Beyond the Culture Trap: Immigrant Women in Germany, Planet-Talk, and a Politics of

Listening
Author(s): Beverly M. Weber
Source: Women in German Yearbook , 2005, Vol. 21 (2005), pp. 16-38
Published by: University of Nebraska Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20688245

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 Beyond the Culture Trap:
Immigrant Women in Germany, Planet-Talk, and
a Politics of Listening

Beverly M. Weber

Drawing on transnational feminist cultural studies and Gayatri Spivak's

notion of "planet-talk," this article reconsiders the questions posed to textual
figures of immigrant and minority women. Assumptions of Western cultural
superiority have limited the focus of scholarship addressing immigrant
women's economic and political positionings in Germany. Scholars must
work to imagine a wider range of possibilities for immigrant women's
participations in life in Germany, particularly in relationship to economic
and political subjectivities, in order to better enable scholarship analyzing
the intensely gendered processes of globalization. (BW)

There can be no doubt that "democracy" in the general sense is

an unquestioned good. But there can be no doubt either that, in
our current predicament, confidence in the formal democratic
structures of civil society as sanctioning a cultural superiority
from which to dispense bounty to the migrant, cannot find
support. -Spivak (Imperatives 66)

Much of Gayatri Spivak's recent work seeks to sketch possibilities

for a re-imagining of the planet, a "planet-talk" that employs the notion
of the planet to counter the globe. This planet-talk is insistent on respon
sibility: responsibility to the world, as earth rather than as globe demar
cated by the movement of finance capital. Planet-talk might thus serve
as resistance to globalization's seeking to impose a uniform system of
exchange everywhere (Spivak, Imperatives 44). However, planet-talk
also entails a re-imagination of the figure of the (im)migrant,1 along with
a rejection of Europe's claim to a role as sole inheritor and benevolent
distributor of the Culture of Enlightenment to the "unreasonable"

women in German Yearbook 21 (2005)

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 Beverly M. Weber 17
immigrant and Third World other (50, 84). The cultural othering of
immigrant, once termed "neo-racism" by Etienne Balibar (Balibar a
Wallerstein), relegates immigrant agency to the speaking of unreas
and often occurs on a highly gendered discursive terrain where
"enlightened" European produces itself against the trope of the sil
immigrant woman "oppressed by (the other) culture."
In this article I would like to think through both the potential a
the imperative for planet-talk to enable German Studies scholar
rethink the questions posed to textual figures of immigrant and minorit
women. Assumptions of Western cultural superiority-though often
stated and unconscious-of the sort Spivak describes above have
consequences in limiting scholarship addressing immigrant wom
economic and political positionings in Germany. If scholars wor
imagine a wider range of possibilities for immigrant women's
ticipations in life in Germany, particularly in relationship to econom
and political subjectivities, they might better enable scholarship th
analyzes the intensely gendered processes of globalization. Instead o
positioning immigrant women solely in culture and outside of
terrains of democratic politics and economic activity, German Stud
scholars might instead read culture itself to point to culture as only
arena, inflected by and revealing of other arenas, in which struggles
the rights and responsibilities of the planetary subject play out-of
through claims to and participation in national and state identities
processes. In the case of Germany, where post-World War II la
migration for many decades occurred largely along networks establis
by guestworker contracts with Turkey as well as countries in Easte
and Southern Europe and Northern Africa, cultural Othering o
occurs through the figure of the unenlightened Muslim woman oppre
by her culture (Gumen, "Die sozialpolitische Konstruktion"; H
Hildebrandt; Lutz, "Unsichtbare Schatten"; Lutz and Huth-
debrandt).2 In what follows I first briefly review the participation
immigrant women in Germany's economy as well as the obscuring
that participation in scholarly work by focuses on "culture." I t
consider the implications of planet-thought for responsible "readin
practices on the part of German Studies scholars. Finally, I pro
readings of two texts deliberately intended to "give voice" to immigr
women in order to suggest concrete textual strategies that might po
out necessary new directions in German Studies.

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 18 Beyond the Culture Trap
Immigrant Women and C/culture Traps

While there has been scholarly attention to immigrant women's sig

nificant participation in the German workforce since at least the late
1970s, dominant accounts of worker migration tell a story in which im
migrant women arrive in Germany almost exclusively as the spouses of
immigrating workers (Guti6rrez Rodriguez, Intellektuelle Migrantinnen
23-25). These assumptions are often based on the fact that early on in
Germany's postwar worker migration, Turkey unexpectedly became the
largest supplier of worker migrants. Women from a predominantly Mus
lim country, the assumption was, would not be involved in paid labor.
However, from 1968 to 1973 (the end of guestworker recruitment), 20
percent of Turkish guestworkers and 25 percent of all guestworkers
entering the Federal Republic of Germany were women, often referred
to as "pioneer migrants" because they do not fit classical understandings
of migrant workers. Some 10-12 percent of married Turkish women im
migrants entered without their husbands to take on jobs. Furthermore,
immigrant women have consistently been employed at higher percent
ages than German women-in 1973, at a rate twice as high (Castro
Varela; Huth-Hildebrandt; Kofman et al.). Female guestworkers initially
worked primarily in textiles and clothing, metal production, electronics,
and other manufacturing positions (Kofman et al. 50). Those women
who were married and immigrated with working husbands first became
economically dependent on their husbands after spouses were prohibited
from working from 1973 to 1979 (Kofman et al.).
The rapidly expanding service sector since the 1970s provided new
upward mobility for "German" women workers; up to two-thirds of
their positions in blue-collar labor were filled by immigrant women
(Westphal 19). Since then, the gradual reduction in positions in the pro
duction sector has often forced immigrant women to turn to temporary
work or to informal work from home, in domestic help positions, or in
family businesses-"hidden" work with no job security, benefits, or con
tributions to the governmental pension fund (Hess and Lenz 134; West
phal 19-22). Of those who remain involved in the formal workforce,
53% are industrial workers and 37% white collar workers, while among
German women who are formally employed, 22% are industrial workers
and 76% are white-collar workers (Lenz and Schwenken 155). By the
late 1990s, immigrant women workers made up around 90% of the part
time labor force and were increasingly trapped in temporary positions
(Guti6rrez Rodriguez, Intellektuelle Migrantinnen 25). Consequently,
even if one excludes the informal labor sector, the wage gap between
Germans and foreign nationals is growing rapidly, except among highly

