teaching of our colleague, Ruba Saleh. And after five minutes, I knew that Alyosha was very special and precious. And I'm so glad that she's been here. Of course, you all know that as well, and I know. It's mutual. So Alyosha is, of course, not only a senior teaching fellow with us, and she's been convening gender immigration and diasporas last term and the year before. And this term, she's convening for politics. But Alyosha is, of course, also the MSD fellow in transnational gender studies. And this is also great because we feel that she's a great bridge between the gender institute at LSE and ISE. We have some members of the audience who are representing the gender institute and the Center for Gender Studies. And I think as part of our feminist work of trying to do things differently, there's always this competition between Sowas and LSE. But I think where gender studies is concerned, we are showing that we can do things differently. So Alyosha's work connects trans and queer families approaches with transnational feminism and post-colonial studies. Their main research interest lies in analyzing knowledge productions on migrations, diasporas, and borders, particularly in relations to critiques of Eurocentrism and to processes of gendering and racialization. And, of course, today's lecture will be about the distinction, the analytical, political, and theoretical distinction between racism and migratism, which has been really at the core of Alyosha's work. In the past, they have worked as an assistant researcher at the Center for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies at the Humboldt University in Berlin and also were a visiting scholar at the Center of Gender Excellence at Linköping University in Sweden. In their current research project on transnationalism, Alyosha analyzes links between conceptualizations of transgender and transnational and aims for a critical redefinition of transnationalism and political agency. Alyosha is currently preparing a book manuscript with the working title, Trans-It, Trans-Feminist Perspectives on Diasporas, Migrations, and Community in Post-Colonial Europe. Please help me to welcome Alyosha. Thank you, Alyosha, for this generous introduction. I'm really happy to be here. It's always a special task to give a paper at your home institution, but as LSE is my GIs, my second home, I'm not really at home. This is, like, the mighty tradition, I guess. The three quotes that introduced this paper lay down tracks to indicate what is important for me in this project. It is not a coincidence that I start with Sarah Amin's quote on feminism. Amin takes the word feminism life meaning grasps a dimension that I find incredibly important, the dimension of disobjectification, the political act of making thinkable, utterable, making intelligible, impossible, non-intelligible, intelligible subjects. This process is not a voluntary act, but a fragile effect of collective politics, empowering positionings, and transient political alliances. It is about coming into existence, about collective processes of turning oppression into a resistance. Feminism as critical positioning spoke me into existence. Amin brings together feminism with the process of making thinkable, unthinkable, and unutterable positionings. It is about the process of making possible and livable accounts of oppositional subjectivity. Fatima Altaieff too problematizes processes of objectification in certain understandings of migration. She states that in heteronormative discourses of nation as well as migration, Europeans of color become the objects, the impossible, queer, unsubjects. This means that discourses that define nation and migration as binary gendered and heteronormative, and conceptualized racism, only in terms of migration, objectify Europeans of color. Likewise, Ha Adal underlined that racism is about the construction of non-European, non-European-ness, or European-ness as binaries, and that the brittle category migrant is insufficient for critical analysis as it is based on and that reduces the exclusion of Black Europeans, and in consequence constructs Europe as white. Taking up these various perspectives on one side of problems, I argue that critical feminist scholarship on rendering sexuality, migration, racism, nation, and European-ness urgently needs critical conceptualizations to make sense of complex post-colonial geopolitics. We need to take a chance to open up new ways of thinking gendered racism and nationalism and its connection to migration in post-colonial Europe. In this paper, I want to make one main argument and discuss its implication, potential challenges and contradictions on various levels. I claim that a differentiation of racism and migratism is needed in critical feminist knowledge production concerned with racism and migration in post-colonial Europe. This claims relies on and expands the insights of transnational feminist post-colonial and queer and transgender feminist knowledge productions and clear influence of color critique. With my analysis, I show that without this differentiation, feminist theory and activism reproduce Europe as a space free of race and thereby deny racism and the efficiency of racialization, reduce transnationalism to a coexistence of homogenized national entities, render Europeans of color as the abjects of discourses on migration and paradoxically racism in Europe and repulse queer and trans feminist diasporic political struggle to heteronormative binary-generating ideas of origin, family, culture and nation. I start with a disclaimer or with a reaction to many misreadings of my migratism conceptualization that I had encountered in the last years. The migratism conceptualization is not to foreground the discrimination of white migrants. It is to sharpen their understanding of post-colonial racism in Europe. It is about grasping the description of migration as one strategy of racism and about understanding recent discursive racializations of migration. That, for example, the description of Eastern European migration to certain bodies, like, in my case, in a German context, the description of Romanian migration and its discriminatory effects become theorizable through the concept is rather a byproduct than the main focus. Furthermore, it's not about privileged forms of border crossing in a supranational Western context. I say this because every time I talk about migratism in public, I have a person identifying with the concept who is certainly not meant by it. So no, it's not about white Swedes in Norway and white Germans in the UK and white Canadians in Australia and white Danes in Poland. You get the poet, I hope. Without me making me name all possible privileged border crossings, it is not about inventing discriminations. It is about conceptualizing migration and nonbelowing and belonging as relying in complex ways on post-colonial geopolitics, North, South, East, West divisions, and very often racialization. All I can offer a change of paradigms in activism and scholarship on migration in post-colonial Europe. Mainly, I argue for a post-colonial framing of migration and show the necessity of analyzing migratism, the discriminatory description of migration, always in relation to racism. In so doing, I question optimized and oversimplified linkages between migration and racism. Today, I start with an analysis of quotes from feminist knowledge production on migration and from cradle migration studies. Before I expand on what migratism is and what the conceptualization of migratism might help us to think and do, I try to persuade you to read with me in order to follow me in feeling the need for such a conceptualization. I give the quote by Etienne Baribar, whose work is seen as one of the foundations for thinking of neo-racism and political belonging in Europe in many critical migration studies and in leftist, Marxist, anti-globalization activism. Modernarily, the word immigrant is a catch-all category combining ethnic and class criteria into which foreigners are done indiscriminately, though not all foreigners and not only foreigners. The Portuguese, for example, will be more of an immigrant than a Spaniard in Paris, though less than an Arab or a Black, a Britain or a German certainly will not be an immigrant, though a Greek may perhaps be a literary reader at the moment. Baribar notes that there are differences in the quality and extension of the discrimination of migrants. Some people, in this case in France, are seen as migrants and some are not. Baribar tries to get hold of these differences and uses nationalizing appellations in his