Catharina Peeck-Ho: You are both known for your research on intersectionality, citizenship, gender and migration. Where would you identify shared perspectives, topics or insights of your work? What are the differences? Maybe you could answer this question with reference to your shared academic biography.
Nira Yuval-Davis: Helma and I have been friends since the mid-1980s. We met in Amsterdam at a conference and we liked each other from the beginning and respected each other’s work. But, kind of paradoxically, except for the book that we edited in the 1990s with Ann Phoenix (Phoenix et al. 1995), we have never worked together. Except, we spoke at each other’s conferences and contributed chapters. But otherwise we never did any work together, which, looking back, seems to me really puzzling.
Helma Lutz: It is wonderful to look back and think about when we first made the connections in our intellectual biographies, and the ways we link to each other. We met in Amsterdam, at a conference in the mid-1980s as part of the RC051, the research committee on racism, nationalism, indigeneity and ethnicity of the International Sociological Association. Floya Anthias was also there, and you and Floya had already published this immensely important article in Feminist Review in ‘83 on the inter-relationships of ethnic, gender and class divisions (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1983), which then paved the way for your ground-breaking book Racialized Boundaries—Race, Nation, Gender, Colour and Class and the Anti-Racist Struggle (Anthias et al. 1992).
Nira Yuval-Davis: In hindsight, we dealt with what, at about the same time Kimberlé Crenshaw in the U.S. had coined the term, intersectionality (Crenshaw 1989). This is what I was working on, and what many others, including you, were working on already, as well.
Helma Lutz: I was doing my PhD in Amsterdam at the Institute of Race and Ethnic Studies. My own work on migrant women in Germany and the Netherlands as mediators was strongly influenced by Nira and Floya’s thinking. However, at that time, it was not easy to use race or racism as an analytical category of social investigation in the Dutch and the German context, a situation which has only recently begun to change. And you, Nira, together with Nora Räthzel, introduced me to the group The European Forum of Socialist Feminists, which, at the beginning of the 1990s, changed its name to European Left Feminists, because the Eastern and Southern European members of the group requested it. The first time that ‘race’ and ‘racism’ became a topic in the group was during that time. I recall a lot of resentment—in particular from German members—about dealing with race and racism at all. The first conference of the biannual meetings of European Left Feminists on race and racism was organized by myself and colleagues in Amsterdam in 1993. And this is where the book Crossfires came from, that Ann Phoenix, you and I edited together. At that time, the rise of nationalism and, of course, the war in Yugoslavia was absolutely at the forefront of the analyses of racism. The book also addressed the question of what was happening in Europe. There were, at least in Germany, a lot of defensive reactions against refugees from former Yugoslavia and against migrants in general. It was at that time when the European Union became what we now call fortress Europe. In 1992, Nira had a Visiting Professorship at the ISS in The Hague and I lived in Amsterdam and visited London many times. So, friendship and exchange were connected. This is the background. Since then, you, me and Floya Anthias have always been part of RC05. You became the president of RC05 during the years 2002–2006, and I’m the president now2, so there is a lot of confluence in our biographies.
Nira Yuval-Davis: You also took part in the first panel on intersectionality that I organized in RC05. The concept has become a very, very important part of our work. As a result, we also worked together with RC32 called Women, Gender & Society. So, the intersectional approach to issues of racism, nationalism, ethnicity and now indigeneity, has always been very central to the work as well as the organisations in which we work together. You had this gallant attempt to include thirteen social divisions into your frame of intersectionality analysis at one time (e.g. Lutz and Wenning 2001; revised in Amelina and Lutz 2019, p. 11). Probably, this is the only time that I actually disagreed with you: from my perspective, which and how many social divisions are relevant for any intersectionality analysis depend on their particular spatial and temporal context as well as their specific positionings, identifications and normative values of the people involved. Apart from that, we have different work focuses but a similar approach to the topics on which we work.
1 Coming from Germany and Coming from Israel
Nira Yuval-Davis: I think one of the reasons we clicked so well at the beginning, and I clicked also with Nora [Räthzel] and some other German socialist feminists, is that I come from Israel and most of my family was murdered by the Nazis. At that time, I had gradually come to see what Israel was doing to the Palestinians and I gradually became anti-Zionist. So, my anti-racism, and also my German sisters’ anti-racism has been forged not from issues of colonialism and Blackness but from the issues of anti-Semitism and imperialism. From the beginning, we did not accept this exclusionary definition of racism, that it is only about Black people, but rather that anybody can be a victim of racism as well as a perpetrator of racism. This was a very important point of empathy for our political activism, which then became wider, and we started to focus on different categories. I remember encounters with Swedish feminists. They felt that we were not paying attention to the most important thing, which was the class difference, and we felt that it’s important to not homogenise class, but also look at other social divisions like ethnicity and racism which cut across social classes. But at that time, we were also a minority among British feminists. I remember a meeting of British socialist feminists, where Floya and I wanted to explore issues of racism and ethnicity, and not just class, as dividing women. And all our colleagues told us that, indeed, it is interesting, but we need to stay focused on issues of class only. However, things changed later, and I think in Britain, feminists and socialists came to understand the importance of racism, ethnicity and nationalism earlier than other socialists and feminists in Europe.
