Description
This paper centres marginalised – that is racialised and trans/queer – people's feelings of anger to make visible how white supremacist heteropatriarchy remains entrenched in liberal regimes today, with the case study of Germany. Following their anger, this paper aims to uncover the invisibilised violence that the order of the German nation-state rests upon, as it instantiates itself in the ordinary unfolding of communal life, in everyday encounters and affective relations. Building on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with members from marginalised communities, the paper firstly demonstrates how their anger has long since been invisibilised to maintain 'the peace' of Germany’s positive self-image, and how this erasure is violent in and of itself. Secondly, tracing the lineage of their anger, it reveals the historical ongoingness of the injustices that they continue facing. This illuminates the long durée of dispossession, exploitation and subjugation that they have been subjected to by the hands of the German state, and how German society benefits from these injustices to this day. Lastly, their anger points to the hypocrisy of the liberal promise of equality, freedom and prosperity, as these privileges remain policed along gendered, racialised and sexual lines to uphold the privileged positions of white heteronormative Germans vis-à-vis all ‘others’.