listing. Portuguese, Spaniard, Britain, German, Greek, and so on. The intention here is to discuss that not all border crossings are migrations and that migrant is not a neutral category, which simply names the border crossing but a hierarchical description. In Baribar's analysis, he constructed as a migrant in Western Europe relies on nationality or assumed nation of origin and sometimes of class. While I agree with his analysis that not all border crossings are a stripe of migration, we can think of the differentiation between migrants and experts in recent media debates. And I agree that we need to understand migration as a category that produces hierarchies. I want to problematize his equation of nationalizing categories with racializing ones. You may have noticed it. In his list alongside the Spaniard, the German, and the Greek, Baribar's names the categories Arab and Black and states that these two are much more likely to be seen as migrants. However, with equating racializing categories with nationalizing ones, Baribar makes it impossible to think of the nationalizing ones as something else than white. It is a racialized homogenization of nationality. In line with the nationalizing appellations like Spaniard and German, the mentioning of Arab and Black as different categories makes it impossible to think of Germans and Spaniards as Black or as Arab. Or to put it the other way around, his formulation suggests that Arab and Blacks cannot be French, but are migrants in all events. They are constructed as the eternal migrants who never can be at home in Paris. Baribar's formulation suggests that all the nationalized groups are not racialized and the racialized groups are automatically migrants in Europe. What this statement helps us to do is thinking the description of migration is not neutral, but hierarchical, and depending on geopolitical and classist power relations. It becomes clear that not every border crossing is a migration and that white Christian, I would add, Germans or Britons in France are not migrants. What it prevents us from doing is having a nuanced understanding of what racism in post-colonial Europe is and how it is connected not only to migration, but rather to the description of migration to certain bodies that are constructed as never at home in Europe. Racism functions in many Western European contexts through the strategy of ascribing migration, the externalization of Black and brown bodies from Europe. But it is a problem of Baribar's approach that he does not reflect on this. And by equating racializing categories with nationalizing ones, he rather reproduces hegemonic understandings of European-ness as whiteness than help us to deconstruct this racist account. According to the idea of a so-called neo-racism approach, racism is the power relation that discriminates migrants. Let us think this through the help of Baribar's example. I want to do this by having a closer look at the category Britain, who, as Baribar reliance, certainly will not be an immigrant in Paris. If Britain were a category that is above or beyond race, in consequence, this would mean that Black Britons, because of being British, wouldn't be discriminated against in a racist way in France, because Britons are not seen as migrants in France. Their privileged nationality would overrule being constructed as non-white. We can ask ourselves, is this really the case? In another reading of this formulation, one could argue that the existence of Black Britons is not thinkable in Baribar's framework. In my analysis of the text passage, the underlying logic strength of Black Britons as object and the category Britain is constructed as white within the possibilities of thinking that are offered in Baribar's approach. Baribar tries to define a power relation that constructs migration as a hierarchical category and touches on the idea that people who are constructed as non-white in Western context are described as migration, even if they are not migrants at all. What is problematic about Baribar's approach is that he does not question and investigate the entanglement of migration and racialization. What kind of power relations and geopolitics lie behind the description of migration? What role does colonialism play? What role does the construction of intelligible Europeanness play? How can hierarchies within Europe and the construction of European nations as racially homogenous be theorized and criticized? In which ways is racialization a construction that is entangled with migration but not the same? The second example I want to discuss here is from a gender studies context. Building on an older piece by Baribar T. Griffin, this text discusses the relevance of critical whiteness studies for gender studies knowledge productions in Europe. If European critical whiteness studies really attempt to establish whiteness as a racialized position, then we should probably ask whether this goes in the right direction, especially since here, and we can at least say this for the contemporary Germany, racial categorization systems have much less importance for public and social life than in the United States. There is, as a chat by Baribar, from an anti-stated racism without races. So at least concerning these forms of racism, we might conclude that the re-racialization of the European anti-racist discourse that critical whiteness studies attempt is unhelpful, at best, and misleading, at worst. And of course, the line of argumentation that I want to talk about here is the assumption that colonialism or racialization are irrelevant for analyzing racism in the European context. Fatima Altaiep asserts that there is a form of invisible racialization in both media debates and academic discourses in continental Europe. She argues racialization is constantly reproduced in ascribed on persons, but at the same time, there is prevailing collective attitude of purporting, not being able to see racialization and therefore to deny the existence in an impact on Europe. This might claim that this attitude is paradoxically reproduced in some approaches of racism that understand themselves to be critical. The conceptualization of migration is only relevant category for defining racism can therefore be understood as a reproduction of the racist tradition of denying the impact of racialization on Europe. With the argumentation that can be extracted from this quote, a discursive position is reproduced that as Altaiep puts it, bemoans, I quote, a harmful introduction of race. She cards out a supranational pattern of racism in Europe that is determined through the convergence of racial race and religion and most importantly, through the quote, externalization of racialized populations. With the statement, here, I quote, here racial categorization systems have much less importance for public and social life than in the United States. It is denied that racial categorization systems have come into existence exactly here in Europe and are therefore constitutive of what Europe is in the first place. Binds of argumentation that deny that racialization has an impact on Europe do not only deny white privileging, they even deny the very presence of black, brown, Asian, Roma, and PUC persons in Europe. In contrast, all the Lord argues in relation to an African diasporic presence in Europe. I quote, yet the presence of Africa and Europe goes back to before the Roman Empire. The historical presence of black Africans in court, university, monasteries, and bedrooms of the 17th, 18th, and 19th century, Europe comes as a surprise only to those scholars pseudo-educated in Europeanized customs of institutional etnocentricity. So this is basically the point that Europe has never been white. I think it has become clear that conceptualizations of racism that understand migration of the only line of differentiation are insufficient to grasp contemporary correlations in post-colonial Europe. In light of the recent public discussion of the so-called refugee crisis in Europe, the term migrant becomes more and more a racialized category and the vocabulary is twisted in a specific way. My approach is a critique of understandings of contemporary racism in Europe as disconnected from post-colonial racialization and understandings of migration as disconnected from post-colonial geopolitics. This critique displaces the prevailing assumption of feminists theorizing on migration and in critical migration studies that the race racism is over or not applicable to Europe and opposes the idea that the only relevant racism is anti-migration racism. My approach is not about giving a better account of reality, it is about asking what