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

Positionality and co-option

Two months after the sexual assaults in Cologne, the Egyptian feminist organization Nazra for Feminist Studies issued a statement about the incidents because ‘feminist solidarity is a universal concept that transcends borders’ (Nazra, 2016). Nazra’s statement is an attempt to engage Western feminists in a transnational discussion about the entanglements of violence against women, culture, religion, racism and immigration. Nazra links the assaults in Cologne to the assailants’ background in North African countries and uses the opportunity to expose misogynist practices in Egypt to an international audience. Nazra voices discomfort at what it experiences as Western feminists’ tendency to downplay the anti-patriarchy struggles of feminists in Arab countries for fear of Islamophobia and urges them to support Arab women not only against dictatorship and imperialism, but also against ‘extremist values and fundamentalist ideas’ (Nazra, 2016).

Amira Elwakil stated that, as an Egyptian feminist, she was sensitive to Nazra’s approach, whose prioritization of a gendered perspective was ‘rooted in its work on sexual harassment/assault in the context of Egypt’ (2017). However, as a British activist committed to the rights of refugees, Amira Elwakil was aware of the political implications of the Western embrace of the comparisons between Cologne and Cairo: how referring to the assaults with the adoption of the Arab word ‘taharrush gamea’ prevented an analysis of the incidents within the larger context of sexual violence in Germany while also promoting the culturalization of rape in tandem with the stigmatization of Muslims (Abdelmonem et al., 2016). Her dilemma echoes broader debates on the politics of engaging with gender-based violence perpetrated by non-Western men. The pervasiveness of the orientalist trope of the oppressed Muslim woman is certainly one of the most enduring legacies of colonialism. The mediatization of gender-based violence in Muslim communities has served to justify the surveillance and disciplining of the Muslim man and Muslim communities in the context of the ‘war on terror’ (Farris, 2017; Grewal, 2017; Morgan and Poynting, 2016; Razack, 2004; Tekin and Gabriel, 2012). When Machtans (2016) examined how the pressure that populists and sensationalist media exerted on German Muslims could have worked to silence necessary debates in Islamic associations, she mentions the ‘highly charged atmosphere following the events in Cologne’ as a moment when ‘it seemed to be difficult to publicly voice and make heard constructive criticism that would not accuse all Muslims and all refugees of being inherently prone to violence against women’ (pp. 95–98).

Hence the following questions prevail: how can the contributions of feminists who referred to realities in North African countries be assessed when discussing Cologne? Do Schwarzer’s writings expose the ambivalent interweaving of racism, sexism and feminism (Hark and Villa, 2017: 10)? What about feminists with a Muslim background who, like Nazra, linked Cologne to the cultural-religious background of the suspects? Do they fall into the trap of being the ‘authentic voice’ who speaks what the hegemonic ear wants to hear as a reiteration of dominant power relations (Castro Varela and Dhawan, 2016: 24)? Are they ‘useful fools’ whose texts dangerously converge with arguments made by anti-immigration actors? Or, do those who dismiss their examination of misogyny in Muslim communities/societies as potentially benefiting racism and neo-colonialism run the risk of contributing to ‘benign’ expressions of Eurocentric worldviews, which are anchored in the assumption that Islamophobia is the major threat for European Muslims and therefore it is legitimate to discredit those who may be co-opted by Islamophobic agendas? And if so, what are the implications regarding the discussion of sexual violence and efforts to develop transnational anti-rape initiatives?

As we know, several European organizations of racialized women working against gender-based violence were accused of reinforcing the stigmatization of their communities of origin. Even collectives with a decade-long anti-racist feminist action, like the UK organization Southall Black Sisters, were suspected of providing a co-optable foundation for Islamophobia (Razack, 2004). The critical analysis of positionality sheds light on the tensions erupting between, on the one hand, the need of acknowledging and allowing space to non-Western women’s cultural critique of their own societies/cultures and, on the other, the need for a critical analysis of the politics of visibility framing their participation in Western debates.

