Soulier, ‘Racializing Homophobia’, 2017

Marlene Soulier, ‘Racializing Homophobia: Tracing Sexual Political Discourse within Europe’s “Refugee Crisis” in Berlin’, 2017 Kohl 3.1: pp. 46-58

Discourses relating to gender and sexualities have long been a tool for the perpetuation of racialized “othering” and have contributed to the strengthening of national identities and boundaries as they reproduce binary constructions of “us” and “them.” As the German nation-state reinvents itself as multicultural, tolerant, and sexually liberated, these discourses serve to mark the racialized body as a site of backwardness, sexism, and homophobia, and thus justify its segregation and exclusion exemplified in the restrictive practices of housing, mobility restrictions, and deportation of asylum seekers and migrants. This paper aims to trace the unfolding of discourses in and between some dominant organizational structures in Berlin that advocate for LGBT refugees and asylum seekers. It argues that the claim for citizenship of some formerly excluded sexual others is contingent on the promotion of a very specific notion of sexual identity and participation in the orientalisation/ethnicisation of homophobia.