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 Beverly M. Weber 19
skilled foreign nationals recruited to the computer industry in the l
few years under a special program called a "green card" program
actually a guestworker-recruitment program (Lenz and Schwenken 15
Participation in the workforce on the part of immigrant women h
often been absent in discussions of immigrant women in Germany. T
absence, which I address more specifically below, parallels a tendenc
to ignore the contributions by Jewish, immigrant, Black, and anti-ra
white feminists to feminist theory in Germany. While these group
women participated in ongoing theorizing and debates about potenti
alliances and differences, discussions that included consideration of t
complex issues raised by immigration in Germany (as well as ra
nation and ethnicity), their work and struggles were often marginal
(Gutierrez Rodriguez, "Fallstricke des Feminismus").3 Sedef Gum
argues that a fixation on gender as the "primary" difference delaye
discussions of ethnicity and race by feminist researchers in German
until the early 1990s (GUmen, "Das Soziale des Geschlechts" 22
Ironically, the focus on gender as a primary difference and the con
quent lack of research addressing intersections of racism and sex
resulted in continuing constructions of Otherness deployed to discu
sively create the Western, emancipated German woman (GUmen, "D
sozialpolitische Konstruktion"; Gumen, "Das Soziale des Geschlechts"
Beginning in the late 1980s and early 1990s, immigrant, Black, a
Jewish women, together with white women committed to anti-racism
have vocally critiqued feminist groups in Germany for disregarding
sues of xenophobia, nationalism, anti-Semitism, and racism. This
curred in part through several heated debates at feminist conferences
which white feminists were accused of ignoring the concerns of
migrants and Black Germans (Arbeitsgruppe Frauenkongrel; Kaufma
Jacobsohn, and Ghirmazion; Konuk, Piesche, and Gelbin; Lutz, "S
wir uns"). As a consequence, scholars like Elisabeth Broyles-Gonzales
Helma Lutz, and Ay?e caglar published a number of articles that sug
gested the role that the "straitjacket" of culture played in immigrant
search (caglar), particularly by encouraging studies on medicine and d
mestic violence while excluding immigrant women from scholarship
work and economics (Broyles-Gonzalez; Lutz, "Unsichtbare Schatten"
At the same time, critiques of simplified notions of difference poin
out the dangers of thinking about oppression as additive and hierarch
(Schulz). This work calling for attention to diverse intersections
gender with race, nation, and ethnicity was unfortunately also m
ginalized by mainstream feminist academic discourse (Lutz, "Sind w
uns"; Gutierrez Rodriguez, "Reprisentation"). Encarnaci6n Gutier
Rodriguez highlights a further consequence of refusing to include wo

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 20 Beyond the Culture Trap
by these "minority" voices in the dominant narratives of feminism
(while work drawing heavily on American Black feminisms and post
colonial feminisms played a major role in introducing theories of
deconstruction to German academic discourse, this lineage is largely
ignored): "The destabilizing of the category of 'woman' is thematized,
but the sociopolitical and historical moment in which this debate was
carried out in feminism remains effaced" (Guti6rrez Rodriguez, "Fall
stricke des Feminismus"). Sedef Gumen, Maria do Mar Castro Varela,
and others continue to write theoretical calls showing the urgency for
analysis to think difference in terms of intersectionalities rather than in
terms of binaries or hierarchies (Castro Varela; Gumen, "Frauen,
Arbeitsmarkt").
This theoretical focus on binary or hierarchal forms of difference
rather than intersectional differences overdetermined the forms of
analysis possible in academic work. Huth-Hildebrandt and Lutz have
shown that from the time of the increased migration of women to
Germany during the 1970s, studies of immigrants tend to highlight
culture and pay an unusual amount of attention to women's issues.
Indeed, research on "other cultures" is the one area of German social
science research where gender as a category is constantly employed in
the German social sciences (Lutz and Huth-Hildebrandt 159). The
relegation of immigrant women to the realm of culture has produced a
dearth of research on immigrant women's positioning in Germany in
relationship to economics and politics.
The relegation of immigrant women to the realm of culture occurred
in part via a conflation of the "immigrant woman" with "Turkish wo
man" and in turn with "Muslim woman" by the end of the 1970s, a con
flation that not only obscured the diverse immigrant populations present
in Germany but also the diversity of Muslim and non-Muslim affiliations
among Turkish women (Huth-Hildebrandt 115). Huth-Hildebrandt notes
a shift in the 1990s social science discourse on migrant women from one
of class or national difference toward one of cultural difference (Huth
Hildebrandt 46; see also Lutz and Huth-Hildebrandt; Westphal), often
by reducing representations of immigrant women to their relationship to
a stereotyped and reductive Islam (Huth-Hildebrandt 56). The feminist
immigrant group FeMigra, in attempting to create a counter-image of
themselves as modern, educated, autonomous, and emancipated, pointed
to the construction of the Muslim woman as the "epitome of women's
oppression" (Yurtsever-Kneer). The reductive representations of the so
called "culture of Islam" have had concrete effects. Medical issues,
marriage migration, and cultural difference as a contributor to women's
oppression far outweigh studies on migrant women as workers, whether

