embodiments


Subjectivity is always embodied subjectivity, which emerges as a versatile product of biographical experiences, overdetermined by historical and geopolitical power structures. Social norms and common sense, habitual practices of daily life and sophisticated disciplining shape embodiments and define which bodies count as healthy and highly productive, as male or as female, as disciplinable or as resistant. Yet, it is also the other way round: binary gender difference, health, or whiteness operate as normative ideals that gain power through being embodied and performed.

Nevertheless, embodied subjectivity is also a potential source and site of resistance. It might evolve from discrepancies between expectation and experience, or from failures of complying with aesthetic or ableist ideals. It is exactly because body norms – to be healthy, to be beautiful, to be disciplined, to be gendered – are so varied and numerous, that they intermingle and interfere and possibly contradict each other. In how far do such interferences or contradictions open up space for bodily resistance? What would it mean to say that a body develops a creative stubbornness, or inhabits a subversive counter-world?

The challenge consists in taking embodiment as a starting point for analysing heteronormative, racist, classist, anti-Semitic, and disabling power dynamics. Which alternative modes of embodiment develop from queer crip theory or the mutual exchange between critical disability and queer studies? Or from strategies of decolonizing racialized embodied subjectivities?

FORMER EVENTS
for a full overview of events, please scan the chronological archive

Queering Audibility

11 April, 2024, 8 pm, Lettrétage, Berlin-Mitte (DE / EN / DGS / with sign language interpretation). Hearing and Deaf performance art exploring their encounter A a collaboration develops between deaf performance artist Eyk Kauly and the hearing sound artists HYENAZ (Kate Fischer and Adrienne Teicher). Together they explore through sound, signs, and performance how conditions of audibility can be challenged.

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Poetic Transitions

Workshop 4 of the series Queere Multilingualities and Embodied Speech, June 29, 2023, 5-8 pm, Vienna. With Chaka Collective (Claudia Frikh-Khar, Nina Höchtl, Verena Melgarejo Weinandt), performance artist Pêdra Costa and author and scholar Daniela Rodríguez.

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membra(I)nes

Conference, June 15-17, 2023 Can the concept of the membrane therefore help us overcome anthropocentric thinking? And if so, how does it allow to address hierarchies and power imbalances among humans? Can it mobilize decolonial critiques of a posthumanist discourse as a model to thinking in gender studies and feminist science and technology studies? Will a queer understanding of desire or a Black feminist understanding of eroticism help us to draw new, unexpected connections between these relationships and environments?

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Multilingually queer

Workshop Monday May 8, 2023, 1-3 pm (CET), part of the series queere multilingualität and embodied speech with Mariana Aboim, Rubia Salgado as well as Martin*a Vahamäe-Zierold and Maria Kopf. Hybrid event in DGS (German Sign language), English, German, and Portugues.

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CfC The Multilingual Issue

The Multilingual Issue: untranslatability, linguistic multitudes, embodied speech Call for Contributions (open for abstracts until  30 Nov, 22) by Antke A. Engel and Anna T. für InterAlia: A Journal for Queer Studies Aims/Scope English has become the de facto lingua franca in the academic world and it often dominates both scholarly and activist discourse around […]

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