Saturday, March 15, 2014
Private Dining Room (Omni Shoreham)
While the trial against Terrorist Beate Zschäpe, member of the right-wing-terrorist group NSU (“National Socialist Underground”) takes place in Munich, Germany, the previous and ongoing media coverage on the groups’ late discovery and the failure of investigative authorities has been cliché-ridden and heavily stereotypical regarding gender aspects. Terrorist Zschäpe was e.g. labeled as “affectionate cat-mother” or “bride of terror”, while her two male accomplices were called “the intellectual” or the “tumb hooligan”. Rooted in sociological analysis of the relation between gender and (right-wing) political extremism, we will analyze the external perception and the self-description of right-wing-terrorists and extremists as men and women in contemporary Germany. We argue that the gendered discursive framing has important implications both for the attribution of responsibility and the (political) practices of men and women in right-wing extremist contexts. Moving beyond the particular case of NSU in Germany, we equally address the more general dynamics of multiple femininities and masculinities in contemporary right-wing extremism in Germany, i.e. as articulated in regard to motherhood, violence, etc.