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 Beverly M. Weber 21
formal or informal (Huth-Hildebrandt 56). This is certainly not
suggest that there are not aspects of Muslim cultures oppressiv
women, or that scholars should not have serious concerns about
sexist aspects of Turkish society. Nor do I wish to deny that there
concerns specific to living in Muslim or Turkish families in Germany
Instead, what I wish to suggest is that when thinking about immigra
women in Germany, we must also examine sexisms and racisms/
turalisms4 at work in Germany as contributors to structural discrim
tions, and provide careful attention to how discursive formations aro
the culturally other immigrant woman enable particular labor practi
and prevent attention to her economic and political actions.
The early 1990s brought a shift in work done in the fields of litera
and textual studies-the avenue by which a majority of German Stud
scholars continue to "study Germany"-in both Germany and No
America. With a shift from traditional Germanistik to a German Stud
influenced by cultural studies, a wave of North American Germ
Studies scholarship expressed a commitment to researching culture
relationship to globalization. Because this trend was led in part
feminist scholars (Lennox, "Feminisms"; Lennox, "American Fem
nists"), a great deal of attention has been paid to immigrant women
creative engagement with their positionings in multiple cultures. T
growing body of interesting critical attention to Emine Sevgi Ozdam
literary and theatrical production is exemplary of these developmen
Since she earned the prestigious Bachmann literary prize in 1991, am
much Orientalizing praise for her work (Jankowsky), an explosion o
critical work has examined Ozdamar's writing: as an example o
hybridity (Seyhan), as employing strategies of "mimicry" (Breger)
"ethnic drag" (Sieg). Others have pointed to Ozdamar's conscio
engagement of the shifting nature of "culture" and construction of a sor
of identity politics (Shafi). Ozdamar criticism marks a larger shift fr
examining artistic production by foreigners from a sociological pers
tive to both treating this body of work as art as well as reading it
order to examine and problematize notions of multiculturalism
hyphenated German identities.
Criticism acknowledging immigrant cultural production as "art"
"literature" in many ways enabled more differentiated scholarship
immigrants to (and minorities in) Germany-as intellectuals and art
rather than mere victims of Germany and/or migration. However, s
scholarship has also effaced the diversity of immigrant women's pa
ticipations in German society-including claims to Germanness
multiple arenas as workers, students, and citizens engaged in politic
struggles. Perhaps paradoxically, attention to "culture" in the study

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 22 Beyond the Culture Trap
Culture (in the sense of cultural production) has distracted German
Studies scholars from critiquing the ways in which constructions of
cultural otherness might obscure women's political and economic sub
jectivities. Studies of Ozdamar, for example, pay scant attention to the
fact that her main characters, mostly women, often work in German
factories or immigrate as guestworkers. Rita C.-K. Chin's excellent
examination of the interrelations of German policy and immigrant
cultural production, via an analysis of Aras Oren's work, also repeats a
frequent tendency to insist on an understanding of guestworkers as
"healthy male labor."
Social science studies also deploy the explanatory power of "cul
ture." For example, Heather Booth's 1992 comparison of migration
demographics in Germany and Great Britian provides crucial data that
tell us that before and after the end of recruitment, women made up
between 20 and 25% of total labor migration (197), and tended not to
return to their home countries at nearly the rates that their male com
patriots did (194). Before restrictions placed on spouse's working,
yearly numbers of women workers as a percentage of total female
Turkish immigrants varied from 46 to 70% (186), which varies only
slightly from the range of rates of immigrants from Portugal, for
example. Yet Booth explicates her data in terms of culture, more
specifically, religious culture, ignoring Portugal to suggest that differ
ences between female participation in Spanish, Greek, and Turkish
migration exist because "Turkish women, who are mostly of Muslim
faith, might be expected to comprise the smallest proportion of labour
in-migrants from any sending countries" (Booth 127). As suggested in
a rare book-length work on gender, work, and immigration in Europe,
the "cultural" turn in research on immigrants, particularly the focus on
identities, difference, and bodies, might mask the material effects of
immigration (Kofman et al. 33). Yet, cultural constructions of cultural,
ethnic, and national difference clearly have material effects in terms of
policy and institutions (Kofman et al. 34-36).
In the late 1990s two feminist researchers in the social sciences in
Germany provided particularly useful and complex notions of ethnicity
that work against culturalist tendencies in research. Sedef Gumen's
article "Das Soziale des Geschlechts" considers the process of gendering
as always constituted by and in relationship to other social questions,
such as ethnicity and class. This understanding of gender allows her to
consider how socio-political considerations inflect the construction of
cultural difference. Guti6rrez Rodriguez draws on G0lmen's understand
ing of gender and works from the framework of postcolonial theory in
an exciting book that examines the strategies of intellectual immigrant