Grewal’s analysis of the ‘authentic voice’ exposes the entanglements of positionality (Grewal, 2009, 2012, 2017). Her examination of widely read testimonies of victims of rape by Muslim men reveals that their broad visibility in the West was due not only to their ability to fulfil the criteria of ‘real rape’ (i.e. they did not challenge heteronormative gender norms), but also to frame public debate around these testimonies in a manner that placed anti-racism in conflict with anti-sexism (Grewal, 2017). Similarly, she argues that the approach to gender-based violence by influential collectives like the French Ni Putes ni Soumises and famous activists like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Somali born Dutch-American who supported US-imperial wars, exposes a rhetoric that serves to pit feminism against anti-racism and which ultimately works to the detriment of non-white/immigrant women. Although Grewal subscribes to criticism of Hirsi Ali – perpetuating an image of an orientalist monolithic Islam, building a political career on the denigration of Muslims, strategically using ‘the language of “lived experience” to justify an intolerant and exclusionary message’ (2012: 572) – she acknowledges that the issues she raises (as well as the French collective) respond to genuine and widespread concerns regarding gender-based violence in immigrant communities. The ‘failure to translate the theorizing of postcolonial feminism into a politics that reconciles the demands of countering both racism and sexism’ has left ‘many non-white women trapped between the two’ (p. 571). Therefore, postcolonial feminism should ‘engage with a diversity of women’s voices in a constructive way rather than avoiding, ignoring or simply dismissing those messages that are politically unpalatable’ (p. 571). She concludes that phenomena like Hirsi Ali, i.e. racialized women spreading ‘discourses of superiority and human rights that are themselves exclusionary and oppressive’ (p. 571), have been created precisely ‘because attempts to construct a different form of feminist politics have all too often been treated as inauthentic or suspicious from the outset not only by white feminists but also by those who set feminism up as essentially and irreconcilably “western”’ (p. 586).

Other important contributions came from scholars who examined the challenges for transnational solidarity in the post-9/11 order. Terman (2016) analysed the criticism made by some Western-based postcolonial feminists of the engagement of feminists in Muslim countries with topics that tend to be instrumentalized by imperialism as ‘an expression of a Euro/American experience of Islamophobia post 9/11’ (p. 77). She warned that ‘privileging a critique of Western imperialism in discussions of violence against women in Muslim contexts’ risked presenting ‘women’s rights activism not just as complicit in imperialism and Islamophobia but as inescapably imperialist and Islamophobic’ (p. 77). Drawing on Abu-Odeh’s similar critique (2015), Al-Ali argues that a ‘positionality rooted in transnational feminist politics needs to go beyond dichotomous positions of macro power configurations linked to imperialism, neoliberalism and globalization on the one hand, and an attention to localized and regional inequalities and power configurations linked to patriarchy, cultural norms and religious interpretations and practices [on the other]’ (Al-Ali, 2018: 23). Her intersectional approach to the experiences of sexual violence of Iraqi women in the long period from Saddam’s era to the years of the Syrian Civil War offers an analytical model capable of making visible how ‘the struggle for women’s rights intersects with the struggle against other inequalities’ in each differentiated context (p. 13). However, given the way feminism has been co-opted to discuss migration and border control, her analytical framework does not spare her from feeling ‘extremely conflicted in articulating a coherent transnational feminist solidarity at this historical juncture’ (p. 23). The following pages argue that similar tensions and conflicts frame efforts to forge a transnational feminist response to Cologne.