2 The Politics of Belonging
Linda Supik: We are interested in today’s challenges and struggles around politics and regimes of belonging, especially with regard to the notion of citizenship. In how far do you think citizenship is an important category for the analysis of social inclusion and exclusion? What can we learn about social boundary-making if we explicitly focus on citizenship in the analysis of social inequalities? And, Nira, you titled your 2011 book The Politics of Belonging (Yuval-Davis 2011), why did you choose the term ‘belonging’ as a central concept, why not citizenship? Is not citizenship a more clearly political approach to address questions of power?
Helma Lutz: I agree. In my view, in the beginning, the concept of citizenship was just an expression of legal and social inclusion or exclusion. Coming from Germany, with its horrendous history of blood and soil ideology, racism and anti-Semitism, and where the laws until the beginning of the 21st century were based on jus sanguinis, to me, the UK was really more of a model. The UK had anti-discrimination law and jus soli. All the anti-racist input in our debates came from the UK at that time. I learned then, from your work and Floya [Anthias]’s and Ann [Phoenix]’s, and of course Stuart Hall and Phil Cohen, that the UK was not a paradise. But for my work at that time, it was important that there was one country in the European Union that was progressive on this.
Nira Yuval-Davis: For me, citizenship is but one, if hegemonic, political project of belonging. And indeed, I did work on issues of citizenship before moving to the more general framework of the politics of belonging. I’ve written papers, organized an international conference and co-edited a book with Pnina Werbner about women, citizenship and difference (Werbner and Yuval-Davis 1999). I started to work on issues of citizenship, when, in 1986, Verena Stolcke invited me to a conference on women and citizenship in the Wissenschaftskolleg in West Berlin. That was when the Wall was still there. And I saw how important issues of citizenship are. However, the reason that citizenship is only one chapter in The Politics of Belonging is, first of all, because although it’s the most common, it is by no means the only important contemporary political project of belonging. And I do differentiate between the political project of citizenship and the political project of nationalism, because the boundaries are virtually never overlapping. And a lot of the issues of exclusion and inclusion are because the so-called nation state pretends as if the boundaries are overlapping. But also, in terms of the subject, there are people for whom ethno-nationalism is more important, or colour of the skin, or religion. I wrote a lot about the different meanings of ‘nationality’ in English, because in Russian and Hebrew there are different words for national belonging and citizenship. But in English, and I think in German, you don’t have these different terms, which is absolutely formative in terms of your social positioning, identity and any kind of intersectional analysis. I would claim that, today, having a particular passport or not having any, or which kind of passport you have, is one of the major local and global stratificatory tools that exists. Because only with the right passport are you able to move from one place to another, only then you are entitled to the most basic human rights. As Hannah Arendt said, human rights were supposed to kick into action when civil rights end, but what we see in the world is that human rights act only when civil rights exist already. Therefore, if you see citizenship as a framing, rather than looking at different political projects of belonging, you cannot really understand some of the most exclusionary, hierarchical and oppressive tools that exist in our world. Citizenship is a social division, which relates to, but cannot be reduced to, nationality, ethnicity, race or class. After leaving Israel, I lived in the United States for a few years. Being able to live in a society which is not exclusively constructed in terms of your nationality and ethnicity,—not that it was not a racist society!—but still, it gave me freedom, and exactly this is one of the points of empathy between us that formed our political as well as theoretical kind of world.
Helma Lutz: Let me get back to the question why belonging, why not citizenship? As a migration researcher, I saw how more and more migrants could identify more with local belonging than with the state and the passport as a whole. In Germany, in particular, the migrant population of Turkish background, they were never really given the choice to have both of them. I remember Rosi Braidotti’s book on the nomad (Braidotti 1994) where she said it doesn’t matter whether I have one passport or many. I was really angry when I read that because I thought “okay, this is your privileged position”. There are so many who cannot just say “well, today is Tuesday, I’m taking this passport”. I think the notion of belonging added so much to the citizenship concept because it integrates an affective aspect. And that is important to this question “Where am I at home? Where is my home? Where do I belong?” This is still—and has been, interestingly, over the last thirty years—a very important question in debates on the intersecting aspects of citizenship, race, class, gender and nationalism. Also, in my recent work on migrant live-in caregivers from Eastern Europe in Germany and other German-speaking countries (Austria and Swizerland), these women live in the homes of other people who hire them, because those other people want to continue to live in their home while the migrant workers have to leave their home to do this. Belonging is not only a meta construct on the big screen, it’s also something in the daily doings. Bordering, doing bordering, for instance, is something that is done in the home, where these migrant women work. People draw borders, even though they are totally depending on each other, to put the migrant workers in their place. I think the concept of belonging has lots of potential and is not sufficiently researched, and we should develop it even more.