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 Beverly M. Weber 23
women, often understood in terms of Gramscian notions of the "or
intellectual" (Guti6rrez Rodriguez, Intellektuelle Migrantinnen). Th
work in particular is important for providing ways of thinking ab
immigrant women as political, economic, and intellectual age
Opening this space has enabled studies such as Sigrid N6kel's re
ethnographic work, in which she points out that "Neo-Muslimas," a
terms them, are deeply interested in education, careers, and so
mobility, contrary to much popular perception. That is not to say
the analyses I mention earlier exploring culture are "wrong" or un
portant: these have been crucial contributions to expanding underst
ings of Germany and Germanness in relationship to globalization,
readings of texts in the context of culture and cultural contact ha
inserted a delayed discussion of difference (beyond gender) into b
North American German Studies and German social sciences.
German Studies scholars in North America who study texts (in
broadest sense of that word) find themselves at a moment where sev
discursive interventions continue to be necessary, including 1) cri
evaluation of shared responsibility for limiting the field of possibi
for imagining immigrant women in such a way as to ignore their p
cal and economic subjectivities; 2) exploration and engagemen
immigrant women and Black women's critiques of liberal multicult
ism and their rejection of assignation to exemplar/carrier of cultur
readings of textual figures of immigrant women in order to highli
these figures as agents of knowledge, politics, and economics; and
analyses highlighting the larger discursive and ideological field
material realities in which these textual figures exist. These tasks
occur continuously, in constant dialogue, debate, and even contradic
with one another.

Toward Planet-Thought and Planet-Talk: Planetarity and Teleopoeis

Spivak's notions of planetarity and teleopoeisis are useful in

sidering the implications of re-imagining the textual figure of
(im)migrant woman in Germany-away from "victim of cultur
agent of speech, knowledge production, and self. The planet, sugg
Spivak, might serve as an alternative, though not as an opposite, to
globe:
The globe is on our computers. No one lives there; and we think
that we can aim to control globality. The planet is in the species of
alterity, belonging to another system; and yet we inhabit it, on
loan. It is not really amenable to a neat contrast with the globe. I
cannot say "on the other hand." (Imperatives 44)

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24 Beyond the Culture Trap
Spivak's comments in Imperatives to Re-Imagine the Planet invoke
"globe" as the globe of economic globalization. "Planet-thought" might
aid us in developing a different relationship to the world, one other than
that enabling the circuits of finance capital, by permitting us to rethink
ethical notions of rights and responsibility in relationship to alterity.
This might happen on multiple levels, but in part by imagining the earth
itself as the "species of alterity" to humans: "If we imagine ourselves as
planetary subjects rather than global agents, planetary creatures rather
than global entities, alterity remains underived from us, it is not our
dialectical negation, it contains us as much as it flings us away [... ]"
(46). The imperative might be to "re-imagine the subject as planetary"
(48), or to employ the planet as catachresis for inscribing collective
responsibility as right (56).
These contemplations evoke a potential to rethink a collective that
moves beyond the multiple alterities created by and among people.
Drawing on deconstruction's commitment to the recognition that the Self
always contains the trace of the Other, Spivak returns us to the questions
of how that recognition can enable collectivity. A perspective carefully
attentive to the relationship between the Self and the Other, a relation
ship of subjects mutually interpellated, although a relationship also
always structured in power, can seek to undo the conflict between right
and responsibility, by thinking both dominant and subordinate as also
both "intended or interpellated by planetary alterity, albeit articulating
the task of thinking and doing from different 'cultural' angles" (78).
Subjects constructed as mutually Other within other discourses might, in
recognizing shared responsibility for the planet Other within planet
thought, be capable of forging ethical alliances despite varied and
contradictory positionings.
The winners, suggests Spivak, will be women, freed from the re
sponsibility of serving as placeholders of culture in the face of material
dominance (Spivak, Imperatives 78-80). I do not wish to suggest that
Spivak's notions provide an entirely new way of thinking about or be
yond the national or the local, but that her proposal of a new terminol
ogy is a useful strategy at this moment, a moment where the term
"global" has been already appropriated by the interests of capitalism.
The genealogy of postcolonial criticism that informs Spivak's work also
makes her theorizing particularly useful-especially since her work has
also contributed to many of the critiques of German feminists that I out
lined above (Gutidrrez Rodriguez, Intellektuelle Migrantinnen; Steyerl
and Guti6rrez Rodriguez).5 Spivak's reflections reveal affinities (often
unnamed by Spivak, but briefly acknowledged in the preface to her book
A Critique of Postcolonial Reason) with the project of feminist

