Assimilated Inhabitability

Abstract

This paper examines the socio-spatial conditions surrounding Black foreign women in Zurich between the 1980s and 2000s, a period marked by Switzerland’s self-presentation as neutral, progressive, and orderly, yet sustained by regressive racial-sexual hostilities. Drawing on Christina Sharpe’s notion of the weather as an anti-Black climate, I introduce the fogas both metaphor and materiality to describe the ecology of hostility that shaped Black women’s lived experiences in Zurich. Through oral archives, biographical accounts, and feminist spatial theory, the paper traces how the fog’s condensity manifests in everyday racial-sexual violences, structural exclusions, and juridical precarities that suspended Black women in states of disorientation and isolation—what I term floating. Yet within these hostile atmospheres, women’s hybrid improvisations—exemplified by the Treffpunkt Schwarzer Frauen (1993–2010)—functioned as counterpublics of grounding and collective breath. These practices reveal how Black women’s geographies in Switzerland emerge through acts of refusal, haunting, and world-making that reconfigure belonging beyond the limits of visibility and nationhood. The fog thus operates as a conceptual and spatial frame for apprehending anti-Blackness in Europe while foregrounding Black feminist strategies of survival, relation, and re-invention within hostile ecologies.