and ‘racialities’
This chapter explores what are, within the European context, often con-sidered two of the most stigmatised and pathologised collective social, ethnic/‘racial’, sexual and gender identities – Roma, queer and their inter-sections. It considers the construction of gendered and sexualised, or sexed, ethnicities/‘racialities’, as well as the construction of ethnicised and ‘racia-lised’, or ‘raced’, sexual and gender identities. Seeing identity formation as a process whereby identity is constantly reshaped and reconstructed in and across social processes and contexts, the chapter also discusses the prism of negative social valuation of Romani identity that has come to be seen as pathological, deviant, perverse and abject. Just like non-normative sex-ualities and gender identities are often closets for queer people, Romani identity has become a kind of ethnic/‘racial’ closet due to being a negative, socially stigmatising marker for many Roma.
Ethnicisation and ‘racialisation’ of Roma
As we have seen thus far, historically, antigypsyism has been at the core of mistreatment of Roma by non-Roma. Since Roma arrived in Constantinople between the 9th and 11th centuries and in other parts of Europe in the 14th and 15th centuries, non-Romani individuals, commu-nities and societies have largely ostracised and marginalised Roma. This has been reflected in the names non-Roma gave to Roma. Throughout Europe’s history, dominant populations have called Roma various names, often based on the lack of information majority society had about Roma and, at times, on direct hostility towards Roma. The names included, among others, the term ‘Tsigan’ – and regional variants of Tsingan, Cingan, Zingar, Cigany, Cikan, Cigan, Zigeuner – originating from the Byzantine Greek ‘Atzinganoi/Atsigános’ to refer to a group who was most likely Roma and who appeared on the mountain of Athos around 1068 (Horváthová 2002, 11). These exonyms included the term ‘Gypsy’, too, which is rarely spelt as ‘Gipsy’ (along with the French variant ‘Gitan’ or the Spanish ‘Gitano’), deriving from the word ‘Egyptian’ (Hancock 2002, xxi).
Scholars believe that this was because due to the darker complexion, Roma DOI: 10.4324/9780367822699-2
were erroneously seen as foreigners, having come from Egypt (Hancock 2002, Lee 2013). Alternatively, the term ‘Gypsy’ was used to refer to an area called Little Egypt, or Egypt Minor in the Venetian colony of Modon (present-day Methoni) in the Peloponnese peninsula where some Roma were settled for substantial periods of time (Fraser 1992, 50; Clébert 1961, 20; Liégeois 1986, 28–29; Horváthová 2002; Matras 2014). It would take another five centuries for Roma to organise, mobilise at a transnational level and adopt the endonym ‘Roma’, sometimes spelt as Rroma,1 at the first World Romani Congress in London in 1971 for the purposes of self- determination and recognition.
From the outset, the term ‘Gypsy’, which was imposed on Roma by the respective majority societies, had negative connotations. Roma were also called Heidens (heathens, pagans) in Dutch. The misperception and the attendant mislabelling of Roma went hand in hand with anti-Romani measures and laws introduced and maintained by the Church, the state and trade guilds in the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th centuries. As we have seen in the introduction, these measures stigmatised Roma even further as vagrants, parasites, unwanted outcasts, outlaws and criminals. Complementing the mislabelling and mistreatment of Roma by non-Roma, and the ensuing wholesale stereotypical vilifying and stigmatising conceptualisations of Roma as an ethnic group was the romanticisation and objectification of Roma. Following the publication of Grellman’s thesis in 1783 and the foundation in 1888 of the Gypsy Lore Society, academic discussions were underway about the Indian origin of Roma based on evidence that the Romani language is of the Indo-Aryan family of languages. In the 19th century, romanticised literary (for example, Maupassant, Hugo, Mácha, Borrow, Arnold, Dickens, Eliot, the Brontë sisters), visual representations (e.g. Van Gogh’s 1888 Encampment of Gypsies with Caravans near Arles;
Morland; Nonell; Sully; Harvey; Modigliani) and musical renditions of
‘Gypsies’ (for instance, Dvořák, Janáček, Verdi, Liszt, Bartók, Bizet, Strauss) constructed an image of Roma as ‘bon sauvage’ that has persisted well into the 20th and 21st centuries. Combined with the different, ex-ternally imposed exonyms, these representations of Roma (McGarry 2014), created by non-Roma, have incorrectly endorsed a wholesale association of Roma with both positive and negative stereotypes.