Nira Yuval-Davis: For me, as a migrant too, my belonging is not to England, my belonging is in London or even more specifically in my neighbourhood. And of course, now, with the lockdown, I am getting to know the people of my street even more. But even before, when I heard people slandering Hackney, I felt, you know, slandered because I became attached very much locally and to the very diverse and multicultural population that became my home. I belong to this kind of plurality, this kind of diversity, this kind of contestation. So, in my work, I differentiate very strongly between belonging, feeling safe and feeling at home, although of course we know that many women under the lockdown do not feel safe at home. This equation of ‘feeling safe’ and ‘feeling at home’ is a masculinist definition. Yet you do have this sense of belonging, which is naturalized. But when it becomes threatened or problematized, that’s when the politics of belonging emerge. And this is when, suddenly, you are not just a person but a member of a particular identity community, part of ‘us’ whose community is threatened, or an ‘other’, seen through the filter of collective stereotype, constituting some kind of danger. So, only when belonging is threatened, do you start to question it. This is the reason I feel the politics of belonging is so important. Also, in my intersectionality approach, I differentiate between social positioning, identifications and normative value systems. I do not reduce them to each other. At the beginning of my book Politics of Belonging I quote one of the bombers of the underground in London on 7 July 20053, who left a video as they often do. A lot of people questioned ‘How come, somebody who was supposedly belonging, was born and grew up in Britain; he was a teacher and had family and so on; how could he bomb a civilian population, the people he belonged to?’ But in his video, he talked about ‘my people’, but his people were not the British. They were not even the Pakistani, his family’s background; they were the Muslim Umma. This is a political project of belonging, which is not about citizenship, which is not about nationality, it’s about religion. So you do have other political projects of belonging and you have to be sensitive to both the situated gaze of people in terms of their own subjective feeling, but also in how they affect and are affected by collective, political projects of belonging. The other side of the political projects of belonging, of course, are the political projects of bordering, on which I’ve been working in recent years and recently published our book Bordering (Yuval-Davis et al. 2019).
3 Bordering as the Other Side of Belonging
Catharina Peeck-Ho: An important debate in the social sciences is about the relevance of nation states today. What significance do they have today if we look at current developments? For example, the Covid-19 pandemic seems to put nation states in the centre of political action. What do the national reactions to the pandemic tell us about bordering processes? For example, if we think about the situation of refugees at the moment? What challenges can be identified in the field of transnational migration? Do nation states, in your point of view, gain more relevance due to the current developments?
Nira Yuval-Davis: I don’t know about the nation state, but in spite of the rhetoric of a no-border globalised world, the states are absolutely vital for the activity of global neoliberalism because they are parasites on it. They are depending on their infrastructures, they are depending on their social reproduction, both of individual women and families, and also by the public sector. And, in the Covid-19 lockdown, we could see it more than ever. But since the 2008 global crisis, we have clearly seen how states have been suffering the global crisis of governability and governmentality (Yuval-Davis 2012). At the same time, we see a shift and a weakening of the ability of states to be able to represent the interests of their citizens because the executive government, especially, becomes a facilitator between the multi-nationals and the state in order to seduce them, to keep the business there, because the neoliberal corporations really have no accountability or responsibility to the people and the environment where they work and can always move to where they feel they get better conditions and returns. Meanwhile, the legislative has much less work to do because of the ongoing privatisation of the state. The fact that the state became weakened does not mean it is not important, but that it needs to be legitimized. A typical way to do that—and Britain of course was at the forefront of that—was to show how we are in control. Brexit meant to take back control. “We are in control. We introduce a stronger border control”. And differently from what we have seen under earlier global neoliberalism, it’s not the withering away of borders into a borderless world anymore, but just the opposite, the proliferation of borderings of a very different kind, in a very intersectional way. Helma, your example of migrant care workers shows that borders are drawn even within the home. But it extends to what is called here in Britain the ‘hostile environment’,4 the need of every landlord, every employer, every teacher, every doctor, everyone who has anything to do with you, to make sure that the people they deal with have a little right to be there. Border control is moved from the border to every train station, every place of employment, and so on. What we see is that, if before, multiculturalism was the main technology of control of the state over diversity and discourses of diversity, everyday bordering has now come to be the main one, and this is very divisive. It breaks down solidarity not only in between communities, but even within families. Because, often, the employer is the brother-in-law of the relative who just came to work in the West. That’s what we worked on in the Bordering book I wrote with Georgie Wemyss and Kathryn Cassidy. And of course, this top-down everywhere bordering very much is affects and reinforces the bottom-up response of people feeling really lost and out of control under this governmentality crisis. Because, when there is not proper governability, people feel it is not important which government is in place. And then they start to say: “we have to get hold of our resources”, and this leads to the scapegoating of all those who supposedly do not belong, and to the rise of autochthonic politics. The real basis of this autochthonic type of politics is not even race or ethnicity. In many new rights organisations, there are Blacks or migrants as well, or people who—like Trump or Farage—married migrant women. It’s only about who belongs and who does not belong. It is a very empty category which different political constructions can affect. And citizenship here is almost in contestation with this autochthonic type of politics. I’m engaging in writing a paper with two colleagues about the notion of front-line workers in the pandemic, because the front-line workers, the key workers, the ones that Boris Johnson was saying how they kept him alive, were not citizens. Their families have to pay for their national health service5, although this was suspended for them (but not for other key workers) after public pressure. So we are now in a different kind of reality, in which states are still very important, but traditional notions of citizenship, of residency, of nationality, are all very fluid and malleable in the political projects that are being contested. When the lockdown started, we were hoping that exposing the parasitical nature of neoliberalism and the high importance of the public sector would initiate a different kind of politics. But what we actually see is how it is being used for neoliberal corporations, including universities, to realise dreams that in other times they wouldn’t even have dared to dream. And people who are trying to create a different vision of society—at the moment, at least—are not able to act effectively.