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 Beverly M. Weber 25
transnational cultural studies, which works to theorize the transnatio
in such a way that frees "woman" from an essentialized role as t
placeholder of national culture. Caren Kaplan and Inderpal Grewal, w
also draw on Spivak's work, attempt to outline the project of femin
transnational cultural studies by arguing for "an attention to the linkages
and travels of forms of representation as they intersect with moveme
of labor and capital in a multinational world" (357). Kaplan and Grew
caution, however, that this approach can lead to an appropriation "f
the very kinds of retrenchment and recuperation that have occurr
within marxism [sic] (and some kinds of feminism) unless an in
national frame that addresses asymmetries of power and comp
constructions of agency is rigorously engaged" (357). Thus, the
understanding of transnational cultural studies as the study of repre
tations in the context of globalization also requires that scholars
careful to think subaltern female subjectivity in Germany both
constructed by discourses of race and nation and as resistant, that is
capable of agency. Sociologist Saskia Sassen's understanding of tr
nationalism may be productively aligned with Kaplan and Grewa
Sassen suggests that we think of a transnational perspective as "
which takes as its starting points a dynamic system or set of transacti
that by its nature entails multiple locations involving more than on
country" (Sassen 8). Readings of "national" spaces as also transnation
located in transnational networks, traversed by figures with transnationa
positionings and identities, and inflected by transnational events an
histories, permit one to pry the textual figure of the immigrant wom
from her "prisonhouse of culture," to use Caglar's terminology.
I would like to suggest that the achievement of freedom from t
burden of being placeholder of culture is not only a consequence of,
a precondition for, planet-thought as Spivak imagines it: in order t
imagine collective responsibility for the planet, discourses that inter
late both dominant and subordinate as participants in knowledg
politics, and economy are necessary. The dominant already is rec
nized in these arenas. Thinking the subaltern also in these realm
necessary before she can be interpellated as planetary subject-not on
victim of culture. The scholar's first task could be to contribute
production of knowledge that enables the imaginings of the immigra
woman as agent of economics, politics, and knowledge.
Readings of the textual figure are but one space where the constr
tion of such imaginations can take place. Spivak responds to Derrida
notion of teleopoeisis as imaginative remaking (poeisis) in order to aff
the other-without guarantees (Spivak, "A Note" 12). Not only textu
reading, but "[s]ocial contact is curved, for no one can be direc

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 26 Beyond the Culture Trap
accessed. The political must therefore act in view of a 'perhaps.'
Because we cannot decide it, the undecidable future must be ac
knowledged as decisive, the unrestricted gamble of all claims to collec
tivity" (13). The "we" located in academia must persistently ac
knowledge that it has no direct access to the Other-but has the right/re
sponsibility to learn to learn from below. This work requires a practice
of "patient reading, miming an effort to make the text respond, as it
were, is a training not only in poeisis, accessing the other so well that
probably action can be prefigured, but teleopoeisis, striving for a
response from the distant other, without guarantees" (Spivak, "Righting
Wrongs" 181). The scholar cannot access a text directly, nor can
someone within the academy directly access the experiences of someone
in many ways effectively prohibited from accessing education and social
mobility. Yet the attempt remains a responsibility, the effort undertaken
without guarantees.

Immigrant Women Beyond Culture: Knowledge, Politics, and Work

Here I turn to two collections of texts, Frauengeschichten: Mus

liminnen in Deutschland erzuhlen aus ihrem Leben (Women's Stories:
Muslim Women in Germany Speak of Their Lives, 2000; hereafter
Frauengeschichten); and Feridun Zaimoglu's Koppstoff: Kanaka Sprak
vom Rande der Gesellschaft (Headstuff: Kanaka Talk from the Margins
of Society, 1999; hereafter Koppstofj), to consider a reading that works
toward the goals of planet-talk. This reading is an attempt to allow the
texts to speak to "us," recognizing that the "us" of a community of
feminist German scholars is also a diverse and fragmented group of
individuals positioned multiply in relationship to the textual figures we
analyze, as well as recognizing that our location in the academy might
also place us in particular positions of power to the textual figures from
whom we hope for response. Because immigrant women throughout the
1990s and to the present have often been conflated with Muslim women
and/or Turkish women, for the purpose of this specific intervention, I
here privilege these two texts that collect materials by Muslim women
and Turkish women. However, let me mark here the future necessity for
readings that not only diversify the range of subject positions, but also
the relationship to nations, ethnicities, and cultures, in particular, the
need to explore the textual figures of Orientalized women together with
those of the hypersexualized Eastern European woman in post-unification
Germany. There are of course numerous issues about the ethics of
"speaking for" one could examine here; one could (and indeed should)
discuss the impossibilities of ethical ethnographies.6 These are also

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 Beverly M. Weber 27
important and valid concerns for analysis. My project here, however
to read the textual figures-never a direct manifestation of women's
lives-for the multiple subjectivities exhibited, in particular in relatio
ship to arenas in which they have been ignored. I do this by insisting
the textuality of multiple genres of text, thinking text as an interweavin
of many other threads. Here I provide a somewhat artificially schema
analysis, by addressing how some women position themselves in rela
tionship to culture, politics, and the economy (generally via work).
Both texts, while marketed as different genres and radically different
in tone and style, provide first-person "narratives" based primarily
interviews with immigrant women. Feridun Zaimoglu's Koppstoff w
intended as a counterpart to his 1995 Kanak Sprak, a collection of fir
person narratives created by interviewing "Turkish" men from
"streets," provocatively using the perjorative term "Kanak" as a way
resisting what Zaimoglu sees as an Orientalizing of the Turkish-Germ
dialects that have developed. Kanak Sprak has been read and interpret
in the context of "pop literature" (Ullmaier), although its highly poli
cized goals and dramatic language have little in common with
current trends in German pop literature.
While Zaimoglu claims to have planned a female version of Kan
Sprak since the finishing of the collection, he states in the earlier bo
that in the Turkish ghettos, women "are under house arrest, cut off from
the outside world and unreachable for every stranger, including myse
(15). Zaimoglu himself seemed caught in the culture trap. Despite th
supposed silence, at nearly every reading women vociferously demand
that their perspectives be heard (9). Having read Kanak Sprak, wom
offered to be a part of the women's book-either at readings or
contacting his publisher; consequently, most of those involved,
contrast to the men's book, approached Zaimoglu themselves and ha
clear idea of what sort of project they were participating in. In one ca
the narratives were created by translating and editing together a series of
letters from one woman; in another, a woman insisted that Zaimog
publish the text that she handed to him, already completed. Primaril
however, Zaimoglu employed the same method of writing texts based
interviews. He does not specifically address this in reference to Kop
stoff but in Kanak Sprak, the interviewees were asked to edit a
approve the final texts before publication.
Frauengeschichten is a collection of texts also narrated in the fir
person. Dorothee Palm claims editorship, not authorship; the selectio
of interviewees is based on women's self-identification with the Musl
community; immigrants are privileged, as they make up the majority
Germany's diverse Muslim community, although "German" Musli