Non-Roma have associated Roma with romanticising images of no-madism, unchained freedom, passion, voluptuousness and exoticism (Mayall 2004, 1; Oprea 2004, 1), ‘a welcome anachronism in modern so-ciety’ (Mayall 2004, 2) on the one hand; and, on the other, with more sinister ones, portraying Roma as criminals, thieves, vermin, undesirable, anti/asocial, work-shy, foreign elements (Liégeois 1983; Hancock 2002;
Horváthová 2002; Baloun 2019). As Cortés (2021) puts it,
antigypsyist language interweaves, in viscous interaction, moral degra-dation, racial minority and criminal allusion. The Gypsy […] would be
eternally bad […] by nature, and therefore immutably guilty: such is the racist framework from which the archetype of the ‘Gypsy’ springs. Of course, antigypsyism endorses exceptions, and the dominant society keeps celebrating them. But after compliment to every exception, there is that (bad) shadow in the background: how much is this subject worth, who, despite being a Gypsy, is good, and therefore innocent, perhaps against their nature and culture. (Cortés 2021)
These representations of Roma have engendered homogenising stereotypes portraying Roma as a genetically bound, deviant group. In the 20th cen-tury, nation states pathologised Roma, consistently excluding Roma from equal citizenship, deliberately maintaining the negative ascription of Roma identity and actively constructing Roma as a deviant ‘other’, ‘risky people’
(van Baar and Vermeersch 2017) that threaten the fabric of the nation (McGarry 2017, 245); and as a separate, ‘inferior’, ‘deviant’ race (Balibar 2009, x; Rostas 2019). In the most recent history, a different image of Roma has been created, whereby Roma have been increasingly described as
‘unproductive’ and ‘useless’ citizens, blamed for and responsible for their own poverty (McGarry 2017, 81), who deliberately confine themselves to Roma ghettos and settlements due to their ‘unwillingness to integrate’
(Vincze 2013, 2014); a ‘problem’ associated with negative social phe-nomena (Vermeersch 2006) and with European societies’ ills such as mass unemployment, poverty, ill-health, discrimination, social exclusion and, more recently, the spread of COVID-19. Thus is created a ‘backward’
(Schneeweiss 2018; Rostas 2019), ‘uncivilised race’ (Vincze 2014, 74); ‘an inferior class of non-humans, who threaten the formation of a desired territory of “our own” inhabited by the desired community (by “us”) composed of people who deserve belonging to it’ (Vincze 2013, 239). This means that throughout history, the assumed difference that non-Roma have perceived in and attributed to Roma, whom they have defined as ‘Gypsies’, has always been ethnicised and, effectively, ‘racialised’.
In Chapter One, I discussed the theoretical underpinnings of Romani identity. I touched upon the nexus of ethnicity and ‘race’. The chapter demonstrated that Romani Studies scholarship on Roma has often viewed Roma through the lens of ethnicity/‘race’: this has resulted in the discipline getting caught in the trap of cultural essentialism by ethnicising and
‘racialising’ Roma. The chapter also signalled new approaches to con-ceptualising Romani identities in Romani Studies: hybridity, super- diversity, critical race theory, intersectionality and, to a limited extent, queer theory. We have seen that ethnicity/‘race’ is a socially constructed category, a discursive, contextual, relational and at times material unit of meaning that is constantly reconstructed and redefined in different periods of time, in different regional, political, socio-economic and cultural con-texts. It is grounded in the discourse of nationalism, racism – and, in the case of Roma, in the specific form of racism targeting Roma, antigypsyism –
and colonialism. It is operationalised through ‘racial’ difference where
‘race’ has become a category of difference that refers to assumed or per-ceived differences between people (Balibar and Wallerstein 1991, 48–49).
