activities

The Institute for Queer Theory develops activities in research, teaching, public events and international exchange. The rubric "activities" documents former events, presents the schedule for the upcoming months as well as a preview of further plans, and an overview of projects and cooperations, including research groups existing under the roof of the institute. > newsletter subscription

projects / cooperations

Queer Salon Berlin

The Queer Salon is a monthly event that experiments with different formats of "doing collective" (DIC) in order to explore the wide spectrum of queer political ideas and positions. Following each event, everybody is invited to chat and exchange in a frivolously-kempt atmosphere while consuming inspiring snacks and beverages at moderate prices. The Salons are meant to be perversely parasitic -- with each feeding off the last and hopefully inspiring new, unexpected ideas for future Salons.

If queerness is neither uniform nor fixed, how can its manifold and constantly changing positions intersect? And how does queer then become productive, provocative, and political? We want to create a space that brings people into contact who would not otherwise meet and who might see the Salon as a platform to negotiate and transform relations of power, a space that individuals and communities who take queer to provide a range of possibilities of expressing difference in its manifold forms might make use of. Rather than rely only on language or the classical formats of political discussion, we want to develop ways of contending with the political that build on alternative formats and shared practice.

The Queer Salon is initiated by Antke Engel & Volker Woltersdorff alias Lore Logorrhöe. Salons have so far taken place in cooperation with Katja Abel, Arnika Fuhrmann, Eva v. Redecker and Koray Yilmaz-Günay, Sun-ju Choi, Jess Dorrance, Jule Jakob Hesseler, Romyrosa (Alex).

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1st Berlin Queer Salon: Queer-Political Speed-Dating
Thu June 30, 2009, 8pm, WIRR-WARR, Dieffenbachstraße 36

2nd Berlin Queer Salon: Anti-Racist Kiss-Ins? How to fight homophobia and racism simultaneously rather than pushing them into competition?
Thu August 20, 2009, 8pm, WIRR-WARR, Dieffenbachstraße 36

3rd Berlin Queer Salon: Luminous People:
Queerness in films of Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Thu September 17, 2009, 8pm, Basso. Köpenikerstr. 187/188

4th Berlin Queer Salon: Queer Intersectional Role Play – Invent New life-stories and figure out how privileges and disadvantages resulting from socio-economic origin can be challenged.
Thu October 15, 2009, 8pm, Mittenmang, Lenaustr. 12

5th Berlin Queer Salon: Asian Affairs. Queer Film Salon - a set of recent short documentaries and experimental essays that reflect on queer Asianness across countries and continents. > abstracts (pdf)
Thu January 21, 2010, 8pm, Adalbertstr. 71, Hinterhaus

6th Berlin Queer Salon: dicker als blut? Queer Generations subverting Kinship Norms
Thu February 18th, 8 pm
Werkstatt, Adalbertstr. 71, Hinterhaus

7th Berlin Queer Salon: Change of Identity - and the political surprise of the day
Thu March 18th, 2010 8 pm
Werkstatt, Adalbertstr. 71, Hinterhaus

8th Berlin Queer Salon: oh economy, up yours! a > film program
Thu April 15th, 2010, 8 pm
Werkstatt, Adalbertstr. 71, Hinterhaus

9th Berlin Queer Salon: relationships - farewell to heteronorm and subcultural moralism
Thu May 20th, 2010, 8 pm
Werkstatt, Adalbertstr. 71, Hinterhaus

10th Berlin Queer Salon: how to queer things with words?
Thu June 17th, 2010, 8 pm
Werkstatt, Adalbertstr. 71, Hinterhaus

Bossing Images

series of events (up-coming summer/autumn 2010, Berlin)
curated by Jessica Dorrance, Antke Engel and Renate Lorenz

The relationship between viewers and images has always been one that is a little bit bossy. Subjects boss the image around to serve ideological goals or desires; images boss subjects around, for instance by suggesting they conform to hetero norms; images and subjects engage in elicit transgressions of boss/non-boss relationships through mutual desire. The idea of this series of events would be to look at the social field of images and subjects as one that is structured by ongoing, dynamic attempts to boss each other around. This bossiness is hierarchical and saturated by power and desire – and always includes moments of failure; as with any “work relationship,” the boss can never fully control the employee, there are always paths for subversion, wasting company time etc..

Rather than simply asking who’s the boss, this series of events in an attempt to surface how the dynamic, hierarchical relationships between images and subjects (ones that are saturated with power and desire) are established, developed and managed. It also seeks to ask what are their aporias and underlying assumptions and where are sites within them that can be used as bases for resistance. Each of the five public events will bring together an artist, an artistic production, a theoretician and an audience – in constellations that will change over the course of the series – in order to work on different aspects of these questions. In experimenting on how these actors work together, we are interested in challenging the role that curation plays in bossing images and in developing curatorial formats that could trigger, at very the least, more nuanced considerations of the bossing dynamic.