4 The Exploitation of Non-Citizens, Denizens and Migrant (Care) Workers
Linda Supik: Helma, in one of your blog entries on the Cornelia Goethe Centrum (CGC) website (Lutz 2020), you described the situation of transnational care workers coming to Western Europe, and you assessed really clearly—and for me, in a disillusioning way—that the coronavirus crisis will not contribute to a discussion about fair pay and work relations. This countered all the media talk about recognition that caregivers had been receiving in recent weeks. But still, you were clear that we should not get our hopes up. On the other hand, there were big coronavirus outbreaks in German meat factories, and the workers were all sub-contracting workers from South Eastern Europe with very low wages. They live in crowded rented rooms with six people in one room, where social distancing is not an option, not in their workspace nor in their sleeping arrangements. In this situation, 1500 people were infected with the coronavirus in one factory alone. This happened in several places. That is another sector of the transnational workspace between the privileged Western European states and the Eastern European states (where people go to as transnational workers to fill the spaces that get very little pay). The German Ministry for Labour now issued a new law that sub-contracting work relations in the meat industry will be banned from January 1st, 2021. They don’t address other fields of work, but in this field we do see an effect of the coronavirus. Something changed here.
Helma Lutz: It’s to be seen whether it works or not. It was very well known what’s happening in the meat industry and that the working conditions are horrific and the level of exploitation is incredible. But in the unions, this more or less seems to be the hobby of one or two people. Few persons are really engaged and address this, and nothing changes. I’m really pessimistic that change will happen this time, because there were lots of initiatives before. We’ll see. The thing is that, with the expansion of the European Union to Eastern European countries, a lot of laws were softened. The European Union had this idea that all workers become flexible and mobile, they can work wherever they want and wherever they can find good money. What happened was, of course, in many industries, like the meat industry, but also in the building industry and many other branches, the EU enlargement came at the right time, because it opened up a huge source of workers that were and are totally exploitable. Lots of them had lost their previous work. In their desire to earn money, people accepted more or less acceptable working conditions, always thinking “Okay, it’s just for some time that I’m doing this, and then I go back and I can do something else”. But the economic situation in the sending countries has not improved a lot. In Poland, it improved for a time, but became worse again. If you look at Bulgaria and Romania, where the majority of the meat workers come from, the situation is horrible. In particular during the pandemic, they suffered a lot. Therefore, I’m not sure if this new law helps, I’m really happy that it passed. But in the end, I’m more pessimistic because other initiatives have not helped so much. This is the reason why I was more pessimistic about the situation of the migrant workers. Look at the particular situation of the migrant women, who work as caregivers in German homes. We don’t have the numbers but it must be somewhere between half a million and six hundred thousand people, just in Germany. They are placed by placement agencies. The placement agencies fill the gap in between, and the state is actually not looking at this situation at all. There is also very little interest from the unions to look at the situation of the carers.
Catharina Peeck-Ho: If we look at the relationship of regimes and subversive acts in the field of the transnational care work economy, what is the political agency of illegalized transnational migrant care workers?
Helma Lutz: What we found is that the carers organize themselves, in Facebook groups for instance, where they give each other advice how to cope with complicated situations. But there is nothing like a union or a group that is really active in changing the conditions and the pay. In Germany, there is a group called ‘Fair Mobility,’ which is a union-affiliated project requiring the improvement of working conditions and enforcement of fair wages for employees from Central and Eastern European countries on the German labour market. We interviewed one of the group activists, and she pointed out that—and this is one of the reasons why I’m right in being pessimistic—in the contracts, that these workers sign, there is a confidentiality agreement. This means that they are promising to keep information secret. So, they are expected to keep quiet about any complaint they have about working conditions. They are ‘sold’ by the placement agencies as 24-hour live-in workers. The contract says nothing about maximum working hours or minimum breaks. They are not supposed to complain about this to anyone, but they do this within their network on Facebook. There is a contractual penalty of between four and ten thousand euros that they have to pay if they talk. I wouldn’t call it slave labour, but the conditions are really hard for them, and still, they sign this. Afterwards, they have to make sure that their complaints are not going in the wrong direction. There have been very few juridical cases, where this was put to a judge. This is why I’m quite pessimistic regarding the political agency of migrant care workers. The blaming of the meat industry may help in the long run; some first steps are initiated by the Federal Ministry of Labour. For migrant care workers, however, the situation is different, because there is no influential pressure group. We can identify the same situation concerning migrant construction workers, where a lot of exploitation can also be identified. And think of the seasonal workers picking berries and cutting asparagus. There was an interesting discussion during the shutdown of borders in the first wave of the pandemic in spring 2020, where the very well-organized big farmers asked to declare the Eastern European asparagus cutters in Germany as essential workers, so that they could come into the country to work. They won. And although travel restrictions and lockdown measures disrupted a lot of the transnational care arrangement in the first place, the placement agencies put pressure on the state and eventually migrant care workers were recognised as ‘system relevant’ and could travel, but the working conditions got worse; as family members were not supposed to visit their parents, the migrant workers ‘responsibility became harder’ (see also: Leiblfinger et al. 2020). As Nira already mentioned, the neoliberal logic intruded many areas in our lives and changes won’t come easy. If we want change, we have to confront ourselves with the ways neoliberalism impacts our daily lives and the related technologies to govern people.
