2012

Contagious Collaboration

Bossing Images 2
March 26, 2012, 7-10pm, NGBK Berlin
Are power struggles inevitable in every collaboration? Do these struggles infect the images that are being worked with? Do images provoke collaboration? Can collaboration itself be considered contagious?

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Ecstatic Bodies

Bossing Images 3
May 4, 2012, 7-10pm, NGBK Berlin
Are bodies playgrounds for images? Or rather their means of transport? How do bodies become ec-static? How do they cross through fields of power?

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Masked Publics

Bossing Images 1
event,Monday, January 23, 2912, NGBK Berlin
What sort of masking grants power to publics?
Which images can be made audible? What language can be rendered visible?

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Bossing Images
The Power of Images, Queer Art, and Politics

event series began in 2012
The relationship between images and their audiences is often a little bit bossy. Subjects boss images around to serve their ideological goals. Images boss subjects around, for instance by suggesting they conform to heteronormative ideals. The same can be said about the production process: In cultural practices and art making, producers co-opt images, but images may also capture the producer and make them subject themselves. Through mutual desire, images and subjects engage in illicit transgressions of their hierarchized relationships.

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Race and Queer Theory in the Age of Obama

Cathy Cohen
The Subtle Racializations of Sexuality 6
Talk, June 12, 2012, 7.30pm, ICI-Berlin
Changes in our understanding of the racialized state, as experienced in the United States in the era of President Obama for example, inform both queer theory and queer politics. How does the work of black queer theorists as academics and activists re-imagine the politics of intimacy? How is race in/directly deployed in debates over the status and scope of queer subjects?

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Rethinking Ethical Feminism and Sexual Politics through uBuntu

Drucilla Cornell
The Subtle Racializations of Sexuality 5
Talk, May 15, 2012, 7.30pm, ICI-Berlin
Transnational feminism, as both an ethical ideal and an actual struggle to form political alliances, raises some of the most difficult and burning issues about what it means to challenge profound Eurocentric biases. Alliances, particularly when including sexual politics, demand of us that we rework some of our most cherished feminist ideas, such as freedom and equality, without of course giving up on those ideals. In order to do so, Cornell examines the potentials of uBuntu, a non-Western (South African) ethics.

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subtle? how sexuality gets racialized

The Subtle Racialization of Sexuality series
Workshop, April 23/24, 2012, TrIQ, Berlin
How is sexuality deployed for political ends? … in official state politics, in the media, in activism? Do political struggles acknowledge intersections between homo- and transphobia, able-bodiedness, and racism? Is “subtle” racialization a euphemism, or does it allow us to point out particular forms of dis/articulating racism? The workshop explores in more depth the discussions initiated by the lecture series „“The Subtle Racialization of Sexuality“ through activating knowledge and experiences from activism and project work.

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Queer Time. An Image Workshop

26. Januar 2013, Berlin
A notion such as “queer time” can include the experiences of aging, of life expectations, illness, youth, or coherence and incongruity, which clash with conventional meanings. In the workshop we want to inquire this notion of “queer time” and ask in particular how it is dealt with in artistic practices.

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The Subtle Racializations of Sexuality

Queer Theory, the Aftermath of Colonial History, and the Late Modern State
Lecture series June 2011 – June 2012 at the ICI-Berlin
Self-proclaimed liberal and pluralist Western states happily turn to gender and sexual politics in order to demonstrate their presumed progressiveness. They find support from some parts of feminist and LGBTI activism that regard the (neo)liberal state and diversity policies as instrumental in achieving integration and recognition. Such alliances have recently been criticized for fostering new social divisions and endorsing occidentalist and sometimes racist premises. Debates around this critique have tended to reproduce the political figure of antagonism, polarizing the dominant white middle class against various minoritized positions. This lecture series seeks instead to bring to the fore the nuances of the critique and aims at advancing queer sexual politics that take into consideration the subtle racializations of sexuality and the aftermath of colonial history.

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