certain conceptualizations allow us to do and to think and what their limitations are, what they even prevent us from doing and thinking. I'm in line here with Aftar Braher, Braher who asks, how do we construct politics which do not reduce everything to the economy of the same and which do not essentialize difference? Rather than focusing primarily on migration and migrants, I concentrate on correlations that construct the description of migration, thereby also constructing both the privileged and the discriminated positionings in relation to migration. I call this process of construction of migrationism. On the one hand, this correlation is described in generalization to people in a generalized and discriminatory way, on the other it normalizes non-migratization. Similarly to how racialization and gendering are constructions which are not neutral but which always function hierarchically, migration like migration background, migration experience, et cetera, is not a neutral term. It's not an a priori category. The construction of migratize and non-migratize positionings through migratism does not only occur once, it is performative in a Butlerian sense and of course continuously and takes place in many different dimensions. I argue that the equation of racism and migratism renders Europeans of color into objects of theories on racism and flip-fruits uses than as objects of the hegemonic idea of Europeanness. The central argument for my conceptualization of the relation of racism and migration is that racism is not confined to a description of migration but is both a more parallel chain and an underlying power relation that constitutes societies and that construct intelligible Europeanization as privileged racialization. Ascription of migration are interconnected with post-colonial conditions. This does not mean, however, that every description of migration is therefore racist. But of course racism and migratism are entangled. Racism converts through my migratizing strategies. For example, when black Europeans are being asked where they actually come from. However, there are also forms of migration that are not racist. For instance, when a white person is told that they have an Eastern European accent. That kind of statement does not automatically construct that person as non-white. The fixation of people and groups of people to an elsewhere is the precondition and the driving force of the idea of migration. And elsewhere it has to be imagined in order to mark the boundaries of the here and to regulate all border crossings both on the level of national borders and on the level of boundaries of privileged self-constructions. To give an example from Feminist Migration Studies, I want to read with you a passage by Incanacion Gutierrez Rodriguez. She reflects on the interview process in her own work and the interaction with her interviewees that is defined by their different positionings towards post-colonial racialization. Gutierrez Rodriguez positions herself as a white privileged feminist who has grown up in Germany and has a family history of work migration from Spain. Her interviewees are mostly non-white migrant women from Latin America, working in Germany or in the UK. Gutierrez Rodriguez tells us a bit of the story of her own discrimination growing up in Germany. Oh, you're a child of a foreigner. You smell of garlic and they always insult you. You encounter teachers who rejected you because you couldn't speak German. Then there was this form of racism. And this leaves a mark on you even as an adult because you're in a different country and you don't want to be here because you are with your parents and it's different because you're not part of the society and the foreign in Spain you were. This quote provides an argumentation that I use for a sharpened distinction between racism and migratism. The relation of discrimination and violence that I have named migratism as part of the new approach detailed here is called in Gutierrez Rodriguez's approach a form of racism. She discloses discriminations and stereotyping descriptions and discusses her own experiences in Germany in the 1970s. As a white privileged migratized person in Germany I myself have experienced discriminations that follow a very similar pattern. Broadly speaking the main issue are the description and degradation of the smell of garlic, denial of the knowledge of the German language, the question when are you going back, experiences of physical and mental violence by teachers, hindrances to pursue a higher education and so on. Why is my situation comparable to the experience described by Gutierrez Rodriguez although our positionings differ in terms of class, nationality, citizenship etc. and are situated in different parts of Germany at different points of time in a changing Europe? My answer to that question is that German structural migratism is the foundation of this pattern of othering. Even if I agree with Gutierrez Rodriguez's analysis for the most part I am calling for a differentiation between racism and migratism so I wouldn't call it a form of racism as she does. As Gutierrez Rodriguez herself writes in her article her Ecuadorian inferior partner Carla brought to her attention I quote the incompatibility of our different positionalities and white privilege. Gutierrez Rodriguez makes the following remarks about the interview with Carla. Carla started to talk about the racism she experienced during her childhood as an indigena. Her childhood was marked by the experience of force for assimilation under Spanish rules. As her mother tongue Quechua was forbidden at school she could only speak at home. Carla simply focused on the differences between my story and hers situated in postcolonial conjunctures and disjunctures. In this interview Carla demonstrates one of the differences between migratism and racism so now I took over the interview. Carla demonstrates one of the differences between migratism and racism that I would like to elaborate on here. I quote Carla as represented in Gutierrez Rodriguez. She says it does not only happen because you are from a different country but also when you are in your own country. End of quote. Here colonialism is clearly the framework in which a form of discrimination becomes a form of racism. The social positionings of both actors are hierarchized and codified as indigena and white through colonial racism. This racialization takes place beyond migration experiences and the description of migration. I claim that the account of the interview with Carla vividly demonstrates that racialization has also powerful effects beyond migratization. Both interviewer and interviewee are migrants in a Western European context. But Carla emphasizes the privilege that is linked to whiteness and to migratize whiteness as the case might be. For that reason I argue that it makes sense to analytically separate racism and migratism from one another in order to examine them in different and differentiated ways as mutually constitutive and entangled with each other. Okay, now in order to complicate my own claim, I want to turn now to a specific example and discuss hegemonic readings and misreadings of racialization, migratization and national belonging and problematized attempts to correct certain description or to assume stable categories of belonging. I am read as a dyke person in specific contexts in different moments and places. In others I am read as a teenage boy which transits me potentially too. When I am read as a woman indeed always a gender deviant woman, my age is read in a way corresponding to the conventionalized data in my papers. When I am read as male it always reduces the age people read. When I am read as a teenage boy people mostly read me and also as migratized in Western Europe. When I am read as a gender deviant woman people mostly read me as non-migrant. When I am read as migratized I mostly get read as male. When I am read as non-white I never read as black but as migratized and therefore PC and in Kreuzberg Berlin where I have considered myself to be at home for a long time in most of these cases migratized equates Muslim equates PC as being a migrant there means being a Muslim in a hegemonic understanding. In other words, despite my being privileged through racism sometimes I am read as a person of color maybe when I am read as migratized the description of migration becomes racialization. It happens very rarely that I am not read as white but it happens at times. Do these readings turn me into a boy into a teenager a woman a Muslim, a non-migrant a person of color discriminated by racism? If one of transnational