5 The Binary between the Global South and Global North and Its Misconceptions
Linda Supik: You pointed to the gendered constructions of nationality and citizenship relatively early (Nira e.g. in Women, Nation, State in 1989 and in Gender and Nation in 1997, and both in Crossfires in 1995). What do you think about recent developments of these gendered forms of citizenship and belonging, for example, the growing numbers of refugees worldwide, the economic crisis in 2008 and afterwards, or currently, in the context of the pandemic? How are women in the Global South, for example, affected in a different way than in the North? And regarding race, are women of colour affected in a specific way, differing from white women?
Helma Lutz: Concerning the global effects of Covid-19, I’m actually co-editing a special issue of the European Journal of Women’s Studies which is called Feminism of the Global South (Ruppert et al. 2020). And Nadje Al-Ali has written an article (Al-Ali 2020), a great piece that shows which role feminism has or can have in this situation. She opens with a quote from an Indian doctor saying that social distancing is a privilege. You need running water, space in your house and the means to afford to not go out to earn money. Many Indians, he added, don’t. The majority of the people on the globe do not have running water and do not have the privilege of being able to socially distance themselves from others. The Global South, again, is hit in a horrendous way. Many of my friends and people around me complain about wearing a mask, and I say: “But this is a privilege”. We do have a privilege here and we need to be aware of the fact that the real burden of Covid-19 is carried by people living in shantytowns in South Africa or Brazil.
Nira Yuval-Davis: For several months, Covid-19 affected mostly people in the West, not in the Global South. And then it started to affect, most heavily, very specific countries in the South. That leads me to the general methodological issue of the homogenization of the Global South, which has been a real big problem for me. This relates to my understanding of intersectionality not only as a political tool but also as a dialogical epistemology and methodology. This dialogical epistemology and methodology encompasses different situated gazes rather than that it just determines one position as the one in authority. In this sense, like Patricia Hill Collins says, we can approach the truth, and the more we can include different, situated gazes. This is the basis of my approach to intersectionality as epistemology and as a methodology, rather than what Ange-Marie Hancock and others have called ‘oppression Olympics’ (Hancock 2011). Also, we have to ask ‘Who is the Global South? Are the migrant women in the North, from the south part of the Global South or not?’ And do we put Saudi-Arabia, India, Mozambique and Ecuador in the same kind of category? This is—as far as I see it—a very ethnocentric, if not racialised positioning. This is why we have developed a methodology of situated intersectionality, which, in addition to this dialogical epistemology, is defined as always multi-temporal, multi-spatial and multi-scalar. We need to question the meaning of categories, not only on a vernacular basis, as to what is the particular meaning of gender or feminism in the South versus the North, but also what is the meaning of feminism, for example, to various different situated gazes, within one particular place and time within the South. The educated, articulate, urban feminist coming to a village, is her situated gaze from the South? Of course, she is it, as much as the woman living in the village. Both of their situated gazes have to be encompassed in order for us to understand and approach the truth.
Helma Lutz: I join you on this. Among some of the editors of the European Journal of Women’s Studies, we had the discussion about where is Eastern Europe in this divide: The Global South or the Global North? There is no place for it.
Nira Yuval-Davis: This is one of the issues. And what about the Global South within the Global North? There is no place for that, either.
Helma Lutz: Absolutely. We tried to tackle these questions in the introduction of the Special Issue (Ruppert et al. 2020). And in my last book, Die Hinterbühne der Care Arbeit (2018, due to be published in English as The Backstage of Care Works), I discuss questions around the meaning of categories like the Global South and Global North. What does it mean if we do not have the first, second and third world anymore? The second world, what is now Eastern Europe and Russia and so forth, somehow vanished. The economic situation there and the role of nationalism for the population, these aspects are somewhere on the sideline when talking about the Global South and the Global North. I agree with you that we also have the Global South in our own countries, present in neglected neighborhoods.
6 Transversal Politics
Catharina Peeck-Ho: Nira, your notion of transversal politics has been very influential. I’m not sure how much readers know about the concept, would you mind expanding on it?
Nira Yuval-Davis: Transversal solidarity is based on shared values. Originally, I started to write about it after learning from Italian feminists from Bologna (Yuval-Davis 1997, 125 ff.), where there is a whole transversal feminist political group who were using it in their work with Palestinian and Israeli women as well as with different groups of women from different parts of former Yugoslavia. Transversal politics is a solidarity, which is based on shared values across borders and boundaries. The Italian feminists also used the notions of routing and shifting. Routing means self-reflection, where are you positioned? For example, what are your identifications and values, what power do you have? Shifting refers to empathizing with the situated gaze of other people and asking, what does it mean to walk in somebody else’s shoes? I differentiate it from rainbow solidarity, in which very different values can cooperate. For example, feminists and the Catholic Church can work together against forced sterilisation. But they would never be long-term transversal political allies, because feminists are against forced sterilisation as part of their struggle for the right of women to control their own bodies. In different locations, this means to struggle for the right to have an abortion, which the Catholic Church would completely oppose.
