Gender Roomours I

by Elahe Haschemi Yekani and Beatrice Michaelis, Humboldt-University Berlin

1      This much-needed collection of German- and English-language essays on Critical Whiteness Studies combines different disciplinary and thematic approaches to the topic and explores this relatively new field in German academia. The articles - all of them well-structured and of readable length - interrogate a number of important (political) questions: What are the blind spots of German feminism when confronted with its own hegemonic position? Can Critical Whiteness Studies serve as a tool to approach the structural racisms that so are so easily neglected when racism is time and again only equated with right wing extremism and Neo-Nazi brutality? And how can we clarify the fact that race is not something that applies only to racially and ethnically marked people, but has a lot to do with Whiteness and Occidentalism?

2      Martina Tißberger's two essays try to shed some light on the psychological effects of Whiteness or, to be more specific, the absence of an informed White perspective in dominant German psychological discourses. In her first German-language essay, "Die Psyche der Macht, der Rassismus der Psychologie und die Psychologie des Rassismus," Tißberger explores the history of her discipline and its entanglement with racist practices such as intelligence tests. On a smaller scale, she also records the defense mechanisms of White German psychotherapists she interviewed on their understanding of race and racism in her second, English-language contribution, "The Project(ion) of 'Civilization' and the Counter-Transferences of Whiteness." Tißberger demonstrates how resistant (German) psychology still is to a critical understanding of Whiteness as a privileged subject position.

3      Nado Aveling in "More than Just Skin Color: Reading Whiteness across Different Locations" explores notions of Whiteness across age and place. Collecting data from conversations she conducted with White university-educated Australian women in their mid-thirties, White Australian school children (both male and female) aged 12 to 17 and White German university students in their mid-twenties to mid-thirties on White subjectivity and racial privilege, she was continually being confronted with the groups' power-evasiveness, colour-blindness, and the general difficulty of speaking about Whiteness. Especially the group of German students repeatedly attributed their paralysation in the face of race, racism and Whiteness to the history of Nazi ideology and German post-war education on it.

4      Jana Husmann-Kastein's article on "Schwarz-Weiß. Farb- und Geschlechtersymbolik in den Anfängen der Rassenkonstruktionen" examines the European tradition of black and white imagery and deconstructs it as a gendered system of thought and representation that is fundamentally linked to a specifically occidental dualism. Those symbolic traditions are at work in European racist discourses, which construct the colors black and white as anthropological categories. Focusing on the 16th up to the 18th century Husmann-Kastein explores the implications of these color symbolics for a gender-specific racism.

5      In her text "Weiße Körper als Fetisch: Konsequenzen aus der Ausblendung des deutschen Kolonialismus," Isabell Lorey focuses on the problem that gender still largely constitutes the primary category in much of German feminist research. The failure to properly address Germany's colonial past has also helped to conceal White women's status as accomplices. Feminist research has centered so exclusively on the "fetish" of the devalued White female body that it has neglected to understand its hegemonic position in terms of race. Drawing on Foucault's theory of gouvernementality, Lorey seeks to develop a feminist perspective that does not mourn the purported devaluation of the body but that accounts for the different functions of its valorization.