art & culture


Why think about art and (audio-)visual culture from a queer perspective? In order to criticize dominant symbolic orders, as well as to develop queer cultural politics? If representation does not simply depict or imitate something absent, but functions as production of meaning and social reality, it has a political dimension. Yet, why would one call certain aesthetic strategies or cultural politics queer? Is there something like queer art? What does is mean to queer dominant symbolic orders? What does it mean to exert sociopolitical struggles through aesthetic means?

According to theories of hegemony, late modern governance operates less through repression and more through gaining consent for social inequalities and capitalist socioeconomic orders. Such processes of consensus production depend on cultural products and practices, like movies, literature, news, documentaries, photography, music, and visual art, that influence what is called common sense. Yet, under which conditions do cultural practices reproduce and stabilize normative power constellations, and when do they have resistant or subversive effects? Is there a difference between everyday and artistic, between social or cultural practices? How do they differ or intertwine? What does it mean to break compliance via cultural means, in a fictional space or a utopian time?

RECENT EVENTS
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The Multilingual Issue

Proposal and CFPAAR (Call for Papers, Art, and Reviewers) of an issue of InterAlia. Journal of Queer Studies, edited by Anna T. and Antke A. Engel. Some of the questions asked are: Which languages, dialects, registers, or codes do you use to communicate issues related to pleasures, desires, and communities? What does it mean when one’s first language is shadowed by another acquired later on? What is the impact on the person and their communities? How does language affect your sense of identity and belonging and what is the role of visibilities and opacities in that?

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Queer Theory Videos

Bodies, Figurations, Worlds. Three Video Introductions to Queer Theory by Antke. A. Engel and Filmfetch (Tali Tiller und Magda Wystub). On Friday March 12, 4:30-6:30 pm the videos will be presented online as part of FernUni Hagen’s Gender Days.
In an artistic and experimental academic form these videos invite a wide public to encounter queer theory as a critique of structures of domination. Thinking difference through dynamics of power and desire they reflect on sex_gender and sexuality, the power of language, and modes of resistance to planetary inequalities and histories of violence.

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queer art and theories

Postgrad and research colloquium that experiments with formats and explores queer, queerness and queering in their interplay, considering their aesthetic and political potential as well as their mundane immediacy.

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