feminism's projects is to go beyond the national to criticize the stabilization of nations and nationality as natural entities and to fight nationalism might determine transnationalism thus be misleading carrying nationalism within it only in a terminological level so I will come back in my previous thoughts back to the example from the beginning just wanted to open up this kind of the complex of reading and misreading and descriptions and of unstable categories. I don't suggest to replace the conventionalized term transnationalism in my approach but rather play around with different levels of meaning in order to redefine the work of transing of the term question the reliance of categories into being in reproductions of nationalism. Here I discuss transnationalism as in cross-border nationalism a form of minority nationalism in migrant communities that construct the diaspora as extension of the homeland who has written 1998 on a similar pattern I argue that this form of transnationalism is rooted in practicing racism and reproducing hetero and binary gender norms in my readings of the example it is my aim to intervene in the logic of minority nationalism and the idea that co-optation by majority nationalism is a desirable goal on the way to I quote Erin Azura belonging without complication to a normative social sphere what happens if white persons are being read as non-white what happens for example if persons who consider themselves as being white Romanians are being read in Western European context as Roma is this description anti-Romaist and if so from whom for those who define themselves as white Romanians or for the Roma or for both in 2011 the fascist Romanian party Noa Drapta launched a poster campaigning Italy here is the poster on the posters one can see two photos with Italian texts in my reading the photo on the left sides meant to represent the Roma family the one on the right side hetero, retro gendered Romanian family under the right photo there is the Italian word for Romanians and under the left the Italian anti-Roma is word for Roma followed by Roma in brackets the Italian word for Roma below the two images one can read the demand notice the difference and then the sentence they are two different or dissimilar people the Roma family is represented as dressed carefully and arranged as a chaotic open group in front of families in the streets the Romanian family is draped in a photo studio setting all dressed in white shirts or blouses and grouped in a closed arrangement in my reading the letter are blonde much blonderer than my own image of family belonging and Romanians would ever suggest the ones who are supposed to be recognised as Romanians are constructed as white through visualised representations of skin and hair colour as well as through clothing it is about representing intelligible Europeanization and even more intelligible middle Europeanization the Roma family is constructed in opposition to this as long white the disconstruction of the Romanian family a middle European norm of bourgeois family is reproduced this is realised via the ordered grouping in the contrast to the disorder of the construction of the Roma family and the relatable and ambiguous representation of kinship age, number of persons and gender the norming of whiteness gets entangled here with the norming of binary hetero and retro normativity in my own reading the Romanian family is constructed as consisting of father, mother and three children while on the other photo the retro structure remains much less clear no directors, posters react to a broader disposition in Romania and in Romanian migrant groups in western Europe there is an omnipresent readiness to complain about the fact that the western European context Romanian and Roma get confounded therefore the Romanians request the differentiation between these two terms that are constructed as mutually exclusive in hegemonic Romanian discourses that are for example attempts to enforce in Romania and in the EU the official replacement of the Appalachian Roma with the anti-Romaist word in order to prevent infusing it with Romania thus in 2010 the Romanian president Trian Bazescu recited as explaining that the request for differentiating between the two categories was for protecting the Romanians in gypsophobic regions as the bad treatment of negative discrimination of Roma could affect in an unjustified way Romanians too with the statement Bazescu externalizes anti-Romaism and locates it outside of Romania at the same time constructs anti-Romaism as something that can affect Romanians in an unjustified way this implicates that in his opinion there is a group of persons that can be affected by anti-Romaism in a justified way however in Romania the Roma are exposed to immense discrimination discriminations explicate Jennifer moreover there are constant attempts from the side of the white Romanians to distinguish themselves from the Roma Anico Imre asserts in relation to Hungary that the white Christian population of Eastern Europe has decided to distance itself from the Roma in order to mask the insecurity about their own identity according to Imre one reason for the ongoing attempts of the Eastern European white Christian population to distinguish oneself from the Roma is the fact that western media does not differentiate between the two cultures Eastern Europeans are treated as gypsies by the western media Imre uses the anti-Romaism discriminatory relation gypsies repeatedly in her text moreover she conducts a dramatic twist in her argument in her opinion not the anti-Romaism of the Eastern European mainstream population is responsible for their vehement delineation from the Roma but the fact that they are treated like Roma in Western European discourses and because the cultures get conflated I don't agree but instead propose that anti-Romaism provides the opportunity for white Christian Eastern Europeans of Western European participation as Manuela Vodka puts it to demonstrate their whiteness and to construct themselves as intelligibly European there is no doubt that in Western European discourses that constructs Romanians and Romania that they are discriminating following Maria Todorová and Manuela Vodka understands the construction of Eastern Europe as interstage between Orient and Occident moreover Southern Europe's proximity to Asia and its Ottoman cultural legacy located halfway between East and West thus giving it a condition of the semi-oriental, semi-civilized semi-developed end of quote it becomes evident that the European separation has been established for centuries and is not rooted in the relatively short period of nationalism and the construction of the Eastern Glock States Vodka the recentric assumptions of backwardness are transferred to Southeastern Europe it is constructed as Europe's incomplete self by Orientalist discourses as epigonal Europe in Vodka's words trying to prove its proper Europeaness but constantly failing Racism, nationalism and fascism can be used as strategies to construct interlegible Europeaness I quote the aspiration to Europeaness as Vodka puts it so the aspiration to Europeaness as Vodka puts it is legitimized through the racist practices of the aspirants in a migration context this is realized through the phenomenon that I call transnationalism or cross-border nationalism persons who are constructed as Romanians in Western European context are without doubt discriminated against and Romania gets devalued chauvinistically in many dimensions in recent nationalist debates in Western Europe the terms Romanians and Roma are indeed mostly used as synonyms however through the analysis of my example it becomes clear that the attempt to correct a misreading of one's own social positioning and to persist on controlling the representation of oneself is not automatically emancipatory but can be racist and self-privileged with their racist delineation against the Roma and the white Romanians try to rule their marginalization marginalization with the system of hierarchies in Europe building on poor conceptualization of homonationalism this phenomenon which of course does not only occur in Romanian migrant communities can be named as transnationalism or cross-border nationalism the attempts of a migrantized group to assimilate to the nationalist mainstream of their country of origin moreover cross-border nationalism relies on invoking racist nationalisms as the supranational commonality of the Europeanist and self-construction allows for a Romanian moreover cross-border nationalism relies on invoking racist nationalisms as the supranational commonality