German feminists at the crossroads

The media hypervisibility of Cologne exposes how racialized gendered identities interacted with existing anxieties and how deeply entrenched colonial notions of wild Arab men sustained the enactment of the sexually threatened body of the German woman as a surface to frame migration as a security issue (Jazmati and Studer, 2017; Pressentin, 2017). The mediatization of the assaults was framed by a narrative that had emerged in the autumn of 2015 contesting Angela Merkel’s pledge to give refuge to Syrians and which claimed that the influx of refugees was overburdening Germany, the state was losing control, and chaos was about to erupt (Herrmann, 2019). The Cathedral of Cologne, a renowned monument of German Catholicism and Gothic architecture associated with the Holy Roman Empire, became, alongside the Cathedral square, a projection screen for a scene where previously diffused fears materialized. Photos depicting crowds of dark-haired men in the foreground and fireworks surrounding the Cathedral were signified as a ‘horde of barbarians’ proudly taking control of an emblematic public space at the very heart of Christian Europe. As an iconography adaptable to the far-right repertoire against multiculturalism, these photos were read according to nativist imaginaries that reinforced narratives about the ‘big replacement’/Islamization of Europe. The famous Focus cover and the Süddeutsche Zeitung’s frontpage on Cologne, for instance, are representations of the incidents that stage the ‘white German woman’s body as the nation . . . being violated by “borderless” Europe and “failed Wilkommenskultur”’ (Boulila and Carri, 2017: 288). Such representations enact an old and widespread nationalist war trope of the nation as a woman in danger and exemplify precisely how tropes which were associated with the radical right were gaining prominence in centrist discourses (Weber, 2016). In a context of ethnic anxieties and nativist backlash against immigration, the ‘ethnicization of sexism’ (Dietze, 2016) prevalent in the mediatization of Cologne strengthened the public association between Islam and ‘gender violence, feminism, and gender mainstreaming’, thus reinforcing the positioning of ‘Islam as the racialized Other to Germany, to Europe, and to the West’ (Weber, 2016). In sum, the sexual assaults were translated into pre-existing patterns of cultural interpretation (Werthschulte 2017) that echoed tropes from the European colonial archive. They sustained the reading of the events as an attack on the nation, which in turn strengthened the discursive positions of the German far-right (Boulila and Carri, 2017: 288–291).

Debates about Cologne were also marked by an anti-feminist subtext (Boulila and Carri, 2017: 289). Some prominent German feminists strongly combated the racialization of the assaults in Cologne. Anne Wizorek, one of the faces of the hashtag #aufschrei, ² together with feminists from different ethnic backgrounds, reacted to Cologne with #ausnahmslos. Gegen sexualisierte Gewalt und Rassismus [#noexcuses. Against sexualized violence and racism]. Their initiative aligned with broader German feminist efforts to resist the co-option of the incidents for anti-immigration policies. ³ The #ausnahmslos open letter (11 January 2016), published in German and English (http://ausnahmslos.org/english), criticizes those who highlight gendered violence ‘only when the perpetrators are allegedly the perceived “others”: Muslim, Arab, black or North African men’. It rejected cultural readings sustained by a dichotomy that discursively constructs Europe/Germany as a safe haven of women’s rights under the threat of misogynist Islam, highlighted the shortcomings of gender justice in Germany, and envisaged Muslim and migrant women as partners against sexual violence. The initiative is foremost an effort to redirect the debates about Cologne from immigration to sexism. By capitalizing on the promoters’ long-term involvement in campaigns against sexism and arguing that the combat against sexual violence must be a ‘political priority every single day’, #ausnahmslos also proposes political solutions (e.g. investment in rape crisis centres), societal solutions (e.g. combating victim-blaming) and media-related changes (e.g. mediatization of sexualized violence as violence).

The German webpage of the initiative includes three further press releases – one of solidarity with Gina-Lina Lohfink, ⁴ and two related to the law reform – which strengthen the attempt by #ausnahmslos to use Cologne to combat sexism in the German judiciary. On 28 April 2016, as the German parliament began discussing the reform of the law for sexual offences, the group called for the ratification of the Istanbul convention. Later, the group welcomed the adopted reform anchored in the principle of ‘no means no’, but firmly condemned the tightening of the residence law, which they regarded as a victory for the racialization of rape. Certainly, the evolution of German immigration policies and public attitudes towards asylum (see, for instance, how the 2016 electoral gains of the far-right party Alternative für Deutschland capitalized on the sex panic around Cologne) signals that #ausnahmslos did not succeed in countering the pervasive culturalization of rape. Nonetheless, the initiative should not be discredited as a marginal phenomenon. The presence of internationally influential scholars and activists (Angela Davis, Urvashi Butalia, Chandra Mohanty, Nadja Al-Ali, Rokhaya Diallo, Charmaine Pereira) and prominent German public figures (politicians Manuela Schwesig, Claudia Roth and Katja Kipping, novelist Tanja Dückers, activist Monika Hauser) as some of the signatories of the open letter attests to the possibility of forging anti-rape alliances among women from different ethnic-religious backgrounds and nationalities. Furthermore, the enthusiastic public response to the text (11,000 signatures just in the first week) signals the strength of feminism in mobilizing against the racialization of rape.

What’s in a comparison?