In the 1990s, when Women Against Fundamentalism (WAF) was in the NGO forums of various UN conferences on human rights, reproductive rights and women’s rights, we were a fantastic transversal alliance, and, interestingly enough, very much led by Global South feminists because they are often more articulate, more organized and more sophisticated than those of us coming from the North (see also Dhaliwal and Yuval-Davis 2014). There were differences, not only national differences, but differences of class and others emanating from different situated gazes, but gradually we were able to work together and form a long-term alliance. Also, I consider WAF as a transversal political organisation in which women from Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, Christian and Jewish backgrounds all worked together, because we shared common values rather than identities. We worked against the sexism and racism within our own communities, but also within the British society as a whole, and, of course, we cooperated with global feminist organisations which shared our values. So this is what I talk about when I use the term transversal politics.
Catharina Peeck-Ho: I remember from your texts and from what was said before, that it is also about the recognition of different identities. Against the backdrop of our discussion before, I was wondering if you do not feel a tension between transversal politics and the recognition of identities, which can easily be shifted to identity politics. It seems to me that identity politics can limit transversal politics in many ways.
Nira Yuval-Davis: No, because I think it’s very important that I recognise and identify as a Jew, although my value system puts me in opposition to probably a majority of the contemporary people who identify themselves as Jewish because I’m anti-Zionist. People can identify, for example, with being working class and be proud of it, but not be socialist. It is not that the politics of recognition are not important. Non-recognition can make people invisible and/or degraded. What is important is that positionings, identifications and normative values would not be collapsed together and one assumed from the others. Otherwise, no middle class would be able to be socialist, no white could be anti-racist. So, in identity politics you conflate the three: value systems, identifications and social positioning. Floya [Anthias], at least at a certain stage of her work, thought identity was not a good term to work with. I think it is a very important one, as long as you define it in a consistent way, which is an answer of “who I think I am and who I am not?”. But this is different from analysing your social positioning, and this is different from analysing your normative values. But again, it’s a dialogical epistemology across borders and boundaries. Intersectionality is a dialogical epistemology and it encompasses different situated gazes as does transversal politics. But if you speak of intersectionality as a methodology, you don’t have to share values. That is something different. The more heterogeneous the situated gazes which are included, the better chance you have to approach true understanding, epistemologically and methodologically. It doesn’t mean that you are neutral. This is where your value system comes out. I mean, I can understand why some people in the post-industrial neoliberal state in the north of England have become pro-Brexit. I have to understand their injuries. I have to understand why they scapegoated other kinds of people. It doesn’t mean I have to agree with them, but if I don’t include their perspective, I cannot understand the situation. If I then just become very righteous and say “Oh, it’s nonsense. It’s not the migrant that causes the situation”... of course it’s not, but in order to understand why they voted Brexit, and for them not to feel that we call them stupid, you have to understand their common sense. Obviously, social and political change come when we are able to change the constructions of common sense, that’s what Phil Cohen6 always emphasized. And I think he is right. But it’s very difficult to do. First, we can understand social transformations via situated intersectionality methodology. Secondly, we can try and construct alternative reality by mobilizing transversal solidarity. I am not that pessimistic like you, Helma.
Helma Lutz: I was also reminded of the work of Cynthia Cockburn (Yuval-Davis 1997, Cockburn and Hunter 1999, Cockburn 2007).
Nira Yuval-Davis: You know, she took the notion of transversal politics from me and worked with it so beautifully in so many different global locations. I thought about what she would have said about the state of the world today. She is a great loss.
7 Intersectionality
Catharina Peeck-Ho: As for the political implementations of the intersectionality concept, it can be stated that it became mainstreamed in some regard (examples are UN declarations and also the German Federal Anti-Discrimination Agency, FADA politics). In the meantime, an increasing number of social scientists without a background in feminist theory also regard intersectionality as an important concept. Both of you have been engaged in the intersectionality debate since the very beginning, and you know about the allegations from Black feminists or feminists of colour concerning appropriation and depolitisation. What is your perspective on these ‘intersectionality wars’?
Nira Yuval-Davis: Helma mentioned the article on the interplay of race, class and gender that Floya and I wrote in 1983 (Anthias and Yuval-Davis 1983). We were accused by some feminists that we were breaking solidarity, because we differentiated between different kinds of women, different kinds of working classes and different kinds of Blacks. Some of our critics were the same women who later embraced post-modernism with its free-floating signifiers, which is ironic, historically. Rather than spending all my energy on what often turns into stake debates, I focused on my own approach on intersectionality, which I call situated intersectionality. I use it as a way of understanding, of approaching the truth, and I differentiate it from the dialogical epistemology of transversal politics which is about the political action that emanates from that understanding. I think we have to clarify what we call intersectionality. Some feminists now call themselves intersectional feminists to label what I would call fragmented identity politics which homogenize and reify social groupings as social categories. I see intersectionality as a as an analytical tool for feminist and socialist political solidarity which is based on a transversal justice perspective. I know it is all very controversial but this is how I approach intersectionality. You, Linda, and Catharina mentioned Jennifer Nash’s term “intersectionality wars” (Nash 2018). I have a problem with calling it a war, because it is quite a tough term. But in her writing, Jennifer puts her finger on a soft spot, of course, namely that Black women feel excluded from the intersectionality debate. At the bottom of this debate is the question “Who owns intersectionality?”, as Kathy Davis7 put it.
In August 2009, I spoke on the same panel with Kimberlé Crenshaw in the American Sociological Association that Patricia Hill Collins organized on intersectionality. In addition to Kimberlé and myself, there was Helen Meekosha from Australia whose work focuses on disability and gender. The title of Kimberlé’s presentation (and this was some months after the conference that you organized in Frankfurt in January 2009), that she was so upset about, was E-T: Intersectionality Calling Home. Because she objected to Kathy Davis’ (2008) notion of a travelling concept of intersectionality. Of course, every word, every term travels, it is nothing special for intersectionality. Socialism, feminism, gender, they all have different meanings, not only vernacular, but, as I said, also to different situated gazes in the same space/time. And of course, this crosses disciplines. Her perspective started in law. My perspective is very much embedded in sociology and probably yours as well.
Helma Lutz: It is nice that Linda is here today. With Linda and Maria Theresa Herrera Vivar, we organized the Celebrating Intersectionality conference in 2009 as a team. It is interesting that, four years later, Sirma Bilge wrote about it as the beginning of the “whitening” of the concept (Bilge 2013). This claim is picked up a lot and reproduced over and over again. And apparently the conference struck a nerve which needs to be addressed. Last year, I gave a keynote lecture at the G19 conference (7–8 October 2019) in Gothenburg, Sweden, about this process.8 When we started to organize the conference, I had just newly become a Professor of Gender Studies at the University of Frankfurt. At the time, colleagues told me that I am damaging Gender Studies with introducing the intersectionality perspective. That was the conflict line we had to deal with prior to the conference, and it shows that German Gender Studies were at a different point at that time (see also the edited volume, Lutz et al. 2011).
Linda Supik: Helma, at the beginning of this conversation, you already mentioned how hard it was to address race in continental Europe in the 1980s and still in the 1990s. Had this changed by 2009? Because the Black feminists’ critique is not only about whitening the debate, but also about silencing race. When you, Maria Teresa and I organized the Frankfurt conference in 2009, I remember being excited about the diverse crowd gathering in the Goethe University’s Casino, the most diverse crowd that I, as a white PhD student, had encountered in a German academic conference up to that point. On the other hand, I can imagine the renowned Critical Race Legal Scholar, Kimberlé Crenshaw, was used to different crowds on the US West and East Coast. I think, still today, twenty years later, US Americans cannot easily read the salient racialised differences in European contexts, because these are different from the USA.
But obviously, the panels were majority white and there were some Black and some not Western European speakers. Several distinguished white German feminists spoke at this conference and replaced the term race by migration or ethnicity, or reduced race to a footnote in their intersectional narratives.
Nira Yuval-Davis: Helma, when you were a visiting lecturer in Frankfurt (1997–1999), before you became a professor, you brought Ann Phoenix and myself to give a presentation in your Gender Studies course to show all your colleagues that you cannot talk about gender without sensitivity to issues of ethnicity and race. In 2009, you launched the conference to become a professor on gender ‘working intersectionality’ in order to validate and stamp this theoretical political approach. One can always say “you could have done more”. But this is not the issue. I think it is time to draw a line under this debate. And I thought that Ann’s lecture really did just that in a good way.
Helma Lutz: Yes, she talked about privilege.9 I remember also, at that conference in Frankfurt, it was you who raised this question “Does this mean that if we talk about oppression, we should also speak about privilege?”. We agreed then that we need to talk about privilege.
Nira Yuval-Davis: But when you talk about privilege, only focussing on colour without thinking of class or other dimensions, this is identity politics. I regret these developments because intersectionality, for me, is the alternative to identity politics, not another form of it, in terms of feminist politics.
Helma Lutz: I agree with Floya, who says that intersectionality is a heuristic tool and this is what it needs to be in order to work with it. In that way it doesn’t have a colour, right? Talking about ‘the whitening of a concept’ leads to discussing intersectionality in terms of identity politics. What I think is true and what we have to be aware of, is that intersectionality is sometimes used in places where you do not expect it, for example, in order to launch diversity politics.
Nira Yuval-Davis: Already in my 2006 article, which appeared in the European Journal of Women’s Studies (Yuval-Davis 2006), I mocked some of the UN documents for the perversion of intersectionality into a mechanical point system. There you have ‘women’ at one point, ‘rural’ at another point, ‘disability’ as an additional point, etc. How could intersectionality be turned into a social policy tool in this insensitive way? How can you talk about intersectionality only as dealing with Black women? There is no meaning for Black if you do not talk about Black in the context of white and other kinds of colour. But what is the meaning of Black? The majority of women in the world are Black. Many researchers are talking about Blacks only as racialised minorities in the West without thinking about other parts of the world. Very often, they are excluding the majority of Black women in the world. The situations of different Black communities are quite different in different places. On the other hand, I remember a debate, which was in the European Forum of Socialist Feminists, that wanted to call all racial minorities, like the Turkish, Black in Europe. Despite legitimate criticism, I would say that at that time, it was quite a success to recognise that not all racialised minorities in all places are just Black. This is all very delicate, because of, as Ann Phoenix mentioned in her CGC lecture, the psycho-social injuries of discrimination and racism. These affect not only Black women, but also other racialised minorities. I am working on issues of anti-Semitism and I can understand why many Jews are hurt by any kind of criticism of Israel. Because for them, Israel is a Jewish collective identity. But for me, also a Jew, who grew up in Israel, this is very problematic, and I would not stop criticizing Israel and the Zionist project because of that. We have to be very empathetic, and yet, not lose the critical perspective just because we are empathetic. It is very problematic. But this is our role as public intellectuals and human rights defenders. We cannot avoid this. I mean, it is very easy to think that the interests of all of those who suffer from injustice collude. That would be very easy. But it is not true. One of the early insights of feminism was that the oppressed working class man comes home and beats up his wife. You do not lose the empathy and sympathy with the oppressed working class man, and yet, you are not going to align with him and allow him to get away with beating up his wife. I think you need to work through all these kinds of contradictions and refrain from moral righteousness. And that is very, very difficult, it is very delicate.
