The Stories of Cologne. Governing Emotions in Strange Encounters

Abstract: The sexual assaults reported on New Year’s Eve 2015 in Cologne and the reactions towards it have changed political and public opinion on the issues of migration, gender equality, and sexual violence in Germany. Based on theories from postcolonial studies, feminist studies, security studies, approaches on collective trauma, and emotion studies this thesis analyzes ‘Cologne’ as a trauma which has enabled the affective construction of racialized and gendered subject positions. This thesis aim is to illustrate how the governing of emotions in events of trauma is used to secure borders, identities, and bodies. A discourse and narrative analysis of German parliamentary debates on Cologne reveals the production of narratives of crisis through the attachment of emotions to different objects or bodies. The narrative of crisis presumes the existence of a normalcy that has to be re-established and measures to restore normalcy- that is in the case of Cologne the securitization of migration politics. A range of existing competing narratives show the complexity of how politics of emotions function as a tool to securitize national borders, identities and bodies.