There were no Egyptians among the suspects identified by the German police. However, German police, media and politicians drew on the fact that the majority of the suspects were from North African countries and on the intensive media coverage of the mass sexual assaults reported during political protests in Egypt (women being circled and sexually harassed and abused by groups of men) and adopted North African countries, and specifically Egypt’s capital, as a frame of reference in debates about Cologne.

The use of the derogatory word ‘Nafri’ (from North Africa) to describe the suspects and the Arab word ‘taharrush gamea’ to define the assaults contributed to the perception that sexual violence was a Muslim ‘import’ (Vieten, 2018: 79), reinforced the presence of Cologne in German security debates (Pressentin, 2017), encouraged discriminatory policies, and exacerbated the essentialization of Arabs/Muslims as deviant masculinities. The reference to realities in North African countries to explain Cologne also resulted in the erasure of the social phenomena serving as a frame of comparison: false translations of ‘taharrush gamea’ as ‘sex game’ in the UK press effaced the complexity of Egyptian feminists’ activism against sexual harassment within a network of transnational human rights and feminist organizations (Abdelmonem et al., 2016).

These familiar patterns of appropriation did not prevent feminists with a North African and/or Muslim background from referring to the religious-ethnic-sociocultural background of the suspects when examining the assaults. Among them are the guests of a three-part series organized by Der Spiegel to explore perspectives about Islam and sexuality. The first and the second contributions include interviews with British author and journalist Shereen El Feki (26 January 2016) and American-Egyptian scholar of Islam Leila Ahmed (29 January 2016). The third contribution is the essay ‘Sexualität in Ägypten. Der Frauenkörper ist das Ziel eines Klassenkampfs’ [Sexuality in Egypt. The female body is the target of a class struggle] (15 February 2016) by Egyptian writer and scholar Miral Al-Tahawy. ⁵ The text contains a photo of young men harassing veiled women with the caption ‘Belästigung 2012 in Kairo: Freiwild und Triumph’ [Harassment in Cairo in 2012: Fair game and triumph].

Al-Tahawy’s essay about sexual violence in the Egyptian Revolution is meant to inform the sociocultural background underpinning Cologne. According to the author, both situations are symptoms of a sick society marked by deep socioeconomic inequality. Her analysis resonates with key arguments from seminal literature about sexual violence: rape as a political strategy in conflict, rape culture as an expression of patriarchy, the inscription of rape in historical processes, and rape as a form of preventing women’s social mobility. Al-Tahawy sees the assaults in Cairo as a contemporary phenomenon informed by the region’s history: they were a strategy to contest women’s presence as political actors in the Revolution and are inscribed in the region’s long history of using sexual violence in warfare; the Salafists’ social influence in normalizing the oppression of women contributed to the abuse of women in 21st-century Egypt. According to Al-Tahawy, the assaults in Cairo and Cologne share a comparable sociopolitical dimension. In Cairo, the assaults were a way for the most deprived to take revenge against social injustice. In Cologne, they were framed by anti-Western resentment in Arab societies fuelled by violent legacies of colonialism, continuing Western interference, exploitation of resources and connivance in suppressing human rights and democracy – factors that made some immigrants ‘ticking bombs full of hatred for Europe’.

Al-Tahawy’s adoption of patterns observed in Egypt to explain acts of men from other countries perpetrated in Germany resonates with essentializing discourses about the Arab man therein reinforcing a culturizing subtext underpinning the Spiegel’s initiative. As a forum to discuss Cologne, the title of the series, ‘Sexuality and Islam’, creates expectations of sexual deviancy. Nonetheless, the outcome is far more complex. While the context may have contributed to the perception of its guest contibutors as ‘native informants’, they are present in the media as feminist scholars with a Muslim background. Furthermore, Al-Tahawy, just like El Feki and Ahmed, used Cologne to expose the (neo-)colonial legacies framing contemporary Arab societies and women’s agency and resistance in these countries.

