The Subtle Racializations of Sexuality: Queer Theory, the Aftermath of Colonial History, and the Late-Modern State

Lecture Series, Berlin June 2011 – June 2012

June 07, 2011 Jasbir Puar
The Cost of Getting Better. Ecologies of Race, Sex, and Disability
Jasbir Puar is Associate Professor of Women and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, New Jersey. The talk is organized in cooperation with Dr. Christoph Holzhey (Institute for Cultural Inquiry, ICI-Berlin). > more

October 27, 2011 Sara Ahmed
On Not Becoming a National Part: Willfulness as Political Art
Sara Ahmed is Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. The talk is organized in cooperation with Prof. Beate Binder (Institute for European Ethnology, HU-Berlin). > more

November 14, 2011 Fatima El-Tayeb
Postracial Europe? Minority Activism and the Queering of Ethnicity
Fatima El-Tayeb is Assistant Professor of African-American Literature and Culture at University of California, San Diego. > more

April 24, 2012 Antonia Chao
Encountering Sexual Aliens: State Sovereignty and the Heteronormative Mechanism at Work on the Margins of Taiwan
Antonia Chao is Professor of Sociology at Tunghai University, Taiwan. The talk is organized in cooperation with Prof. Sabine Hark (ZIFG, TU-Berlin). > more

May 15, 2012 Drucilla Cornell
Rethinking Ethical Feminism and Sexual Politics Through uBuntu
Drucilla Cornell is Professor of Political Science, Women's Studies, and Comparative Literature at Rutgers University, New Jersey. The talk is organized in cooperation with Prof. Mari Mikkola and Prof. Rahel Jaeggi (Institute for Philosophy, HU-Berlin) > more

June 12/13, 2012 Cathy Cohen
Race and Queer Theory in the Age of Obama (talk)
Black Queer Theory and Neoliberalism (workshop)
Cathy Cohen is Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. The talk is organized in cooperation with Prof. Cilja Harders (Institute for Political Science, FU Berlin and Katharina Pühl (ZEFG, FU-Berlin). > more

The lecture series is organized by Antke Engel, Institute for Queer Theory in cooperation with the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry (www.ici-berlin.org), which hosts the series. It is supported by Schwules Museum Berlin as well as other academic institutions and political organizations in Berlin who co-organize and sponsor individual lectures in the series.

Grafik: TEKTEK

Concept of the Series

Self-proclaimed liberal and pluralist Western states happily turn to gender and sexual politics in order to demonstrate their presumed progressiveness. They find support from some parts of feminist and LGBTI activism that regard (neo)liberal state and diversity policies instrumental for achieving integration and recognition. Such alliances have recently been criticized for fostering new social divisions and endorsing occidentalist and sometimes racist premises. Debates around this critique have tended to reproduce the political figure of antagonism, polarizing between dominant white middle class and various minoritized positions. This lecture series seeks instead to bring to the fore the nuances of the critique and aims at advancing queer sexual politics that take into consideration the subtle racializations of sexuality and the aftermath of colonial history.

The series brings together theoretical and political considerations that have developed from anti-racist, queer of colour, and/or migrant perspectives on late-modern and neoliberal state policies. It not only reflects on the way queer activism is entangled with these policies, but also points out how such activism is critical about the policies, and/or resistant to them. The speakers will analyze the sexual imaginaries that organize Western publics built upon occidentalist premises and develop queer counter narratives. They will also reflect on the possibilities and problematics of translating queer politics, which are informed by and attentive to complex power relations, into state politics. What happens in these translation processes? What are the roles of different institutional, non-institutional or anti-institutional contexts? What kinds of theoretical and political alliances and/or tensions arise when fights against racism, homophobia, sexism, classism, and bodyism are combined but privileges and profits are ignored

International Workshop April 23/24, 2012

subtil? wie sexualität rassisiert wird

mit/with Nana Adusei-Poku, Antje Barten, Zülfukar Cetin, Tülin Duman, Henriette Gunkel, Urmila Goel, Anja Michaelsen, Thoralf Mosel, Saideh Saadat-Lendle, Leticia Sabsay.

> mehr/more

In cooperation with .

Funded by
hannchen mehrzweck stiftung (www.hms-stiftung.de).

