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Queer Lovers and Hateful Others: Regenerating Violent Times and Places
Berlin is once more capital of queer arts and tourism. Queerness is more visible today than it has been for decades, but at what cost? In Queer Lovers and Hateful Others , Jin Haritaworn argues that queer subjects have become a lovely sight only through being cast in the shadow of the new folk devil, the 'homophobic migrant' who is rendered by society as hateful, homophobic, and disposable.
At the centre of this book is the concept of 'queer regeneration.' Haritaworn sees the queer lover as a transitional object which allows the present-day neoliberal regime to make punishment and neglect appear as signs of care and love for diversity. Alongside this shift, in the wake of older moral panics over crime, violence, patriarchy, integration, and segregation, the new Other, that is, the homophobic migrant appears. To understand this transition, Queer Lovers and Hateful Others looks at the environments in which queer bodies have become worthy of protection, and the everyday erasures that shape life in the inner city, and how queer activists actively seek out and dispel the myths of sites of nostalgia for the 'invented traditions' of women-and-gay-friendliness.
Haritaworn guides the reader through a rich archive of media, arts, policy, and activism, including posters, newspaper reports, hate crime action plans, urban projects, psychological studies, demonstrations, kiss-ins, political speeches, and films. In the process, queer lovers, drag kings, criminalised youth, homosexuals persecuted under National Socialism, and other figures of degeneracy and regeneration appear on a shared plane, where new ways of sharing space become imaginable.
At the centre of this book is the concept of 'queer regeneration.' Haritaworn sees the queer lover as a transitional object which allows the present-day neoliberal regime to make punishment and neglect appear as signs of care and love for diversity. Alongside this shift, in the wake of older moral panics over crime, violence, patriarchy, integration, and segregation, the new Other, that is, the homophobic migrant appears. To understand this transition, Queer Lovers and Hateful Others looks at the environments in which queer bodies have become worthy of protection, and the everyday erasures that shape life in the inner city, and how queer activists actively seek out and dispel the myths of sites of nostalgia for the 'invented traditions' of women-and-gay-friendliness.
Haritaworn guides the reader through a rich archive of media, arts, policy, and activism, including posters, newspaper reports, hate crime action plans, urban projects, psychological studies, demonstrations, kiss-ins, political speeches, and films. In the process, queer lovers, drag kings, criminalised youth, homosexuals persecuted under National Socialism, and other figures of degeneracy and regeneration appear on a shared plane, where new ways of sharing space become imaginable.
237 pages, Hardcover
First published July 15, 2015
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
September 16, 2019
Haritaworn's Queer Lovers and Hateful Others continues in the tradition of queer-of-color critique of queer subjectivity and queerness's necessity to producing and reproducing systems of power that marginalize racial Others. Drawing upon Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Haritaworn is concerned with the ways that the figure of the Queer Lover produces populations of surplus, "unhappy" or "dysfunctional" populations that, "...must be segregated from the realm of life, and the properly alive" (Haritaworn 2012 qtd. in 2014: 91).
The organization of this book follows a structure similar to the analysis in Haritaworn's first chapter, where they locate the multiple scales--the body, the neighborhood, and the community--at which queer gentrification shrinks environments for queers of color (72). Shifting in scale further, the second chapter, "Love," focuses on the image of the gay kiss, and how relations and relationality produce bodies that are always already victim, and never victim. The third chapter, "Hate," follows from the second chapter, and looks at the mind, focusing on how racial bodies become pathologized, produced as particularly anti-queer in discourses of psychology and biology. The fourth chapter, "Queer Nostalgia," continues from "Hate," focusing on hate crime discourses in particular, and analyzing how time is weaponized, with racialized populations always stuck in a chronology of the past, and queer positionalities are compelled to resist the past and the trauma that the past represents. Finally, the last chapter posits the figure of the Queer Lover as a "transitional object," an unstable object that allows for empty myths of multiculturalism and diversity under neoliberalism to flourish, obscuring the reality of failures of supposed values of multiculturalism and diversity.
By focusing on the dialectic production of the Queer Lover and the Hateful Other--and their role in gentrifying cities in Berlin--Haritaworn offers a complex critique of queer postionalities, even presumably-radical queer positonalities, and their role in reifying complex systems of racial capitalism's core goals of producing populations that can and must be abject.
The organization of this book follows a structure similar to the analysis in Haritaworn's first chapter, where they locate the multiple scales--the body, the neighborhood, and the community--at which queer gentrification shrinks environments for queers of color (72). Shifting in scale further, the second chapter, "Love," focuses on the image of the gay kiss, and how relations and relationality produce bodies that are always already victim, and never victim. The third chapter, "Hate," follows from the second chapter, and looks at the mind, focusing on how racial bodies become pathologized, produced as particularly anti-queer in discourses of psychology and biology. The fourth chapter, "Queer Nostalgia," continues from "Hate," focusing on hate crime discourses in particular, and analyzing how time is weaponized, with racialized populations always stuck in a chronology of the past, and queer positionalities are compelled to resist the past and the trauma that the past represents. Finally, the last chapter posits the figure of the Queer Lover as a "transitional object," an unstable object that allows for empty myths of multiculturalism and diversity under neoliberalism to flourish, obscuring the reality of failures of supposed values of multiculturalism and diversity.
By focusing on the dialectic production of the Queer Lover and the Hateful Other--and their role in gentrifying cities in Berlin--Haritaworn offers a complex critique of queer postionalities, even presumably-radical queer positonalities, and their role in reifying complex systems of racial capitalism's core goals of producing populations that can and must be abject.
August 16, 2024
I had my first encounter with Jin Haritaworn through various articles and I was looking forward to further my knowledge of their theory. I believe this reading really challenged my believes and perspectives on issues such as hate crime laws. It also let me wonder how queer regenerations have been working in the last 10-ish years, and how lately this has related to the further rise of populist and conservative far-right parties in Europe. This has been a great reading, truly eye-opening. I really encourage whoever may be interested in radical perspecitives in queer theory and/or postcolonial theory to give Haritaworn's works a look.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews