Cologne and the (un)making of transnational approaches to sexual violence

The sexual assaults reported on New Year’s Eve 2015 in Cologne posed major challenges to feminists struggling with the tensions and entanglements of feminism, imperialism, racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, sexism and nationalism. The aim of the present article is to examine these tensions through an analysis of the pressures framing the positionality of discourses. It examines how feminists, framed by the larger Western debates about the ‘failure of multiculturalism’ and the global Islamophobia underpinning the ‘war on terror’ era, engaged with the moral panic which pervaded the mediatization of the assaults. It argues that feminist initiatives like #ausnahmslos’, which situated anti-racism at the core of any engagement for gender equality, were a reaction to the femonationalist approach to the events pervading the media and the political debate, and attempts to counter arguments which associated the sexual assaults with cultural practices imported through (Muslim) immigration and which demanded (or condoned) stricter immigration laws and state surveillance of Muslims. Then, this article addresses the challenges posed by some feminists from Germany and from North African countries and/or with a Muslim background, who argued that the analysis of Cologne should address the religious-cultural background of the suspects. The article argues that the difficulty in engaging with their contributions in Germany derives from internal pressures, namely the risk of having their arguments co-opted by Islamophobic and anti-immigration agendas. By pointing at the role of positionality in defining priorities in a globalized world, this article addresses the constraints and potentials in developing transnational approaches to sexual violence.