of the Europeanist and self-construction as intelligibly European in my example fascist supranationalism allows for a Romanian fascist group with the help of an Italian fascist group to launch an anti-Roma supposed to campaign in Italy to secure the borders of intelligible Europeanization theorists such as Fatima and Hayek formulate a series of these efforts to belong to the norm in European contexts there is a tendency among white non-migrant gays bisexual and lesbians to want to be recognized to be normal to dissolve as unmarked in the nation but Hayek holds this adaption and hyper-pronunciation of conservative ideas the preaching of traditional values and the insistence of non-normality my quote solidarity with the mainstream end of quote instead of practicing solidarity with the marginalized and deconstructing mechanisms of marginalization this attitude reproduces sexist racist and neoliberal exclusions the logic of homo-nationalism can be applied also to cross-border nationalism and a similar process is discussed by Jasper Poorn herself after 9-11 that occurred in the US a series of hate crime murders as sex as they were read as presumed Muslim terrorists so I'm talking about the non-introduction of Jasper Poorn here these were answered by an educational campaign with the goal of self-representing sex as a group who personified the form of proper American head of masculinity and could therefore be distinguished from the perverted terrorist bodies the real Muslims Poorn notices that attempts of delineation are rooted in the idea that the white Christian majority would be interested in the difference between two groups that both are constructed among white through the desolidarization with Muslims some Sikhs try to inscribe themselves into the US American nation but this undertaking cannot succeed under light, Poorn applied to the violent self-construction of white Romanians as not Roma to the expense of a re-essentialization of Roma as the real Roma the question remains whether in this context and constellation the undertaking can actually succeed is it possible for white Romanians to range recognition from white western Europeans in order to be perceived as intelligible European so here this is a very interesting example in 2013 apparently when the borders of the EU opened to Romanians to be free for work migration to the UK some officials in the UK started to have this kind of like discriminatory speeches against the Romanians and the Bulgarians and then there was a campaign newspaper in Romania in 2013 as an answer to this and it was like they had this kind of advertisement saying half of all women look like Kate, the other half like her sister and this is an interesting attempt here again like through sexism and normative gendering to inscribe themselves as being like normal European as the British too and it's interesting of course it's like half of our women and so on so you have here like this kind of like really ridiculous reproduction of sexism and heteropatriarchy to show that they are the same as the British the situation that is discussed in poor architects is different from my example here and the differences lies in the self-construction of the group that seeks to do it correctly in the case of the Romanians the self-construction is rooted in whiteness Christianity and Europeanness in the case of the Sikhs this is not the case what connects those examples is the similar process of desolidarization and also the over emphasis on heterogener norms in order to secure a place within a non-deviant part of the nation or Europe applying Honscheid's conceptualization of pluralization it can be argued that the description as Roma of white Romanians is discriminatory however not against the white Romanians but against the Roma as straight as this woman who gets appellated as lesbian Honscheid argues can only perceive the hurt if she reproduces straightness and as a desirable norm and being a lesbian is something negative thus perceiving lesbian as a slur is harmful for lesbians and not for straight women applied to the description as Roma this is also fundamentally true for the appellation to perceive it as a harm to be named as Roma to understand the appellation as a slur the misreading as Roma is wrongful and reproduces anti-Romaism I follow Honscheid's analysis that straight women who feel wrongly interpolated as lesbians reproduce in this idea of wrongfulness lesbophobia and heteronormative gendering in order to extend this concept however one could ask how many performative repetitions of the appellation lesbians does it take for a straight cis woman to unbecome a straight cis woman and to be constructed discursively discursively as a lesbian or does she become then a straight woman who gets discriminated like a real lesbian or does not but does not become a real lesbian let me refer back to my own example of being misread as a Muslim migrant adolescent boy how many readings does it take to become that Muslim migrant child's boy I am mistaken for in relation to my example of cross-border nationalism but one could ask if white Romanians can become Roma's for repeated it repeated performative one could ask if white Romanians can become Roma's for repeated performative appellations as Roma does this happen and if so after how many repetitions for whom does it happen for the white Western Europeans who are the appellators and Romanians who get appellated or for the Roma who become abjects especially in countries like Italy and Spain where many guest workers from Romania live guest workers I should say there occur repeated incidents such as pogroms against Romanian Roma but also against white Romanians for example rapes and murders of Romanian women mostly sex workers that are only fatigued persecuted it is not traceable if these persons are all murdered or attacked for anti-Romanism reasons and if this was the case with the fact of a white Romanian woman being killed by anti-Roma is it going to be such an unambiguous description of being Roma that in death the murder becomes Roma or is this only mistaken identity why do killings appear to be more unambiguous, menors of death and more wallet certainties of violence than slow death menors of death that are not recognised as such which rolls to intersectional power relations like sexism, microchism and racism playing relation to the incidents slow death and killings all these questions could be answered in various dimensions of course I don't pose them the idea to find out the exact moment and the exact situation in which a person becomes what they are described but to raise attention to the idea that processes of becoming and performative descriptions have a complex connection in other words I don't pose the questions because I want to find unambiguous answers but because I want to provoke a reflection on how discrimination and power relations construct or fix persons or their social positioning through performative acts following Ahmed I argue that ascription of non-witeness do not automatically mean to become non-wide and ascriptions of masculinity do not automatically mean to become a man moreover processes of gendering and racialisation do not function in a parallel way and transing gender is not the same as deconstructing racialisation so performative processes of becoming through repeated interpolation or intersectional in many dimensions but might work in contradictory ways Ahmed substantiates this I quote reopening and restaging of a fractured history of identification end of quote this means that Roma who are read as Roma have a history of self-identification and identification through others that is formed by the discrimination by anti-Romaism while white Romanians have a history of self-identification and identification through others that is formed by the privileging of anti-Romaism Roma in contrast to white Romanians do not have the possibility to construct themselves as white through a mixture of racist, nationalist, gendered and sexualised norms the self-construction of the white Romanian migrants shows that neither across the borders nor the status as migrant automatically creates a critical attitude or the rejection of national belonging, nationalism or Eurocentrism what becomes clear here is that power relations and their analysis are and my students will know what I say now complex but the suggested conceptualisation I aim to contribute to transnational gender studies that are invested in analysing genderings, sexualities post-colonial geopolitics diasporas and migration and their entangled and contradictory complexities my approach is not about