Former events of the series

Jasbir Puar
The Cost of Getting Better. Ecologies of Race, Sex, and Disability

This lecture examines the potential for affective connectivities and conviviality to rethink neoliberal stratification. Noting that discourses surrounding queer suicide reproduce problematic assumptions not only about race, class, and gender, but also bodily health, debility, and capacity, Jasbir Puar will be linking Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” project and related discussions about the recent spate of queer suicides to broader social justice issues about disability as well as theoretical concerns in animal studies and post-humanist studies.

Jasbir Puar is professor and core faculty member in the department of Women’s & Gender Studies at Rutgers University, USA. She is the author of Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times (Duke University Press 2007), which won the 2007 Cultural Studies Book Award from the Association for Asian American Studies. Her edited volumes include a special issue of GLQ entitled “Queer Tourism: Geographies of Globalization” and she co-edited a volume of Society and Space entitled “Sexuality and Space”.

Der Vortrag ist organisiert in Kooperation mit und finanziell unterstützt durch
Dr. Christoph Holzhey (Institute for Cultural Inquiry, ICI-Berlin).

Zeit: Dienstag 07 Juni 2011
Ort: ICI Kulturlabor Berlin, Christinenstr. 18/19, Haus 8

> ICI video documentation

Additional Workshop with Jasbir Puar
Wednesday June 08, 2011
Institut für Queer Theory, Werbellinstr. 50, Haus 1a

Sara Ahmed
On Not Becoming a National Part: Willfulness as Political Art

This lecture rethinks national citizenship as “technology of the will.” And it reflects on willfulness as political art – a political art which deals in the field of the ongoing difficulty of speaking about racism, as well as queer of colour activism. According to national citizenship the “would be” citizen must be willing to will what the nation wills; to make their will conditional on the national will. More specifically the paper reflects on the national will as the general will which is defined against the particular will, or the will of the part. The general will creates parts, and demands that those who are part not only participate but are willing to reproduce the whole. I suggest that when parts are willing, they recede from view. The parts that are not willing to reproduce the whole are attributed as willful – and become the potential agents of the art of willfulness.

Sara Ahmed is Professor of Race and Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. Recent book publications include: The Promise of Happiness (2010), Queer Phenomenology. Orientations, Objects, and Others (2006), The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004). Soon will be published: On Being Included. Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life.

Der Vortrag ist organisiert in Kooperation mit und finanziell unterstützt durch
Professor Beate Binder (Institut for Europäische Ethnologie und Zentrum für Transdisziplinäre Geschlechterstudien, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin).

Zeit: Donnerstag 27. Oktober 2011, 19.30
Ort: ICI Kulturlabor Berlin, Christinenstr. 18/19, Haus 8
www.ici-berlin.org
U2 Senefelder Platz

Additional Workshop with Sara Ahmed
Zeit: Freitag 28. Oktober, 10.30-13.00
Ort: Institut für Queer Theory, Werbellinstr. 50, Haus 1a

Fatima El-Tayeb
Postracial Europe? Minority Activism and the Queering of Ethnicity

This talk draws from a larger project that traces Europe-wide forms of racialization and translocal strategies of resistance to them. The latter originate (in) a queer of color identity and activism shaped by transnational movements, central among them U.S. women of color feminism and HipHop, but also rooted in very particular configurations of race, religion, colonialism, sexuality, nation and “Europeanness.” These configurations situate racialized communities in a “queer” space and time constellation that in turn provides the source for a particularly European queering of ethnicity. I will briefly sketch this larger framework, then explore the spatio-temporal queering of communities of color through a neoliberal restructuring of the city, in which the symbolic inclusion of the white LGBT community is dependent on the exclusion of people of color and on the erasure of q queer of color positionality.

Fatima El-Tayeb is associate professor in the departments of literature and ethnic studies and associate director of critical gender studies at the University of California, San Diego. Her most recent publications include European Others. Queering Ethnicity in Postnational Europe (University of Minnesota Press 2011),  “’Gays who cannot properly be gay’: Queer Muslims in the neoliberal European City,” in European Journal of Women’s Studies, 2011, and “'The Forces of Creolization.' Colorblindness and Visible Minorities in the New Europe," in Françoise Lionnet, Shu-mei Shi (eds), The Creolization of Theory, (Duke University Press 2011).

Der Vortrag ist organisiert in Kooperation mit und finanziell unterstützt durch
Gladt e.V. und Gender/Queer e.V.

