Event Cologne: Whiteness, Gender, and Germany's Ontological Insecurity

Abstract:Years after the reported New Year's Eve sexual attacks in Cologne in 2015, the Event Cologne remains widely interpreted as a tipping point in the country's migration discourse. This article deconstructs the prima facie logics of the Event Cologne's body politics through a feminist, ontological security lens. It sees the Event Cologne not as a causal occurrence. Rather, it needs to be more fully understood as an outcome, circulating through Germany's deeply racialized, white, and gendered ontological insecurities. This article offers a feminist, intersectional, and antiracist analysis that scrutinizes the ontologically insecure German state-self through what I call two modes of Western re-belonging: Germany's unique proximity to US hypermasculine, liberal militarism, and the country's enduring, racialized, white citizenship regimes.