By invoking the term “boss,” we wish to highlight the question of power relations and their variability (as well as other valences of bossiness, such as the economy and S&M practices). The events will focus specifically on images that engage with issues of “normality,” either by enforcing or resisting it: How do images of ambiguous genders, queer desire, hybrid cultural affinities or unusual physical properties relate to questions of bossing images and can queer or queer-theoretical and political perspectives be especially useful in thinking about and acting in this field of bossiness?

research groups

Queer/ing Visual Culture (2-3 times a year, german speaking context)

The workgroup critically engages with regimes of visibility and cultural representations that reproduce and "secure" normative heterosexuality and the rigid binary gender order. Beyond this critical approach is a strong interest in cultural and artistic productions and queer visual activism that supports the "invention" of new images/imagery and reworks the dominant archive as well as norms, habits and technologies of visual representation. What is a "queer image"? How does it subvert sexual norms and hierarchies? Does the visual/visualization play a unique role in challenging normative sex/gender regimes? How important is visual culture as a mode of social transformation? What is political about queer visual culture?

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Economy and Desire
(Berlin, under construction) 

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Queer Theory and neoliberal governmentality / economy
(Hamburg/Bremen, 2006-2008, finalized) 

Questioning the heterosexual norm still provokes political and social resistance or rejections. Nevertheless, late modern societies experience the proliferation of genders and sexualities. Representations of sexual and gender diversity pervade everyday culture, the media space, and to a certain degree even official politics. What does it mean to analyze this "new openness" as a moment of neoliberal governmentality and economy? Is there an alliance between neoliberal forces and sexual lifestyles or politics? If so, what is the price, who profits, and which kind of new hierarchies develop? The research group investigates the ambiguity of promise and coercion issued by the neoliberal demand for individualization. We ask for an up-to-date understanding of the relation of sexuality and economy. How does the precarisation of working and living conditions involve the sexual and connect it to other moments of social differentiation? Which kind of new norms and hierarchies organize late modern sexualities? 

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Contact: mail(at)queer-institut.de

cooperations

Centre of Excellence in Political Thought and Conceptual Change,
research group: Politics of Philosophy and Gender (PPhiG)
research team leader: Prof Tuija Pulkkinen,
Gender Studies, University of Helsinki, Finland
projects
Queer and Representational Politics (Tuula Juvonen, PhD)
Politics of Decency (Antu Sorainen, PhD)

Zentrum Gender Studies / Center for Gender Studies
University of Basel, Switzerland
director: Prof Andrea Maihofer

SFB Kulturen des Performativen
Free Univiversity Berlin
project
Precarisation of sexual and gendered identities
co-op partners: Dr Volker Woltersdorff; Dr Renate Lorenz

Institute for Cultural Inquiry / Kulturlabor (ICI Berlin)
director: Christoph Holzhey (PhD, PhD)

Bildwechsel - dachverband frauen / medien / kultur
www.bildwechsel.org

projects

multi-format
To Queer: Visual Culture / Visual Politics

series of events (up-coming summer/autumn 2010, Berlin)
Bossing Images
curated by Jessica Dorrance, Antke Engel and Renate Lorenz

research group (s. a. )
Queering Visual Culture

collective visual readings
Reading Images / Queering Images (under construction)

lecture series
Visual Culture / Visual Politics
first event: Monday Nov 24, 2008, 19:30
ICI/Kulturlabor, Christinenstr. 18/19 (Pfefferberg Haus 8).

Irit Rogoff (Professor for Visual Cultures, Goldsmiths, University of London)
GeoCultures: Circuits of Art and Globalisation
preceded by a performance by Ana Hoffner Panic: Perverted

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book editing
Hegemony and Heteronormativity. Revisiting "the Political" in Queer Politics María do Mar Castro Varela (Political Scientist, ASFH Berlin)
Nikita Dhawan (Philosopher, Centre of Excellence: Normative Orders, Uni Frankfurt/M)
Antke Engel (Philosopher, Institut für Queer Theory)
publication date: approx. autumn 2010 (Ashgate)

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multi-format
Sexuality and Economy

book (in German)
Bilder von Sexualität und Ökonomie (Images of Sexuality and Economy)
2009 (transcript, Bielefeld)

workshop (in German)
Sex, Gender, Wirtschaft. Queere Perspektiven auf Ökonomie
initiiated by Katharina Pühl and Antke Engel
as part of the conference
„Regieren von Geschlechterverhältnissen /Critical Governance Studies"
May 16-18, 2008
University of Vienna, Institute for Political Sciences

conference
Desiring Just Economies / Just Economies of Desire
Volker Woltersdorff (FUBerlin, SFB Kulturen des Performativen)
Nikita Dhawan (Uni Frankfurt/M.; „Herausbildung normativer Ordnungen"
Christoph Holzhey (ICI-Berlin)
Antke Engel (Institute for Queer Theory)
June 24-26, 2010

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multi-format
Queer and the Human Rights Discourse
- a sceptical rapprochement
focussing transgender and intersex politics

in cooperation with AG 1-0-1 intersex, Berlin
(Ulrike Hennecke, Ulrike Klöppel, Ins A Kromminga,
Rett Rossi, Karen Scheper de Aguirre); Susanne Krasmann (Criminol. Social Sciences; Hamburg University); Galery Helga Broll (Hamburg/Basel); bildwechsel (Hamburg); students of the Gender and Queer Studies (Hamburg University)

2006/2007 (finalized)