8 Anti-Muslim Racism and Everyday Racism
Helma Lutz: I think it’s important to talk about what everyday racism means to people who are the victims of everyday racism. At least in Germany, we have hardly had that conversation; it’s only starting now. Also with concern for the various groups that are victims of everyday racism. The term anti-Muslim racism itself is contested; opponents say that not all people who are considered Muslims are religious. But, obviously, the religious self-designation of a person does not matter so much when this person is seen or ‘read’ as a Muslim. For the murderer of Hanau10, who killed nine young people in February 2020, it did not make a difference whether his victims identified as Muslims or not; he identified them as such.
Nira Yuval-Davis: There is anti-Muslim racism, racism against people because they are constructed as Muslims. I do, however, contest the term Islamophobia, because it says that you cannot criticize Islam—but you should criticize certain interpretations of Islam, like you should Judaism, Christianity and all religious (as well as secular) ideologies if they preach sexist, racist and violent ideologies. Speaking as a founding member of WAF and a member of the political left, we always needed to deal with these contradictions as socialist feminists who are both anti-racist and anti-fundamentalist. The strength of WAF has been that we all dealt with the contradiction of criticizing our own communities for sexism and racism as well as the sexism and racism of people in the whole society and the government.
Catharina Peeck-Ho: One important aspect of your work—at least as we understand it—incorporates questions of political action. If we think of current political struggles (e.g. the struggles of refugees globally), but also the relationship between the citizenship regime and acts of citizenship: what chances are there for acts of citizenship from below to affect dominant citizenship regimes? Which are successful strategies?
Helma Lutz: There is a group in Berlin who has written the very interesting and very well-argued article Decolorize it! addressing the debate about anti-racism, by Juliane Karakayalı and others (2012). In the direction of critical whiteness proponents, they raised the question, if white people who work on racism are seen as enemies, then who is left? We need each other as allies as well. They said “if you point out that real anti-racist action can only be done by Black people or by people with a Turkish or migrant family history, then you do not see that racism is relational.” Racism is part of this society and it influences all our relationships. We have to be aware of that.
Nira Yuval-Davis: Exactly, there are different kinds of racisms. Floya and I talked already in the 1980s about boundary signifiers that trigger different kinds of racialisation, and I think this is very important. These dichotomies are so characteristic to certain types of identity politics; I don’t consider them anti-racist, because they don’t want to abolish racism. It’s about power relations. We always have to include the differential power relations in any relational dialogue, because if we ignore differential power relations, this itself can be very racist and classist. So we have to include awareness for these differential power relations in a way of mutual respect and by dialogue and not by paralysing people with guilt feelings, along the lines of “Oh, I don’t have the right to exist because I have a white skin”.
Helma Lutz: … and I shouldn’t take part in anti-racist movements!
Nira Yuval-Davis: Yeah exactly, that could be “Oh, you say I should not be involved in anti-racism. That’s great, so I can just ignore it”. That is so self-defeating.
I always finish my monographs by quoting Gramsci’s words about the pessimism of the mind and the optimism of the soul, but I must say it is more and more difficult to get in touch with this optimism of the soul. Because, in some way, our generational life project has been a failure, because so many things that we took for granted as achievements have now been reversed.
Helma Lutz: But on the other hand, what I find quite amazing is the immense energy generated by the activities of the Black Lives Matter movement; thanks to their activities, in Germany, a debate about racism, or rather the ‘diversity of racisms’ (see Leiprecht and Lutz forthcoming) has gained momentum and racism is finally discussed more frequently in the media.
Nira Yuval-Davis: Yes, and #MeToo and new feminist achievements. But these movements have remained at the level of movements. At least in Britain, there is no political party, there is no political tool that can transform it from a popular mood into different social, economic and political structures. In terms of women’s rights, we have seen that it can be transformed, and then there is a regression. But in terms of the Black Lives Matter movement, there is not even this kind of transformation. When there was the Occupy movement we thought “Haa! Finally!”, a new liberator. But nothing really changed. I moved from anarchism to socialism, because you cannot do away with power. You can only look for ways to redistribute power, but it’s very, very difficult to do this in a way which does not contradict human rights.
Helma Lutz: We also underestimated the change potential of capitalism and how it can transform itself and come back in very new forms.
Nira Yuval-Davis: What we now see is different from the ideologies of neoliberalism, which aim to separate between politics and economy in order to build a minimal state. What we see now is the complete opposite, another kind of neoliberalism. I think of the corruption, all these contracts given to friends. It happened with the rise of leaders from autochthonic and populist right-wing movements: Donald Trump, Silvio Berlusconi and, lately, Boris Johnson. Now the state is not even just a facilitator of neoliberalism, it is owned by neoliberalism. This is a new stage, a very dangerous one, but a more exclusive one while pretending to be a more populist one. So, if we want to be optimistic, maybe the contradictions of this will be such that, who knows.