Beyond politics of difference: intersectionality across time and place

Prior to the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, nationalist and rightist movements were on the rise in many parts of the world.Far-right parties for example gained support throughout Continental Europe (Albertazzi and van Kessel 2021) and in the United States (The House January 6th Committee 2023).In many ways, politics of difference were evoked to gain political power, at the heart of which lay negative characterizations of immigrants, including those otherwise deemed as qualified for immigration status.The most affected were those characterized as 'non-Western' individuals during what was labelled as a threatening 'immigration crisis' in most of the 'developed world' (Holmes and Castañeda 2016).In terms of women's rights, abortion rights were dismantled in countries such as Poland, Italy and the USA, and women's roles were re-traditionalized by the pandemic (Primecz 2022).During and after the pandemic, these trends and sentiments mingled with conspiracy theories and anti-democratic movements, brought together and further churned up by right-wing social media (Demmel 2021).'Where is this world going?', one may ask, 'and what is it that still binds people together?'In light of this 'feeling of the times', we would contend it is the responsibility of critical scholarship to investigate how people construct, perceive and affirm those who are different, and to unveil the mechanisms which underlie these processes.Why is a certain difference chosen as relevant?In whose interests is it?What would be the alternatives?And what are the consequences?For example, in many countries, residents are asked to self-identify in terms of race.However, what counts as 'race' differs across time and place.'Irish' used to be are racial identifier (MacManus 1921)but no longer is, and categories such as 'Latin' or 'Hispanic', too, are power-laden in an equally ambiguous and fleeting way (Faria, Ibarra-Colado, and Guedes 2010).Also, while there is the idea that a person's self-identification in terms of race overweighs how others see them (the ascriptions of race), putting self-identification first is nonetheless not unproblematic.Adding further complexity to the politics of difference, the same issue might be labelled as 'racial' in one cultural context, such as North America, but as 'ethnic' in another one, such as Continental Europe (Lentin 2008).Thus even if there is no awareness that Muslim migrants in presumably ethnic homogeneous countries such as Germany are met with suspicion because of their 'non-Whiteness' and 'non-Westernness', this phenomenon still constitutes a problematic racialization with real effects on those who are subjected to it (e.g.Mahadevan and Kilian-Yasin 2017).For example, research shows that Migrant women wearing headscarves are heavily discriminated when seeking qualified jobs in Germany and Austria (Weichselbaumer 2016).Muslim migrant women thus face double discriminations: those of race and those of gender.Yet, in other cases, Muslim women are more included than Muslim men in Western workplaces, because women are considered to be the 'safer choice', independently of their religiosity.

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