• Sat 23 – Sun 24 04 2016 / 7 pm •
North African Men, German Women. Two-day symposium on sexual violence and racism

with NORA AMIN, KÜBRA GÜMÜŞAY, ANNE WIZOREK
moderated by JASMIN KHATAMI*

The outburst of sexualized crime on New Year’s Eve at Cologne’s Central Station is an echo of a distant powerful thunderstorm largely ignored by the West—of more horrible violence perpetrated regularly on women in other places, far to the East or South. For the West, those places are on the periphery: poor and irrelevant— or, depending on the mood, lusty and alluring. In the aftermath of the events of New Year’s Eve themselves and of their media backlash, it is important to discuss and counteract Orientalist fantasies and the real discrimination that this event unleashed, as well as the realities it brought to public attention. How widespread is sexual violence in European daily life in less public forms? What does collective sexual violence mean in the Middle East, and what role did it play in the aftermath and the reaction to the Arab Spring? Which social conditions does the rampage of New Year’s Eve make evident? How have power relations between dominant groups and the deprived become sexualized? And how can we position ourselves against both sexism and racism?

Venue: ACADEMYSPACE, Herwarthstraße 3, 50672 Cologne
Free admission
The lectures and discussions at 23 4 will be in English

*(The participation of Noah Sow is cancelled.)