This dynamic entails and legitimises the asymmetrical and unequal power relations between the coloniser and the colonised, insiders and outsiders, the norm(al) and the abnormal, or the ‘other’ that deviates from that norm.
Ethnicisation and ‘racialisation’ are discursive practices and processes whereby immutable boundaries that differentiate between us and them are constructed, which are then used to fix and naturalise hierarchical, asym-metrical hegemonic power relations between them (Anthias and Yuval- Davis 1992; Rattansi 2007; Goldberg 2009; Yuval-Davis et al. 2017a).
What is key to the process of ethnicisation/‘racialisation’ is that these boundaries are constructed around the presence of ethnic/‘racial’ bound-aries rather than around the existence of an ‘essence’ (Barth [1969] 1998).
As part of this dynamic, it can be any one physical or social feature, or signifier, for example, skin complexion, the shape of the skull, accent, social status, lifestyle etc, which are then called upon to construct these bound-aries between groups of people.
‘Race’ is a material semiotic and topological object that is ‘enacted in situated practices as a set of relations’; although the concept of ‘race’ often invokes the notion of genetic inheritance, ‘race’ can neither be reduced to the body or biology, nor to ideology (M’charek 2013; M’charek et al. 2014, 468; Plájás et al. 2019). While racial science was deeply embedded within the process of building modern nation states (Schmidt 2020), ‘race’ was integral to racial theories and eugenics in the 19th and 20th centuries (Turda 2014; Saini 2019). Additionally, ‘racial anthropology ultimately provided intellectual justification for policies such as forced sterilization, loss of civic rights and genocide’ (Hutton 2010, 153) for the purposes of the Nazi race theory and ideology in the 20th century. ‘Race’ is internal to all social processes: therefore, it is important to examine ‘race’ and ethnicity separately, too.
The term ‘race’, which started to be used in English during the early 20th century, became a taboo in Europe following the atrocities associated with the Second World War and the Holocaust. Roma were subjected to es-sentialist notions of ‘race’ under the rule of Nazis and their national col-laborators: for example, Czech guards serving in the Roma, or so-called Gypsy camps at Lety and Hodonín near Kunštát under the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, where Roma were gathered before they were transported to Auschwitz. During the Holocaust, an estimated 220,000 (Milton 1991) to 1,500,000 Roma (Hancock 2005; see also Kenrick and Puxon 2009; Stauber and Vago 2007) were exterminated as an
‘inferior race’ alongside millions of Jews, gays, the mentally and physically challenged, political prisoners and others considered ‘racially unnatural’
(Hutton 2005) and anti/asocial. In the period preceding the Holocaust, the Nazis took blood samples from Roma, measured their facial characteristics
(N.B. a reconstruction can be seen in the Museum of Romani Culture, Brno, Czech Republic) and ‘racially’ cleansed or ‘de-loused’ towns and villages.
In spite of – or perhaps because of – this historical experience of ‘race’, across Central and Eastern Europe, and post-communist Europe in parti-cular, ‘race’ continues to be regarded as belonging exclusively to Western discourses of coloniality and imperialism. Indeed, many Eastern European nations are eager to exclude themselves from them. Although ‘race’ and racism are seemingly non-existent, in reality, they have survived and are embedded in many Eastern European societies, thus remaining ‘perhaps the most poorly articulated factor in the relationship between official ideologies and people’s fantasies during and since communism’ (Imre 2005, 83).
Instead of seeing post-colonialism and post-socialism as intertwined phe-nomena, some scholars still distinguish between Western Europe – which is allegedly marked by colonialism and racism – and Eastern Europe, deemed to be marked predominantly by nationalism, socialism and ethnic violence.
