Othering

The term „othering“ can be derived from the English word „other“, meaning „different“, and the suffix -ing gives it its active character.

character. In German it could be translated as „Jemanden anders(artig) machen“. Also in the literature it is spoken of „Veranderung“ or „Fremd-Machung“.

The ‚own‘ and the ‚foreign‘

The expression describes a constructed process that defines people as ‚others‘ who have to be distinguished and separated from their own ‚us‘. While one’s own social image is increasingly emphasized in a positive way, at the same time someone is classified as ‚foreign‘ or ‚different‘. A dichotomous differentiation and even distancing from other people takes place in order to confirm one’s own ’normality‘. The external attribution of inferiority strengthens one’s own claimed superiority. However, this often biologistic argumentation does not only refer to the social position of people in society. Class, beliefs, ethnicity, sexuality, gender, and nationality are also possible categories.

Power defines belonging

Riegel describes the binary relationship as a hegemonic one: „With reference to postcolonial theories and cultural studies, ‚constructions of others‘ are understood as social processes, representations, discourses, and practices through which socially significant differences and boundaries are established against the backdrop of a self-evident, effective normality, and people are turned into others, non-members. They are thereby subjected to a hegemonic order of difference and are assigned an inferior position“ (Riegel 2016, 8).

Philosophical roots

In his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Hegel was already concerned with the question of how the perception of the self is related to its construction and demarcation from the Other. Beauvoir, too, influenced social gender discourses in particular with her concept of alterity. The term othering was later coined by the literary scholar Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.

Literature

Mecheril, Paul (2009), „Diversity. Orders of Difference and Modes of Their Interconnection. https://heimatkunde.boell.de/2008/07/01/diversity-differenzordnungen-und-modi-ihrer-verknuepfung [23 Apr. 2018].

Riegel, Christine (2016): Education, intersectionality, othering. Pedagogical action in contradictory relations. Bielefeld: Transcript.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty (1985): The Rani of Simur. An Essay in Reading the Archives. In: Barker, Francis et al. (eds.): Europe and its Others. Colchester: University of Essex, 128-151.