separating struggles against racism from those against migrantism nor do I want to deny that racism and migrantism have a specific interconnection on the contrary I argue that anti-racist and anti-migratist struggles have a long shared history and my research underlines the necessity to carefully analyse the construction of gendered racialisation in Europe and its relationship to migration into the description of migration to certain bodies I argue that not only the construction processes are complex but also that the knowledge production in transnational gender studies is very available and complex, contradictory and uncomfortable this is what we have to endure and use as constant challenge level 4 and in knowledge production on medical social transformation thank you very much we can share so this was very complex very interesting and I surely have some questions and comments but I'm going to start taking off and I don't expect you to answer because I would like to take some questions and then maybe at the end so I guess for me as an anthropologist when I think about the way that sexism racism and migratism intersect in my experience having lived in Germany having grown up in Germany then here I feel that it has changed quite a bit I feel that since when I grew up to now the intersections have shifted quite a bit depending on the way that the political, social economic context has shifted so I guess sort of one comment for me would be a one thing to think about is how this relationship this intersectionality how is it historically specific and shifting and I'm thinking specifically now for instance I mentioned this at the last talk the incidents in Cologne and all of a sudden there's a kind of privileging of or a recognition that sexism is existent in German society why maybe sort of 20 years ago no one would really care about it in the context of increased migratism and racism and so there is a relationship between the way that these different forms of power configurations play out thinking back to my own experience of growing up and I can relate to many of the things that you are sharing but I think to maybe complicate things even further there is also class when I think about I think there is a huge difference if you are as they say in German which means migration background and you could be third or fourth generation and you would still be called everyone in terms of the resources that you have from your middle class as opposed to a working class I think that class is very important and certainly when I compare the German context and the British context I think a huge difference is in terms of the meaning and simplification attached to whiteness and blackness so I think one of the things I'd like you to reflect on what I'm not a proponent of Brexit but I wonder how much can you speak about Europe and how much do we have to be specific in terms of the specific history of colonialism and migration in Germany as opposed to the UK I think I'll stop here so questions, comments yes please so what can I connect with? I want to divide you into this just thinking in the British context of what the experience would be say in London versus for example in my parents' room where it's pretty much a white completely and in that I was just going to ask about this is something that came up earlier on today in my gender and the Middle East class about this concept of strategic essentialism and it kind of goes into what you're saying about how the self-construction of people in Romania I don't know why European wanted to fit into a certain category I was just wondering in terms of agency where it's a very hegemonic context in which people self-construct these identities and part of me wants to say that I understand why this happens from the perspective of the person identifying this way I was just wondering what your thoughts were on this in terms of maybe seeing something possibly strategic from the individual's perspective and what question of agency how can we tackle the question of agency I was wondering if you could go deeper into the issue of solidarity that you alluded to as a little other work relating never with me okay I mean in that specific context that you are like okay I think this is probably that too to start okay I explain the whole power relations in Western Europe now I think let me start from here I think that there are patterns in Western not even only European context but a Western context that are supranational and that basically define what westernness is and that I think that specific forms of racialization work that way but at the same time there are patterns of racialization that are really specific to certain contexts and I think that most research that is done on Europe as a whole Western Europe more or less is done for example you can think of Fatima she specifically said this is on continental Europe in the UK in a different way and I think this is true and I still think that there are supranational patterns that are true for the UK and for Germany and for France and so on but I do think that racialization and the description of migration might function in a different way in the UK and I think it is what was really in my trajectory like doing the PhD in Sweden and then coming here for me it became really clear that in Germany I was constructed as migratized mainly through the role in our when I speak German and through this idea that Germans are migrating so it was this shifting concept of visualizing normalizations when I moved to Sweden I became even more migrant because the Swedish think of themselves to be superwant and when I came to the UK I became the German and I think this is really interesting because of course it is my running hours gone when I speak English and the visualizing normalizations do not ascribe so rigidly migration to non-blonde white people right so it is certainly different like talking about Germany I totally think that there is like in the post-colonial in the post-war moment until now that there are huge shifts and there are things that stay the same so we can link this maybe to discussing what post-colonial is mean for example to discuss the post-is rupture and continuity and I think there is a post-colonial racism that has ruptures and continuities to colonial racialization that play an important role and I think this example I had by the chair of St. Ligas was a white Spanish person under the guest migrant background in Germany I think that in the 60s and 70s like through class as well the description of migration to people from the south of Europe worked in a very specific way I would still think and this is like I have discussed that in my broader research that is rooted in whiteness that these people could even come to Germany because and of course it's blurry because we know that Turkey was for example one of the countries that had the main people coming to Germany and at that time in the western context Turkey was could pass as one as a European nation more or less so but and of course so there are documents for example internal documents from officials from that time where it becomes clear that for example black Portuguese people wanted to come as guest workers to Germany and that German officials like in secretly blocked that because they said when we call for Portuguese workers we want white white workers so there was an idea of taking workers in only taking white people in and of course they could not really control it because they had Turkey and the rationalization of Turks shifted in the hegemonic discourse and then you had for example a migration from ex-USLavia where a lot of Roma people came and there was no register to distinguish between Roma and non-Roman-USLavian people so they could not control how many white people come or not and I think like when we talk now about the situation in Germany what you said that there is more awareness of sexism I don't think it's more awareness it's more space it's instrumentalized I think that correlations are played out against each other and I think that this is basically one of the strategies in the function to externalize sexism and this has two basic problems one is the externalization of sexism so it's a double thing so it gets externalized in homophobia to externalize to the outside of Europe and at the same time it gets externalized to persons who are constructed as being outsiders to migrants and then this has the consequence that descriptions are racist and on the one hand constructs the migrants and the outsiders and non-white people as in a racist way as sexist, more sexist than others, than white Europeans and