The remaining texts of this article’s corpus include essays from Der Schock – die Silvesternacht von Köln [The Shock: The New Year’s Eve in Cologne] (May 2016), a book edited by Alice Schwarzer. Some of the essays had been published previously in EMMA, the influential German feminist magazine (est. 1977) that has been accused by its critics of condoning Islamophobia and prejudices against immigration. German Muslim associations, journalists and feminist scholars harshly criticized the book and accused it of containing mere speculations and advancing the far-right agenda by participating in the culturalization of rape (e.g. Rossmann, 2016; Schorer and Schneider, 2017: 151; Werthschulte, 2017). For Schwarzer’s critics, it corroborated her media role as an ‘anti-Muslim feminist’ (Boulila and Carri, 2017: 288). Hark and Villa (2017: 77ff.) identify in Schwarzer all the topoi which made Cologne a privileged signifier in a xenophobic discourse about security in the dominant culture: criminality, terrorism, national security, the interweaving of religion, moral and gender, the interweaving of feminism and nativism, the culturalization of rape, and Islamophobia. They identify in Schwarzer a false universalism underpinned by colonial topoi and a toxic feminism and argue that she converges with femonationalism by ignoring how the populist right appropriated critiques of sexism. Indeed, Schwarzer’s ‘Silvester 2015, Tahrir-Platz in Köln’ [New Year’s Eve 2015, Tahrir Square in Cologne] (2016) echoes pervasive tropes that structure the moral panic around Cologne: insistence on the failure of the police; claims that the authorities initially tried to cover up the incidents; adoption of semantics of terror to describe the incidents (inferno, horror night, huge swarm); perceiption of the assaults as an import and a strategy to humiliate the state and express contempt for the West; support for the ethnic-profiling of crime; rhetoric from the repertoire of anti-multiculturalism (false tolerance, political correctness, cultural relativism).

In their critique of the entanglements of racism, sexism and feminism in Schwarzer, Hark and Villa develop the concept of politics of location (2017: 82ff.) as the right approach to Cologne. They propose an analysis framed by efforts to decolonize feminism that focuses on the social context of the incidents, thus avoiding the depictions of the assaults as replicas of incidents in some German festivities or as part of a universal Muslim patriarchal rape culture, i.e. a framework which moves beyond both the Germanization and the universalization of Cologne. However, Hark and Villa do not engage with feminist contributions that pose major challenges to the (im)possibility of developing transnational feminist approaches through Cologne: feminist scholars with a Muslim background who did not Germanize the events or universalize them as a trademark of Muslim patriarchy. This absence may be related to the blind-spot in Hark and Villa’s essay. Although their approach makes way for an examination of the complex experiences of the suspects in Germany and the overloaded context framing discussions of the incidents, it does not engage with the perspectives of victims of sexual violence. How could the politics of location inform the possibility for victims of sexual assault in Cologne to speak about their experiences given the moral panic that framed the media visibility of the incidents? How could the politics of location inform women from other geographies when empathizing with the experiences of the women in Cologne?

These issues, which are at the core of attempts to forge initiatives of transnational feminism capable of accommodating the needs of women in their diversified positionalities, shed light on what enabled some feminists with a Muslim background to find common ground with Schwarzer. Schwarzer’s account of the Vosen family’s ordeal highlights how the politicization of the incidents generated victim-blaming, which increased their suffering: the Vosens were accused of contributing to racism by speaking about their experiences. Schwarzer argues that the instrumentalization of the incidents should not prevent empathizing with the victims. She further contends that Cologne highlighted the need to address the problem of sexual violence in German asylum facilities. She argues that many asylum seekers carry traumatic experiences of wartime rape (as perpetrators, bystanders or witnesses); therefore, the implementation of health programmes to treat these men and security measures to protect women should be a priority in the politics of asylum. ⁶ She also claims that religious fundamentalism contributed to the sexual assaults. Schwarzer depicts the suspects as uprooted men who forged an identity through a version of Islamic fundamentalism, whose dissemination is rooted in the recent history of the Maghreb and the Middle East: patriarchal cultures and resentment fuelled by colonial violence and Western interference. Schwarzer’s insistence on the story of the Syrian refugees who saved an American tourist in Cologne certainly echoes a rhetoric of disciplining refugee men: the construction of the figure of the (un)deserving refugee; nonetheless, it opens up as well for a non-essentialist perception of Muslim masculinities.