Simultaneously, while ‘race’ is used to prevent the Holocaust from being repeated (Banton 2012), it is also denied (Lentin 2005, 2011, 2015). Lentin describes the ‘race idea’ as follows:
The race idea, which invokes theories of genetic inherency as legit-imatory props in situations of domination predicated on either the annihilation of the population conjured as racially other/inferior or the extraction of their servitude (or, later, their labour) becomes dislodged from discussions of blood or skin or hair or bone. It pertains even when those visible differences are actively denied as significant (2015, 1402).
According to Lentin, ‘race’ is confined to the moment of the Holocaust – and is extended to other extreme instances of racial rule such as Apartheid and Jim Crow whilst it is considered debatable in relation to other, less iconic, instances of racial governmentality – thus allowing it to be fore-closed. This approach leads to the narrowing of the problem of ‘race’ and racism to the history of quite a specific stream of racial thinking, the Nazi racial ideology, at the expense of other, less visible, though perhaps equally salient ways of racial thinking, including those of Czech and Slovak pro-venance (Herza 2019, 2020). Additionally, to avoid ‘race’, societies and governments often refer to the so-called Roma question as a matter of culture: a biopower based on an assignment to ‘race’ (Fassin et al. 2014).
Many aspects of this racial thinking are related to the ‘racialisation’ and the racist treatment of Roma throughout Europe, which I outlined briefly in the introduction. The continued existence of ‘race’ and race categories in census data, research and scientific literatures (Lipphardt 2012); the recent revival and resurgence of the race science (Saini 2019) along with the proliferation of scholars openly advocating for it; the rise of racism, racially motivated hate crime, including hate speech, alongside other manifestations of
intolerance such as xenophobia, homophobia; and a growing emphasis on and foregrounding of the essentialist notions of biological givenness and the natural fuelled by populists shows that race still matters (Lentin 2020); or that it has never stopped to matter.
‘Stigmatised’ and ‘deviant’ identities: Sexual and ethnic/
‘racial’ difference
Taking into consideration the historical experience of Roma being enslaved from the 14th century until 1855 in Moldavia and 1856 in Wallachia and the racial theories and eugenics of the 19th and 20th centuries, from which the Nazi ideology stemmed and developed, it is worth remembering that before and during the Holocaust, Roma, Jews, Slavs, LGBTIQ people in-cluding queer Jews (Shneer and Aviv 2002; Hájková 2013, 2020) and queer Roma, as well as other minority groups were persecuted due to the so-called pathology, deviance and deficiency of their identities. They were targeted for extermination because of who they were: that is to say, due to their assumed ethnic/‘racial’ and sexual difference. Since there appears to be no detailed account of the nexus of social arrangements, processes and dis-cursive practices, through which modern Romani and LGBTIQ – or queer – identities have emerged and been constituted by each other, it may be of use to consider how sexual and ‘racial’ difference were mutually constituted in the case of the Jewish sexual difference. There has been a long-standing notion that Jews embody non-normative sexual and gender categories, at-tributing softness to Jewish men, and manliness to Jewish women – or fe-male sexual inverts – who were paradoxically seen as being at once too much and not enough of a woman. Boyarin et al. (2003) illustrate the Jewish-queer proximity, which is highly reminiscent of the Romani-queer proximity:
[T]he circuit Jew-queer is not only theoretical but has had – and still has – profound implications for the ways in which Jewish and queer bodies are lived (…) and have died. (…) While there are no simple equations between Jewish and queer identities, Jewishness and queerness yet utilise and are bound up with one another in particularly resonant way. This crossover also extends to modern discourses of antisemitism and homophobia, with stereotypes of the Jew frequently underwriting pop cultural and scientific notions of the homosexual. (2003, 1)
The rationalisation of Jewish ‘racial’ difference, which came to be deeply embedded within mainstream non-Jewish societies, was all the more pow-erful for being drawn through stereotypes of an assumed sexual difference.
Popular and scientific literature featured claims insinuating the existence of Jewish male’s sexual difference from other men. Modern Jewishness became as much a category of gender as of ‘race’: it is the Jewish male’s difference,
deviance or divergence from normal masculinity – that is, an inability to embody and perform proper masculinity – that was the indelible evidence of the ‘racial’ difference of Jews as a group from non-Jews (Boyarin et al.
