Uncertainty and Method: Whiteness, gender and psychoanalysis in Germany

This article discusses the methodological challenges posed for psychological research on whiteness at the intersection between race and gender in Germany. Much of the current research in the social science field in Germany focuses on violent expressions of racism or Fremdenfeindlichkeit (hostility towards strangers) and represents a collective immunization against the knowledge about the history and the historicity of whiteness as a history of seizure. Such approaches are motivated by fear and uncertainty. The author takes this uncertainty not only as a starting point for an investigation into the heavily veiled history of whiteness, but also as a method in itself.