In her essay, ‘Ein Verrat an den Frauen’ [A betrayal of the women], the Algerian sociologist and secular feminist Marieme Hélie-Lucas ⁷ shares Schwarzer’s anti-Islamic fundamentalist attitude. The essay includes a photo of Arab women demonstrating against rape culture taken by Asmaa Waguih, the Cairo born and based photojournalist who was awarded in 2012 the Reuters Photojournalist of the Year for her work in Egypt and Syria. The photo is meant to reinforce the essay’s key arguments: Arab women are fighting for an anti-sexism agenda, and Western feminists should learn from these women’s fight against patriarchy and fundamentalism and treat them as allies. Converging with Nazra’s critique, Hélie-Lucas resents Western feminists’ refusal to acknowledge connections between sexual harassment in public spaces in Tunis, Cairo and Cologne. Out of fear of contributing to racism, Western feminists promote what she defines as a ‘distorted Eurocentric view’ echoing the colonial difference between the civilized and the undeveloped and normalizing the oppression of women in the name of cultural difference. For Hélie-Lucas, by refusing to confront fundamentalism, the European left is not only betraying women and progressives in the Arab countries, but also strengthening the far-right and Islamists in Europe.

Kelek’s essay ‘Islam und Geschlechter-Apartheid’ [Islam and gender-apartheid] shares in Schwarzer’s mistrust in some German Muslim associations. Kelek is very critical of the influence of some Muslim associations in Germany, namely those subsidized by Erdogan’s Turkey. She argues that they represent a minority of German Muslims that the state and the media wrongfully treat as representatives of a community marked by diversity. She bases her critique of multiculturalism on her conviction that, although the Koran might have meant progress in women’s rights at the time of the Prophet, it postulates women’s submission and promotes gender-apartheid. Kelek’s essay culminates with a plea echoing German-Syrian political scientist Bassam Tibi’s 1998 notion of Leitkultur, a very controversial concept that became central in German debates about immigration. As a way of preventing situations like Cologne and sexual violence in asylum facilities, Kelek warns against ‘parallel societies’ to defend an integration contract anchored in respect for gender rules.

Many of the arguments made in these essays and wording conveyed in them resonate with contemporary forms of cultural racism and rhetoric promoting the policing of minorities and the securitization of migration. However, none of these authors proposes a monolithic understanding of Islam. On the contrary, their argumentation is based on the assumption that Muslim societies are marked by diversity, and their analyses focus on the political-economic tensions that shape contemporary North African societies: legacies of colonialism, frustration resulting from economic deprivation, lack of future perspectives, and continuous Western interference. They all frame Islamic fundamentalism as a modern phenomenon nurtured by the pressures exerted by neoliberal governance. Furthermore, their adoption of the concept of rape culture enacts well-established lines of analysis in the field: the framing of sexual violence in the cultural imaginaries of the perpetrators, religion included, and the economic-political tensions determining their lives, i.e. they do not adopt a universal understanding of (Muslim) patriarchy to explain the assaults.

A critical analysis of the arguments put forward by these contributions to explain Cologne easily identifies blind-spots resulting from the hypervisibility of the suspects’ culture of origin: failing to consider the psychology of group dynamics and the consumption of drugs; disregard for the performative role of borders and the experiences of the suspects as migrants in Germany. The examined texts also convey several incongruencies and hasty conclusions that were later discredited by police investigations. For instance, there was neither any evidence that the assaults had been organized nor that the suspects were fundamentalists. However, dismissing these contributions as Islamophobic erases their positionality and, in doing so, prevents a critical approach to the challenges posed by positionality as a performative signifier in the construction of transnational anti-rape alliances. The lens that these authors use to examine Cologne are non-European experiences like the Algerian Civil War, the influence of Salafism in women’s access to the public spaces, and sexual harassment in contemporary Arab countries. Western Islamophobia is not their main reference.

However, the locus of communication when discussing Cologne, specifically the way by which meanings are acquired, lost and/or transformed when discourses cross borders, prevents these contributions from being understood in Germany as merely feminist approaches informed by concerns regarding misogyny in religion and politics. The long history of instrumentalizing sexual crimes for anti-immigration agendas, and its embeddedness in the history of colonial rule, inevitably complicates debates about the sociocultural entanglements of sexual violence. The risk of having socioeconomic analyses being co-opted into essentialized culturalist arguments, and topoi from studies about sexual violence (e.g. rape culture) being appropriated by anti-immigration agendas, or perceived as corroboration of widespread prejudices, thus legitimizing racism and xenophobia in a country already pervaded by Islamophobia, is too pressing to be neglected as an ‘undesired side-effect’ in the combat against sexual violence. In the political ambiance surrounding the incidents of Cologne, arguments anchored in socioeconomic analysis were easily racialized, distorted and instrumentalized by anti-immigration actors. In contexts framed by cultural racism, anti-racist feminism is therefore the viable space to come forward with initiatives capable of combating sexual violence and the entanglements of racism and feminism that sustain anti-immigration policies. Nevertheless, this ethical commitment requires an openness to engage with the differentiated priorities of women from different social geographies; otherwise, it risks dismissing struggles by non-Western women and restrains their participation in transnational initiatives. The lack of public engagement with the contributions made by feminists with a Muslim background that were examined in this article – in contrast with the intense media attention and criticism of Schwarzer’s texts – suggests that they are indeed subalternized in Western feminist debates.

