Abstract
In this article, I explore the interplay of abjection, space and resistance at the example of a protest intervention that reclaims a highly policed urban space in the city of Leipzig (Saxony, Eastern Germany)—the Main Station. Methodologically, I combine ethnographic material collected throughout the process of a performative counter-action attempting to reclaim and re-imagine Leipzig Main Station as a venue and politicized space with a contextual analysis regarding the discursive landscape evolving around and shaping this urban locale. My empirical analysis is structured along the theoretical discussion of abjection: While Butler's theorization (Butler in Bodies that matter, Routledge, New York, 1993) allows me to focus on the formative power of spatial exclusion and the disruptive potential of protest, theoretical accounts in which abjection is conceived as a “threshold zone” or “overlap space” (Sharkey and Shields in Child Geogr 6:239–256, 2008; Vighi et al. in Between urban topographies and political spaces. Threshold experiences, Lexington Books, Lanham, 2014) help me to outline ‘abject space’ as a space of negotiation and contradiction.
Highlights
Since the happenings around the New Year’s Eve 2015/2016 in Cologne, when dozens of young women have been sexually harassed by men who were later identified—in the press coverage that followed and the offences that have been reported— as having a “Mediterranean”, “North African” or “Arabic appearance” (Arendt et al 2017, p. 136–138),1 the public discourse around asylum and immigration in the
Leipzig Main Station, in this paper, is analysed as an urban site that illustrates how these discursive dynamics reverberate in an Eastern German context3: Since 2016, criminalizing discourses sprouting around this urban area increasingly target undocumented migrants from North Africa
This phenomenon becomes the initial point for a small-scale resistance movement initiated by a theatre performer and political activist with a Tunisian background, supported by a group of urban residents who live in different precarious conditions regarding their administrative status, their housing and economic situation
Summary
Spatial metaphors permeate its theorization, ranging from “abject zones” In other analysis that uses the term (urban) spaces are more explicitly explored as the arenas where politics and practices of abjection unfold, generating individuals “considered worthless” “Abject space”, here, is conceptualized as a “point of convergence” Vighi et al (2014) introduce the notion of “threshold” and advance an understanding of space as fractioned, overlapping and prone to transformation. Urban sites, from these perspectives, appear as contested arenas of struggle From these perspectives, appear as contested arenas of struggle (Ehland and Fischer 2018, p. 9) where regulatory control and the exertion of (state) powers are countered by tactics of resistance, adaptation and solidary encounter
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