2014

The Sexual and the Queerness of the Drive

Teresa de Lauretis
lecture, Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICI), Berlin, 2. July 2015
desire’s multiplicity and serendipity 8
Laplanche proposes that the sexual drive is not innate or endogenous but is constituted as an effect of seduction, repression, and translation. In the context of Laplanche’s theory of the sexual, the lecture examines the difference between drive and desire, the function of the concepts of castration and the Oedipus complex, the relations of sexuality and gender, and the nature of sublimation.

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Gender, Violence, and Visual Activism

series of workshops
2014-2016 in south africa and germany
a series of three workshops that focus on questions of visuality, visual culture, and art in order to widen perspectives on sexualized and gendered violence. The project asks both about the potential violence of images and the semiotics, aesthetics, and effects of images of violence. It aims at exploring what the term visual activism means in different contexts and at different times.

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What is Sex for?

David Halperin
lecture, Wednesday, 5. November 2014, ICI Berlin
desire’s multiplicity and serendipity 2
Wandering through the eras from Aristotelian syllogisms to global, late-capitalist sex culture in bath houses, the historian David Halperin muses about the pros and cons and whys of sex.

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Political Aesthetics of Drag

Shaka Mc Glotten
Talk 15 October 2014, ICI Berlin
desire’s multiplicity and serendipity 1
The anthropologist Shaka McGlotten explores in his ethnographic studies the subversive politics of drag, and questions the desire of resistance in different subcultural settings.
Drag can be a means of touching queer and other publics, or of mediating one’s economic precarity. It can function as art by other means, or by any means necessary. And like politics, drag can be a duty, a contentious pleasure, or something to dread.

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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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