{"id":3533,"date":"2013-10-27T16:35:00","date_gmt":"2013-10-27T14:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.queer-institut.de\/queer-futurities-today-utopias-and-beyond-in-queer-theory\/"},"modified":"2023-11-20T11:48:12","modified_gmt":"2023-11-20T09:48:12","slug":"queer-futurities-today-utopias-and-beyond-in-queer-theory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.queer-institut.de\/en\/queer-futurities-today-utopias-and-beyond-in-queer-theory\/","title":{"rendered":"Queer Futurities<\/br> – Today. Utopias and Beyond in Queer Theory"},"content":{"rendered":"

international symposium, 18\/19 May 2009,<\/strong>
\nwith a keynote by Lee Edelman.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Untimely utopias are inhabited by those who interrupt the here and now, who occupy positions which are yet to be articulated, who have learned to hope for times that will open up new spaces and who never cease to re-invent themselves<\/i>. \u2013 Mar\u00eda do Mar Castro Varela<\/p>\n

Recent years have witnessed a normalizing domestication of the queer. Once held back by the closet, gays and lesbians are now basking in the public spotlight and enjoy high visibility in media, television and popular culture. They are featured in mainstream films and are targeted by advertisers as a major consumer group. What\u2019s more, they are getting married and having children like there is no tomorrow. For some, this kind of visibility in the public sphere is a utopia come true \u2013 it is seen as political and social progress, the realization of true equality.<\/p>\n

During the past decade, however, many activists and scholars have questioned this development and argued that it is a reactionary response, linked with neoliberal politics and privatization. One of the most ardent critics of this development, Lisa Duggan, argues that lesbian and gay politics have reached an era best described in terms of \u201chomonormativity,\u201d which she defines as \u201ca politics that does not contest dominant heteronormative assumptions and institutions but upholds and sustains them.\u201d Another influential queer theorist, Lee Edelman, sees the very term queer<\/i> as entailing a resistance to normalized social forms \u2013 including the norm of what he calls \u201creproductive futurism.\u201d For Edelman, reproductive futurism involves a faith in the consistency of the social, invoking a normative humanism that installs the image of the child as a symbolic token of a progression into the future. The pastoral faith in a shared futurity is therefore something that the queer movement might logically reject rather than embrace.<\/p>\n

Futurities Countering Normalization <\/b>Yet, if a main thrust of queer politics is to oppose normalization, does that necessarily entail jettisoning all visions of the future? Can there be a form of utopian thinking that is not idealistic or normative? Might we entertain the idea of heterotopia as a space that suggests the co-existence of different social relations? Perhaps, rather than seeing society\u2019s turn into a \u201chomonormative\u201d dystopia as a failure of queer politics, one could make use of dystopia as a space of queer potentiality.<\/p>\n

Futurities Challenging Progressive Time <\/b>With the title of our conference, we not only want to proliferate the idea of \u201cfuture\u201d into \u201cfutures\u201d but also, by introducing the term \u201cfuturities,\u201d we want to question the idea of progressive time. This questioning includes building a different relationship between the past and the future: How can we understand political agency if the relationship between the past and the future is not<\/i> mediated by the present?<\/p>\n

Imagination Designing Futurities <\/b>Finally, what is the role of imagination when we take up the question of queer futurities? Do imaginations project \u201ca beyond\u201d or, rather, can they be a way for futurities to inhabit contemporary social relations and political practices? How do these differing ideas of imagination materialize in cultural products or quotidian practices?<\/p>\n

Programme<\/b><\/p>\n

MONDAY 18.5.2009<\/b><\/p>\n

10.00 Morning Coffee & Opening Words
\n11.15. Workshop
\n<\/b>Tomasz Jarymowicz: Utopian Thinking and Queer Theory: A Difficult Relationship
\nVolker Woltersdorff: Apocalypse NOW! Queer Stagings of the End
\nAnnamari V\u00e4nsk\u00e4:\u00a0 Figuring Out Queerness of Children in Fashion Advertising. Disfiguring Childhood Innocence, Outing the Paedophilic Mind or Paying the Price of Reproductive Futurism?
\nJan Wickman: State-Sponsored Queer?
\nTuula Juvonen: Productive Criticality and Queer Potentiality. A Case Study<\/p>\n