2003). In a manner that is highly resonant with Romani ethnicity being sexed and Romani sexuality being ‘raced’ and perceived as deviant, abject, perverse, or pathological, Boyarin et al. go on to argue the following:
Because homosexuality was initially characterised as a matter of sexual, or gender, inversion (a characterisation that understood the ‘bad’
object choice as effect not cause), the Jew’s gender trouble was seen to bear more than a family resemblance to the homosexual’s sexual inversion. Significantly this crossing went both ways, for a cluster of nineteenth century stereotypes of the Jew came to circle around the homosexual as well. (…) [I]t is not just that the modern Jew was being secularised and homosexualised – the ‘homosexual’ whom scientis sexualis and its various practitioners were so busily identifying and diagnosing, was also being ‘raced’. (2003, 3–4)
As we have seen thus far, historically, Roma, Romani ethnicity and Romani sexuality have been marked as fundamentally different and distinct from the non-Romani norm; and stigmatised, pathologised and marked out in ways similar to how Jews, Jewishness and Jewish sexuality have been marked out and misrepresented. These misrepresentations are also re-miniscent of how discourses on Black sexuality are used to articulate the-ories of ‘racial’ difference (Ferguson 2004); and of white Americans’
stereotypical attitudes to African American sexuality. This includes, for example, the misguided notion that African Americans hold ‘more per-missive attitudes to extramarital affairs’, ‘have a more naturalistic attitude towards human sexuality’ or ‘the myth of Black sexual superiority’ (Staples 1978, 1986, 2006). Black sexuality has been historically misrepresented in the popular imagination and in scientific literature as ‘bestial’, ‘animalistic’, and subject to damaging, often contradictory stereotypes of the (enslaved) Black man being ‘super-potent’; a ‘rapist, obsessed with having sex with white women’, yet ‘more feminine than white men’; and stereotypes of the (enslaved) Black woman ‘wanting to sleep with and responding en-thusiastically to all sexual advancers’ (Samuels 1999, 43). As Hancock (2008) observes, around the time of the publication of Grellmann’s 1783 book about Roma, newly emergent sciences were focusing on differences amongst non-Whites by identifying social and moral distinctions between groups, their essential markers of difference and grounding them in nature and science. ‘Race’ and sexuality came to be seen as measurable, perma-nent, categorised and medicalised – hence rationalised – differences; they were applied across various non-White ethnicities and incorporated into emerging discourses on ‘race’ and sexuality. Describing the perceived sexual difference in Romani men, Hancock (2008) writes that Romani male who
had been enslaved in the Balkans were seen as a threat to white woman-hood (2008, 184). As regards Romani female sexuality, Charnon-Deutsch argues that the danger of the Romani woman, who is a threat to the family, social system, the nation, and sexuality itself since she can ‘castrate’ men, and her ‘racial’ difference were represented as reduplicating the seductive danger of her sexual difference (2004, 240–241). Codur (2011), who writes about artistic representations of Romani female sexuality during Romanticism, remarks that ‘Gypsy women have continuously aroused all kinds of fantasies revolving around the repressed desired of transgression of sexual norms’ (2011, 6) while Okely (1983) claims that ‘in England, a
had been enslaved in the Balkans were seen as a threat to white woman-hood (2008, 184). As regards Romani female sexuality, Charnon-Deutsch argues that the danger of the Romani woman, who is a threat to the family, social system, the nation, and sexuality itself since she can ‘castrate’ men, and her ‘racial’ difference were represented as reduplicating the seductive danger of her sexual difference (2004, 240–241). Codur (2011), who writes about artistic representations of Romani female sexuality during Romanticism, remarks that ‘Gypsy women have continuously aroused all kinds of fantasies revolving around the repressed desired of transgression of sexual norms’ (2011, 6) while Okely (1983) claims that ‘in England, a