on the other hand it has the consequence that sexism that exists and that is constitutive for what Germany and western nations are cannot be addressed anymore so this is like and so it becomes normalized and it's not intervention become impossible basically the urban and the rural thing so I grew up in the south of Germany in a small town far away from any city it was awful I don't know, I think that I really don't know I think I'm not a friend of these ideas that people have to know strangers in order to respect strangers so I think the construction of the stranger takes place maybe on different dimensions but you have the construction of the stranger if the stranger is proximate or not so I actually I think that they are conjunctures of different forms of racism and migratism but I don't think they differ very much but big cities are the exception like this kind of not so migratist, not so homophobic not so sexist space and I wouldn't be sure I think of course you have like more people when you have more people you have more diversity too so if you're lucky you'll find more people who are not so stupid so the maybe I can combine the solidarity question with the strategic essentialism question I think like it's funny that you bring it up because I I especially took this up the strategic essentialism question and I think so Steve up defined the term and later says actually I don't actually I haven't meant it that way so basically Steve up uses the term and then later says what was taken up in very problematic ways and what I think is that we have to think about in transnational feminist communities and struggles and like this kind of ideas of coming together and failing and departing again and trying new politics and like in this scattered ways I think that it's important to think about identity and belonging and community and struggling beyond strategic essentialism I think it's a problem to do this and I think this is really not supposed to be what I wanted to do with the term so but I think it's interesting to discuss it because the strategy you're right could be could be describe the strategic essentialism that can be found in the transnationalist approaches and I think it's I think it's a problem to to even if I know what you mean when you say you understand it I think it's a problem to do to try to be in a better position to the expense of discriminating somebody else right so I think this is kind of like one of the main things that it's important in struggles for radical social transformation to go beyond the essentialism idea and this does not mean in my opinion to deny the constructions of essentialism that take place all the time so it's about categories are constructed and discriminations functions the function on the base of constructed categories at the same time so we have to deconstruct the categories all the time but we have to know about the construction process and about the power that is behind it so and I think this is connected to the solidarity I don't know Verena if you want me now to come up with the orientation of solidarity what I mean is what I mean by I think that this is like the constant reflection process that has to take place in communities in alliances for radical social transformation that so it's not so easy you have this it's complex you have this idea that you can find for example a lot in the space approach that you need politics that always depart from the most vulnerable positioning but of course it's the question who defines what the most vulnerable positioning is I think while I am sympathetic with the idea I think this has to fail so I think this is the constant like going around thinking about power relations negotiating power relations like enduring the contradictions in social movements because it's like you will have always contradictions you will have always people who say completely opposite things that you have to negotiate them and I think solidarity starts there to negotiate what you can take on and what you still want to negotiate and there might be things you don't want to that you have to leave and then you have a clash and then you go like it is and you come again and find different alliances and I think this is the thing beyond single issue politics always to like oppose single issue politics at the same time to know that we cannot know if we don't fall into the trap of reproducing single issue politics so it's this ongoing process Thank you so much for your think I love your critique of the outline my question has to do with language and how you're using language and how you're actually trying to transform conceptual if you understand this through the language you're using but when you think about the term language and its derivatives is actually refers to race and essentialism of the art and literary concept because Mike was assumed to say you're coming from somewhere in a way that almost defines you and you're going somewhere else and the reason and so I was wondering about how you might overcome that in a language that you talk rather about movement and I'm asking this because I'm I was born in London I'm Canadian and I lived in France for 10 years but I lived in France but I'm Canadian where are you from in Canada where are you really from what are your origins there's an assumption there exactly that I could not come from Canada to come from somewhere else or from that and so I think underlying this concept of movement is this type of emotion that you have perhaps when you're from really somewhere along and that's what gives you your identity and then if you move from that then and then there's also the assumption that you might go back so it's just one of the rules about the reason why you're from Canada I'm really interested in this reading practices thing that you talk about different words in the paper and partly because I'm thinking there's lots of things to think about I was hoping that you were going to say how many times you needed to be read or something before you read it but I wonder if also there's something interesting about I mean it's obviously partly about the difference between being something and the focus so if you're read or something you might still say that you're subject to isophobia even for me not but also I think there's something I don't know it's just a thought but if you're read as anything in some sense isn't that always a misreading and isn't there a danger that in some sense one posits the lesbian who is subject to lesbian discrimination as in a sense less subject to a misreading whereas of course in some senses all homophobic readings are misreadings because nobody checks with you first all islamophobic readings are misreadings in the sense that their purpose is not to identify the difference between people who are or are not muslim people who are or are not lesbian but to performatively produce the muslim in that moment and so I would worry a bit about is the danger somehow that we also get caught who's the real lesbian who's subject to homophobia rather than the way in which the lesbian is constructed in that moment whether the person sees themselves or not and the seeing yourself as that is the soliduistic response and then I have a second question which is horrible I'm not sure of the relationship between those reflections and the distinction between basism and myotism though I think it's, I can sort of have a feeling about it but I can't, could you sort of maybe restate the connection practices and that distinction You sometimes use transnational together and I've seen you use it apart with an underscore I'm just wondering if you could speak to why you decided to use that particular form of it so what do you rule over? I mean, my knowledge is quite limited in your discipline but what I like about it I found it very solid in that it allows you theoretically solid in that it allows us to move to south, south sort of, you know, racist or migratist or you know that because I keep thinking about refugees in Lebanon and I think what you're proposing is a wonderful thing I shouldn't say wonderful because it's wonderful but you see what I mean because what I get mostly is basically there's no such thing as an individual person you are whatever in as far as you construct yourself as of course or beyond or beside or within you know the other and then it made me think about privilege you know this aspiration to Europe is it's a very special kind of privilege it's not like the privilege you are born that we come that we come with into the world it's almost like being privileged if you can prove your Europeanness even if everybody is I