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 28 Beyond the Culture Trap
(mostly converts) are given much more opportunity to represent them
selves in the media (Palm 16). The editor had a detailed questionnaire
that she worked from, but also tried to allow the women to deviate from
the topics as they chose. Every woman was permitted to edit, expand
on, or delete portions of the transcribed manuscript before publication.
The ten selections are diverse, including women from Lebanon, Tunisia,
Turkey, and Iran as well as children of immigrants. The book is pub
lished by a theological publishing house whose books might be read by
academics as well as by people interested in "interreligious dialogue" in
Germany.

Culture

The women in these two collections come from diverse backgrounds

that remind the reader of the variety of Muslim backgrounds as well as
the range of social, political, and economic contexts involved. Their
reflections on their lives in Germany further complicate matters by
pointing out how the situation in their "home" countries is constantly
evolving and changing. A reduction of these narratives to a static notion
of Muslim culture is undermined by this diversity. To be sure, these
women also invoke subjectivities in terms of culture. Considering the
dominance of discourses of cultural identity, this should not strike one
as surprising. This is, in fact, particularly dominant in Koppstoff,
perhaps less so in Frauengeschichten. Yet often culture is invoked in
order to reject its limitations and thematize subjectivities as agents of
knowledge. A refugee who works in a home for young women is intro
duced as a friend of Zaimoglu's, "Nilufer." Her frustration with her
colleagues' attitudes is expressed thus:

Their official thesis: The foreigner-woman is always oppressed!

German pure happy-glowing-woman, in contrast, has beautifully
emancipated herself and so is a notch higher and must drool her
enlightenment in the face of us barbarians. [...] The headscarf is
kaka, Turk-man is kaka, and leaving out the feminine form [Innen]
is superkaka. I know a lot who wear headscarves, and that's noth
ing but a handful of cloth decorating a real head, do you under
stand, a bright spirit always burns, they are much freer than these
bestial fairies [...] and everything is divided into two classes:
liberated territory for them, occupied beings, us. (Zaimoglu
99- 100)

Niltifer resists a reading of her life in which she is relegated to a

backwardness imposed by her culture. She struggles to insist on her own
agency and the agency of other immigrant women-in the face of what

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 Beverly M. Weber 29
she calls the construction of "Urdeutsch"-ness, the insistence on on
own Germanness through the definition of self as emancipated
inheritor of the Enlightenment, while the Turkish woman is relegate
the realm of the headscarf, victimhood, superstition (Zaimoglu 100-0
Gill, also in Kanak Sprak, invokes culture to reject her assignmen
to it and assert herself as well. An anarchist squatter in a Berlin bu
ing, Zaimoglu has ironically "mistaken" her for a German; she respo
to him in broken Turkish; presumably she speaks the following
German:

So, I'm no well-behaved Turkish mama at the stove, on and off,

ghetto and Moneygermany are strangers to me [... ] well, it's a
headthing [... ] and if I've got problems with a fate forced on me,
then I'm against the politicking of the higher ups here and against
the Orientalchitchat of my homeland [...] I won't put on a head
scarf, that's my business, and I also won't put on some yuppie
chic-skirt, 'cause it doesn't fit [... ] Somehow there are positions,
where you gotta figure it out for yourself, and I chose the fight!
(Zaimoglu 30-31)

Gil's rejection of Orientalized Turkish culture and yuppie consumer

culture is articulated here via a political position, albeit a vaguely
formulated one. It also rejects upward mobility in terms of "Money
germany" and "yuppie-chic-skirt," hinting at a choice to live outside of
circuits of exchange and consumption commonly used to indicate that an
immigrant woman has "arrived" in Germany-money and mini-skirt.

Politics and Citizenship

Gil's comments suggest the possibility of posing questions to these

texts that look for women's articulations of economic or political
positions. Political comments, ironically, are expressed most explicitly
in the arena presumed to be closed to Muslim immigrant women:
feminist politics. Mrs. E from Frauengeschichten, for example, says:

If Western feminism means equal rights for both sexes, then I'm a
feminist! But women should also get these equal rights in reality.
How many German professors or university presidents are women?
The West cannot be my model in this respect. The means to equal
rights is via education. (78)

Mrs. E articulates a position that cuts to the heart of a major failure in

the German feminist movement. Feminists effectively fought for political
parties to set voluntary minimum quotas for women among their repre
sentatives at both local and national levels (quotas for which several

