Überall Direniş?: Solidarity and Division among Queer People of Color in Berlin, Germany

As LGBT rights and institutions have tentatively solidified as political facts, urban European LGBTQ activism and forms of life have increasingly emerged which are expressly both anti-racist and “policultural” (Comaroff & Comaroff 2009). Queer anti-racism—a political practice aimed at eradicating racism in the LGBTQ world as well as in broader society—has come into being across the continent, posing substantial critiques of and challenges to established gay and lesbian politics (see El-Tayeb 2011, Yılmaz-Günay ed. 2014). Drawing on my fieldwork in 2006 and 2012-2013 among queer anti-racist activists and cultural producers in Berlin, Germany, I propose to elucidate some of the strategies and practices of solidarity and division “qpocs” (the locally-used term in Berlin and throughout Germany) utilize as activists in a crowded political environment and as individual members of Berlin’s dense and divided LGBTQ worlds. I consider specific instances in my fieldwork archive in which activists challenged mainstream lesbian-and-gay-legitimized moral panics about putative “migrant” homophobia and religious male circumcision in order to consider the “belatedness” of queer anti-racism within German “late liberalism” (Povinelli 20011, 2016). These ethnographic observations compel a fresh reckoning with social science conceptual “equipment” (see Rabinow 2003) routinely used to figure and analyze sociocultural life—such as “resistance”, “minority”, “identity” and even “group”. I conclude by highlighting selected interviews and a set of particularly rich moments in my Berlin participant observations during the Gezi Park uprising in Istanbul in the summer of 2013, exemplifying how queer anti-racist activism and forms of life connect themselves to local and international movements while simultaneously immunizing themselves against what David Goldberg calls “the threat of race” (2008).