Beyond binary identity politics? Ethnic, cultural and gendered othering in Feo Aladağ’sDie Fremde

Abstract

This paper examines how Feo Aladağ's Die Fremde (2010) simultaneously perpetuates and undermines stereotypes of Turkish-German gender constructs and in doing so engages in a form of othering that, drawing on a long-established discourse in Turkish-German cinema, conflates the Other in terms of gender with the Other in terms of ethnicity and culture. Lauded for eschewing well-worn clichés of traditional Turkish-Muslim patriarchy, Die Fremde represents diasporic identity construction and with it clashes of culture among firstand second-generation Turkish migrants in Germany. Does Aladağ manage to escape the binary economies implied by tropes such as the oppressed Turkish woman, the German saviour and the Turkish oppressor; and do the filmic devices she uses subvert a ghettoization of those values that deviate from the Leitkultur of the majority culture? With the stigmatization of Muslim men emerging as the flipside of female oppression, Die Fremde, I will argue, goes beyond recreating earlier stereotypes and instead shines a critical light on how such othering is an integral part of German national postwar narrative.