Final remarks: Whose positionality when forging transnational alliances?

The hypervisibility of Cologne encouraged feminists and women from different backgrounds and sensibilities to developed frameworks of interpretation that envisaged the reinforcement of transnational alliances, hence contributing to the incorporation of Cologne in transnational narratives. Their different cultural backgrounds framed their approaches and the agendas they prioritized. Women on the far-right contributed to turning Cologne into a cipher of Western anti-immigration imaginaries. Anti-racist feminists, resisting the othering of rape, situated the assaults in the pervasiveness of sexual harassment and violence in Germany and used Cologne to demand reform of laws concerning sexual offences. #ausnahmslos is an emblematic initiative of transnational feminism informed by anti-racism activism and research on postcolonialism, intersectionality and the entanglements of sexual violence and racism. While Schwarzer’s anti-Islamism lens converged with certain topoi of the (far-)right, in some ways, she also echoed the demands of pro-refugee activists (protection against sexual violence in asylum facilities) and converged with some secular feminists from Muslim countries and/or a Muslim background for whom Cologne offered an arena to address sexual violence in Muslim societies and communities.

As the Spiegel’s interview with Schwarzer and Wizorek exposes (21 January 2016), tense dialogues erupted among German feminists due to their differing attitudes towards the pressures exerted by the instrumentalization of women’s rights for anti-immigration agendas, which were boosting the political strength of the far-right and normalizing its rhetoric in mainstream political discourse. In that sense, Cologne reinforced tensions and divergences that had been framing feminist debates in the country for a long time. However, feminists must take into consideration the current worldwide backlash against feminism and the role of religious actors and discourses in many attacks on women’s rights. Consider, for instance, the strength of anti-gender Christian discourses in mobilizing electorates in countries like Poland and Brazil. Given the global scale of this backlash, it is urgent to forge alliances among feminists that resist Western racism and simultaneously accommodate secular feminists from different cultures. Forging such alliances requires creating spaces in Europe for the regular participation of women based in North African countries in broader feminist debates, thus normalizing their presence as feminist scholars – instead of only inviting them to comment on acts of gender-based violence perpetrated by Muslim/Arab men, a pattern which risks attaching to them the role of the ‘authentic voice’. Regular cooperation between feminists and the promotion of transnational anti-rape initiatives can bring us further in deconstructing the entanglements of the functional character of rape, the racialization of sexual violence, and in resisting its inscription as a marker of ethnic difference.

For such transnational initiatives to take place, feminists must be attentive to the possibilities of unwanted translations of their struggles in other geographies as well as the need to address issues that may disrupt their ‘local priorities’. In the context of both pervasive Islamophobia and widespread attacks on women’s rights, such forms of cooperation may contribute to counter two widespread Eurocentric drifts in feminist engagement: on the one hand, the acritical celebration of Western secular feminism which has nurtured the racialization of the concept rape culture by inscribing it as a problem of specific non-White communities and non-Western countries, thus leaving racialized women in Western countries cornered between combating anti-racism or addressing anti-sexism in their communities; on the other hand, the downplaying of the struggles of women in Arab/Middle Eastern countries and communities when their engagement does not correspond to broader pressures experienced in the West, which risks fostering estrangement between the ‘local activist’ and the Western anti-imperialist intellectual, ultimately reinforcing discourses of the superiority of Western(-based) activism and scholarship. The risks of appropriation and dangerous convergences are better addressed through openly discussing the contingencies of each positionality and creating space to discuss the needs of women in different geographies, from different ethnic-religious backgrounds, and with diversified political priorities and sensibilities.