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 30 Beyond the Culture Trap
women in Frauengeschichten express their support), leading to much
higher participation by women in parliament than in the United States,
for example. Yet feminists have accomplished very little in another
major realm of power: knowledge production in academia. The per
centage of participation by women in the equivalent of tenured faculty
positions (so-called C4 professorial positions) in Germany is dramat
ically lower than in the United States or in other European countries
(Deutscher Bundestag 312-14); minority women are virtually absent.
Indeed, many of the minority intellectuals doing interesting theoretical
work on the place of immigrant women in Germany or the intersections
of race, nation, and gender have left the country to accept academic
positions in the US or the UK due to the lack of career opportunities for
them in Germany. Mrs. E's critique positions her as a participant in a
political discourse that also intervenes in the ways in which making
knowledge is sanctioned.
Ms. G of Frauengeschichten, a German citizen of Turkish heritage
working on her PhD, also articulates involvement in and theorizing of
politics. She grew up mostly with her grandmother until she moved to
Germany to join her parents, who came to Germany as "simple work
ers" (91). She views her involvement in politics as having been more
intensive in the time in Turkey than in Germany:

We spent much time thinking about ideologies. There were cliques

in school: those on the left, on the right, liberals. That was com
pletely normal. Before the military coup of 1980. Now I think
about Germanization. If one compares our position with that of
youth raised in Germany, one sees that they are almost completely
lacking orientation. We had a goal. Even though we were affected
by the coup. [... ] That did have the effect that we grew up
quickly. At age 11 I read Karl Marx. [... ] I read Maxim Gorki at
11 or 12, "The Mothers" [sic]. That fascinated me, though my
ideology differed. [... ] I was really into sociological and political
books at that time. (94)

Ms. G's reflections contradict assumptions that women from Turkey are
uneducated and politically unaware until their arrival in emancipated
Germany. She suggests another possibility, of women who, having
grown up during the turbulent times between two military coups, were
intensely politicized and constantly thinking of politics.

Economy and Work

Ms. G's working situation also raises questions for the listener. She
has not been able to find work in her field, and instead works part-time

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 Beverly M. Weber 31
for the post office: "At least I have two finished degrees. At the mom
I can't do anything with either one; I have a few more applications
the works, but work part-time at the post office now. With that I h
to finance my life, my studies, and everything." Ms. G's articulation
her situation suggests that one should pose questions about the situat
of immigrant women who have achieved sufficient education for pro
sional positions. Indeed, although the research is difficult to access,
some studies have been done: immigrant girls are highly motivated to
well in school, and are supported by their families to do so. Yet they
rarely recommended to attend Gymnasium (the university-track h
school), which would prepare them for the university. Furthermor
women with Turkish names with appropriate German-language skills
equal qualifications are much less likely to be employed than th
"German" counterparts-and the level of discrimination is more seve
for betterpaying and professional jobs (Castro Varela 18-21). A polit
of careful listening can lead the reader to consider the place of
migrant women in the German economy-forced to work part time
informally even despite education, their situation reveals structura
inequalities that go beyond "oppression by culture."
A commitment to listening for economic and political subjectiviti
raises difficult issues, for the discursive fields available virtually exc
such subjectivities. One discovers as well that traditional femin
concerns about the nature of economies and work come into play; i
other words, not all production-and rarely reproduction-occurs
consequence of paid work, and not all work is paid. Included in Kop
stoff, Banu works in a bar, the only work she could find after an
timed return to Turkey for several years prevented her from finish
even the lowest form of a high school diploma (Hauptschule). A
consequence, she has been ostracized by most of her family. Ban
description of her paid work reads thus:

I'm not a hooker or anything like that. I mean, they're also doing
their job, and it's not much worse than that of the bartenders.
[... ] The men don't come to me to fuck. They want to amuse
themselves, they want me to entertain them. They can do with me
what they can't do with their wives or with hookers. [...] I'm a
sort of actress. Some Germans think they're quite charming.
They're the worst. I'm their practice doll. [...] They don't miss a
single opportunity to remind me that women have it worse with
Turks than with Germans. The worst part is, I can't deny it.
(Zaimoglu 53)

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 32 Beyond the Culture Trap
Banu's description suggests that we might need to consider how migrant
circulation affects access to education. However, Banu further opens up
a category of labor for German men that is neither sexual labor nor
caring labor, although the entertainment she ultimately provides is un
doubtedly shot through with complex issues of sexuality. Her "work"
also seems inextricably linked to the way in which Turkish masculinity
or patriarchy is understood as worse than German patriarchy or mascu
linity. Part of the work she performs involves a reinforcement of her
own role in culture. Thus, listening carefully for an economic subjec
tivity in this case has also pointed us paradoxically back to culture, but
in a way that suggests that Banu's role as placeholder of culture, victim
of the oppressive other culture, works to obscure the way notions of
enlightened Germanness serve to reduce her to a role as entertainer for
German men.
Mrs. F from Frauengeschichten regrets that she never completed a
university degree, and argues that ideally men and women should have
the option of working half time and sharing household labor (Palm
89-90). She describes her work in a way that feminists have long sug
gested we think about unpaid domestic work: "I think that a housewife's
work isn't valued, it's even undervalued. In the time in which I raised
my children. [...] I worked from early morning to late evenings!
Physically! And emotionally!" (89). Mrs. F echoes feminist critiques of
the undervaluing of domestic/reproductive work. While she also locates
herself vis-a-vis a traditional culture (which she says has little to do with
religious practices), and points to the fact that she was nearly forced to
marry, her life in Germany is marked more by her lack of access to
education and paid work. Reading her as a working or economic subject
allows us to think about issues that do not reduce her life in Germany to
a lineage of cultural oppression. This is a necessary step toward thinking
how the processes of globalization function to exclude women from
access to economic power, and at the same time recognizing women's
agency in seeking that power.
In Kanak Sprak, Necla Hanim, an elderly cleaning woman working
in a school, describes her working life in terms of its corporeality as
well as in terms of the image produced of her for those who surround
her:
I created a slave from my flesh, one who has perfected cleaning:
Dip the mop in the water, wring the dirt trekked in by shoes from
the mop, lay the mop on the broom, pull the mop over the floor.
(121)
They speak of me. I am the creator/witness [Zeugin] of my
image, a portrait of me that they can exhibit in a museum like all

