Hypersexuality and Headscarves Race, Sex, and Citizenship in the New Germany [Paperback]

In this compelling study, Damani J. Partridge explores citizenship and exclusion in Germany since the fall of the Berlin Wall. That event seemed to usher in a new era of universal freedom, but post-reunification transformations of German society have in fact produced noncitizens: non-white and foreign Germans who are simultaneously portrayed as part of the nation and excluded from full citizenship. Partridge considers the situation of Vietnamese guest workers left behind in the former East Germany; images of hypersexualized black bodies reproduced in popular culture and intimate relationships; and debates about the use of the headscarf by Muslim students and teachers. In these and other cases, which regularly provoke violence against those perceived to be different, he shows that German national and European projects are complicit in the production of distinctly European noncitizens.

Damani J. Partridge is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and in the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan.

[This] book's impressive ethnographic breadth thus serves to convey just how varied, pervasive, and entrenched the mechanisms of exclusion are in Germany. . . Taken as a whole, Partridge's portrait of exclusion in Germany is an illuminating and damning one. August 2013Opens up new horizons in conceptualizing the place of biologically non-German bodies in contemporary Germany.Partridge shows how being included in the body politic can be a form of social control and exclusion. . . . Provides a case study for how one can look at identity politics in connection with the debates about human or national rights for citizens.Hypersexuality and Headscarves is a critical analysis of the dynamics of race and citizenship in Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall. With this highly original investigation, Partridge offers an important contribution to the study of race in Germany.[T]his book is an important addition to lcD