13.15-14.30 Lunch<\/p>\n

14.30-16:00 Talks<\/strong>
\nKaterina Kolarova: Queer Futurity Desires the Crip
\nKevin S. Amiddon: Not Like Me? Toward a Queer Epistemology<\/p>\n

16.00-16.30 Coffee break<\/p>\n

16:30-17:30 Talks
\n<\/b>Antu Sorainen: Queer Decency
\nChristien Garcia: Playing Hooky; or, Figuring as Absentee: Queer Accountability and the Praxis<\/p>\n

17:30 Dinner and location change to the ICI – Institute for Cultural Inquiry<\/p>\n

19.00 Keynote: <\/b>Lee Edelman: <\/b>Against Survival: Queerness in a Time that\u2019s Out of Joint<\/strong><\/p>\n

21.00 Fag Bar at Ronson\u2019s with karaoke, dancing, dark room and sleazy vintage porn cinema<\/p>\n

TUESDAY 19.5.2009<\/b><\/p>\n

11.00-12.15 Workshop<\/b>
\nJin Haritaworn: Homophobic Affect and the Militarization of Intimacy
\n\u017deljko Bla\u0107e & Milo DePrieto: QueerGames and HOMOLYMPICS
\nThomas O. Haakonson: Queers in Space: The Queer Art of Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset
\nKatherina Wiedlack: Queer: Punk Rock Expressed Rejection on Futurism<\/p>\n

12.15-13.15 Lunch<\/p>\n

13.15-14.15 Talk
\n<\/b>Harri Kalha: Socializing with the Anti-Social<\/p>\n

14.15-15.45 Talks
\n<\/b>Tomasz Basiuk: The Arrows of Time in Samuel R. Delany?s Life Writing
\nEveline Kilian: Gore Vidal\u2019s Myra Breckinridge and Myron as Allegories of Queer Futurities<\/p>\n

15.45-16.15 Coffee break
\n<\/b>
\n16.15-17.15 Talks
\n<\/b>Philip Pass: The Limitations of Play: Imagination and the Possibility of an idiosyncratic, BDSM Futurity
\nAnu Koivunen: Affect as Futurity: Queer Thinking and the Lures of the Virtual<\/p>\n

End Discussion & Drinks & Let?s Dance!
\n>>> cfp<\/a>
\n>>> program<\/a>
\n>>> abstracts<\/a><\/p>\n

location:<\/b>
\nFinland Institute in Germany, Berlin
\nGeorgenstr. 24 (1. OG), S-Friedrichsstr.<\/p>\n

in co-operation<\/strong> with SQS Queer Journal<\/a>,
\nsupported by Finland Institute and
\nInstitute for Cultural Inquiry (ICI-Berlin).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

international symposium with evening lecture, Finnland-Institut, Berlin, 18.\/19. Mai 2009<\/b>
\nThe symposium, with an opening keynote by Lee Edelman, asks about untimely utopias, which are inhabited by those who interrupt the here and now, who occupy positions which are yet to be articulated, who have learned to hope for times that will open up new spaces and who never cease to re-invent themselves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[696,667],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3533","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2009-en","category-desiring-politics"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/panmCG-UZ","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.queer-institut.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3533","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.queer-institut.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.queer-institut.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.queer-institut.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.queer-institut.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3533"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.queer-institut.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3533\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5067,"href":"http:\/\/www.queer-institut.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3533\/revisions\/5067"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.queer-institut.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3533"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.queer-institut.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3533"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.queer-institut.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3533"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}