mean I have nothing to do with Europe and you speak Arabic and you Muslim and you live in Tripoli all your life for example something you know all of it makes you special it's very confidence but I can't imagine it maybe I am one answering and come back to the last point to ask you again about we can speak about it later okay thank you I think we're with the first migrant yes well I think this is exactly what I want to try to grasp what you describe here that white Canadians in France are not as correct migration and they are not asked where are you from so when they are in English then it's not this migratising question it's more a question like we all travel and we all cross borders and I think that the migratism concept does the two levels to state to talk about description of migration but then to as well talk about how racism functions very often through the description of migration even if it's totally phantasmatic so I think that the concept of migrant or I use the term sometimes in order to translate because it gets used to have a term that we all have agreed on but I think basically it's a problematic and I would agree a problematic term and I think recently in the recent media debates migrant there is a new twist to the usage of migrant and because it gets like equated with refugee and it gets racialized in a very specific way again and so I think that so I think the whole concept the whole point I want to make is to talk about migration rather than to talk about migrants for example to think about at what points is migration ascribed for what reasons and in what discourses and what's the function of it and the effect of it and so on and how does it connect to racialization on various levels I don't know if there's answers to that but I think that there is have the word in some of the words actually so I was confused as to I think the term migrantism what you mean by it I don't even know the term I was just wondering you don't know it because I invented it well I think it's to try to name the power relation that ascribes migration that constructs migrants and this is very often racist but it's not in all cases racist like for example white people are ascribed as migration from Eastern Europe in Western European context but it's really not about the focus on the white migrants it's about the focus on the migratizing strategies of racism and how this does not reflect the reality it's not about talking about reality for the descriptions I was clear in the next one misreadings the misreadings I don't want to to re-essentialize the real lesbians and the real Muslims and the real Roma and I try to really but maybe I have to be so thank you I have to be more explicit about this I think the underlying idea of real Roma and real lesbians is a problem of course and I don't want to say that I think I don't want to say that we can't find we don't know so I think this is one of my points it's so complex and we don't know and I'm just asking the question is there a difference if you are not if you don't live a life that well how do I put this now if you if you have straight privileges and then you get ascribed as a lesbian is there a difference to the description of a lesbian if you don't have straight privilege or is it the same that's a very good way of putting it and I think sorry actually I've been interested for a long time in this kind of complex things without finding a solution for example we have this 2005 bombing in the London Tube and after the police killed this Brazilian guy they mistook him as one as one of the terrorists and I think here you can start with a whole complex thing so they mistook him for a terrorist this means they mistook him for a Muslim this means they equate Muslims with terrorists this means they equate brown bodies with Muslims they equate brown bodies with terrorists so was it a homophobia that killed him or was it something different and I think I don't pose the question to find out because I think there is an answer to it but I want to I think I'm interested in this kind of various levels of misreading so it wouldn't would it be better if they had killed a real Muslim of course not so this is not it's not about the question who is real and how the construction of realness is a problem in the thing but maybe I have to be more specific and to think more about this and to go more into this and to not only make us the questions but to offer some some kind of theorization in the way you say you don't have an answer you may partly do which is the difference is the difference between what it's like to have violence visited on you and how you experience it maybe one of the differences is the interface between the violence I don't know but that's how you describe it because it's different if you have straight privileges in your misreading perhaps there's no difference in the reading but there might be a difference in the experience I don't know I don't know how the second part is interconnected to the first part I think this is my own trajectory in my research so I started to do the research because I was basically annoyed by these critical migration studies that equated racism and migration all the time so I came up with the migration concept and basically when I take myself as an example what I said is alongside as many other things is to say I am constructed in western Europe but I'm not constructed as non-white so this is my criticism and not racism and then I wanted to twist this thing and wanted to ask the question so what happens so we have on the one hand we have a statement and Sarah Hammett helps us to think about this statements of whiteness are not automatically anti-racist and so part of what I did was to say oh wait a minute we need a distinction here because I know we need the distinction because from my own positionality because I privileged as white and I'm described as migration so this was in a way a statement of whiteness and so I wanted to move on from that and wanted to look at how to blur that and how to complicate it and how to say like okay but we don't know so there is no essence behind it there is no category that we can rely on so basically the category of white from manians is a category that how can we talk about white from manians so how can we know that they are white so this was this is the interconnection that I wanted to complicate this is this clear the underscore this might be a problem sometimes this is a problem of who was the underscore person thanks this is a problem of translation because I've done a lot of my research in German language and there I could work a lot with underscores because you have a lot of problems that comes with the German language so for example you have female forms and male forms so you have the migrant always in the gendered form so you cannot have the word migrant gendering in it so you would use the underscore to say that there is a gap so rather so the feminist trajectory of this is saying then migrant in the female form and use this as the generic form instead of the male form and then you have the problem this is problematic too and so on so you can use the underscore to blur this kind of gendering that comes in the terms and then I expanded this and used it for trying to make clear that when I want to combine different concepts but language linear language just only allow me to have them like the first one and then the other then I would like interconnect with the underscore to say oh I want to combine the concept and I don't want to talk about it differently but linear language and use the underscore and I think this is I took it mostly out from my publications and so on because people get confused and this is like I sometimes had publications for example use a lot of underscores so people talk only about the underscores and not about the actual content so I had the feeling maybe I just give up the underscores and try to say it in a different way so this is like something from the past um what was it what did you say what did you say so the last thing was about privilege maybe we have to talk about this after because I didn't I'm not really sure if I got all of the point I have somehow a different idea but what was your first that the thing that you offer is very useful I can see it like okay in a some context yes thank you that's what people ask me and when I say I don't work on this I don't know you have to tell me so thank you great I had hoped that it would work and I had some kind of ideas from literature that I thought oh this might work so yes cool great well thank you very much Agarshan thank you all for your questions