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 Beverly M. Weber 33
of these crazily scribbled artworks; after all, the sign of the
museum is a fossilization. (122)
My language finds no home in these times. And so I don the
flowered apron and scrub the floor and still am not the image or
images of the others. (124)

Necla Hamm thinks through images of her self in connection to h

work. A static symbol of her has been created, she says, as silent,
dient (to employer and husband), and uneducated, incapable of d
much more than cleaning their floors. The image fits perfectly into
her employers want-an obedient, unquestioning, cleaning woman w
will be loyal and will not waste cleaning supplies. And yet, in the
paragraphs of her narrative, she provides a critique of those who
duce knowledge. The images they create have transformative p
(124). But as she says, she still is not that which she has been prod
to be.

Dangers and Directions for Feminist Transnational German Cultural

Studies

Necla Hamm's accusation is a reminder of the dangerous respon

sibilities of the intellectual. The scholar reads her through a textual
figure, produced by another intellectual, who, presumably, produced her
with the consent of another woman, another cleaning woman met in a
school with another name. Indeed, this is true of all of the textual
figures I have mentioned in either of the two books: they are created in
part through the questions posed by Palm and Zaimoglu, constructed in
the way they edited and constructed narratives, although real women
approved and participated in this textual construction. Isn't teleo
poeisis-a speaking and listening to the other, an insistence on the
dominant learning to learn from below-impossible under these circum
stances?
Certainly. Teleopoeisis is impossible under all circumstances, as I
addressed earlier. Learning to learn from below is always the impossible
but necessary precondition for ethical collective action, a goal located in
a utopian place, never attained but always strived for. I chose these two
texts because they happen to be in a format that is often touted as pro
viding direct access to the subaltern-as providing "real," or "authentic"
voices. My brief reading here suggests other directions for the future.
We should provide continued analysis of the ways in which academic
discourses limit imaginations of political and economic subjects who are
members of subaltern groups in Germany. A teleopoeisis that attempts
to listen to the immigrant woman in Germany will, in the future, also

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 34 Beyond the Culture Trap
look where we can seek to access the voice of the immigrant woman
more directly related to her political and economic subjectivities, as well
as recognize immigrant women's critiques of liberal multiculturalism and
their rejection of assignation to exemplar/carrier of culture. Doing this
will better enable future scholarship that acknowledges the radical
diversity of immigrant women, including attention to differing "Muslim"
backgrounds-each of which is also constantly in flux. Such scholarship
will also enable closer attention to the complicated range of class
positionings.
For textual scholars, this might suggest the analysis of discourses
produced by feminist immigrant organizations, such as FeMigra, as well
as continued examinations of literary and artistic productions by im
migrant women in relationship to political and economic subjectivities.
Complex and careful analyses of representations (including self-represen
tations) and participation in popular media, including print media,
television, music, film, and the internet seeking to understand political
and economic subjectivities are also sorely needed. These studies would
aid German Studies scholars in moving beyond thinking of immigrant
women as the recipients of enlightened European culture to recognizing
their complex positionings in a globalized world-laying the necessary
enabling groundwork for collectivities potentially capable of planetary
thought and action.

Notes

My gratitude to Lan Dong, Yehudit Heller, Kai Herklotz, Kirsten Isgro,

Sara Lennox, Mariela M?ndez, Chizu Sato, Maria Stehle, and the anony
mous reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts. Research for this
article was funded in part by a DAAD grant, for which I am also grateful.
All translations of works cited in German are my own.

1 Because of the complicated history of the terms immigration (Ein

wanderung) and migration (Migration) in Germany, it is difficult to find the
appropriate language. For the remainder of this paper I will use immigrant
to denote people who have become defacto immigrants, even though within
Germany they might instead be referred to as migrants or foreigners.
However, in the German language context, the feminist immigrant group
FeMigra has theorized the usefulness of the term " migrant " to claim
counterhegemonic subjectivities (Yurtsever-Kneer).

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 Beverly M. Weber 35
2 Other tropes certainly have been at work, including those of the rura
Italian woman and the hypersexualized Slavic women; for now, I shall have
to exclude these and focus on the representations of Muslim women.
3 The marginalization of this scholarship is made even clearer by the
difficulty of accessing much of their research. In response to this, th
feminist group FeMigra has placed much of the work by its members onli
at <http://www.femigra.de>. As I was unable to access the publis
versions through any of the libraries I visited in Germany or throu
interlibrary loan, I cite here from the online version of some FeMi
documents.
4 My use of "culturalism" here, it should be noted, differs from that o
Arjun Appadurai, who suggests the term as a way of naming the use
constructed cultural unities to resist racism or forms of economic opp
sion. I intend here to evoke a structure similar but not identical to racism
5 There are, however, other equally important genealogies that on
could trace, including the development of an Afro-German identity a
theorizing of the term "women of color" sparked in part by an encounter
with Audre Lorde.
6 One might turn to the concerns about writing ethical ethnographies
raised by several postcolonial theorists (Narayan; Visweswaran).

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