Zeit: Montag 14. November 2011, 19:30
Ort: ICI Kulturlabor Berlin, Christinenstr. 18/19, Haus 8

Antonia Chao: Encountering Sexual Aliens: State Sovereignty and the Heteronormative Mechanism at Work on the Margins of Taiwan

As many scholars of migration studies have shown in their works, the increasingly complicated patterns of border-crossing activities in the contemporary age of globalization have posed a grave challenge to the feasibility of the nation-state model conventionally held by both the sending and receiving countries. Some have also highlighted the fact that gender politics plays a significant, while often hidden, role in shaping the phenomenon that is recognized generally as "the feminization of globalization."

Based on ethnographic research conducted on Taiwan's three crucial sites of national borders, this talk mines the intersections between border control, state sovereignty, national belonging and "perverted sexualities". The focus will be on three forms of subjects, perceived as “sexual aliens”, whose trans-migratory acts violate the principle of biological and heterosexual reproduction that upholds the meanings, practices and institutions of border control. The normalizing regulations imposed upon these subjects, be they "lived" or "imaginary," highlight three corresponding sites of bio-political governance at once outside of, within, and right along the borders of Taiwan's geographical territories.

While all are in keeping with the agenda of heteronormativity, these sites are situated in a distinct circuit of transnational traffic of sexualities and thus requires different modes of governance. Intentionally or coincidentally, these modes of governance coordinate with each other in helping construct a nation whose sovereignty has been in perpetual crisis within the international political community.

Antonia Chao is Professor of Sociology at Tunghai University, Taiwan. She received her PhD in cultural anthropology from Cornell University (USA) in 1996. She published widely on the politics of sexuality in Taiwan, and participated in many Southeast Asian queer conferences, for example at the „Center for the Study of Sexualities“ (National Central University, Jungli City, Taiwan, 1969), the „AsiaPacifiQueer“ (University of Technology, Sydney, 2001), or the „Sexualities, Genders, and Rights in Asia“ (Bangkok, Thailand, 2005).

The talk is organized in cooperation with and financially suported by
Prof. Sabine Hark (ZIFG, TU-Berlin).

Zeit: Tuesday 24. April 2012, 19:30
Ort: ICI Kulturlabor Berlin, Christinenstr. 18/19, Haus 8

Drucilla Cornell:
Rethinking Ethical Feminism and Sexual Politics Through uBuntu

Transnational feminism, as both an ethical ideal and an actual struggle to form political alliances, raises some of the most difficult and burning issues of what it means to challenge profound Eurocentric biases that have often stood in the way of such a coalition.Transnational alliances, particularly when including sexual politics, demand of us that we open ourselves to rethinking some of our most cherished feminist ideas, such as freedom and equality, without of course giving up on those ideals. Sometimes, when the issues are so big, they can best be examined by looking at aspecific case, and in this case an alternative non-Western (South African) ethic: uBuntu. The ethic of uBuntu raises questions about some Anglo-American assumptions about freedom, equality, and obligation. It is particularly challenging since it does not justify itself through an appeal to its indigenous roots, but instead through a claim to universality.

Drucilla Cornell is professor of Political Science, Comparative Literature, and Women's and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, a professor extraordinaire at the University of Pretoria, and a visiting lecturer at Birkbeck College, University of London. Furthermore she is the director of the uBuntu Project in South Africa.

Der Vortrag ist organisiert in Kooperation mit und finanziell unterstützt durch / The talk is organized in cooperation with and financially supported by
Prof. Mari Mikkola and Prof. Rahel Jaeggi (Institute for Philosophy, HU-Berlin).

Zeit: Tuesday May 15, 2012, 19:30
Ort: ICI Kulturlabor Berlin, Christinenstr. 18/19, Haus 8

Cathy Cohen: Race and Queer Theory in the Age of Obama

Vortrag: Dienstag 12. Juni 2012, 19.30

The talk will explore how changes in our understanding of the racialized state, as experienced in the United States in the era of President Obama for example, inform both queer theory and queer politics.  Using the examples of the campaign against bullying and the struggle for same-sex marriage in the United States, I consider how race is directly deployed or inherently influences debates and battles over the status and scope of queer subjects. Correspondingly, given the significance of race in the intimate sphere, at least in the U. S., I consider what insights might be gained from centering the work of black queer theorists and activists as academics and activists re-imagine the politics of intimacy.

Black Queer Theory and neoliberalism

Workshop: Mittwoch 13. Juni 2012, 13.00 – 17.00

In this workshop we will explore how the policies and rhetoric of neoliberalism impact and reshape the intimate sphere, using it as a site for state intervention while deploying the language of privatization.  This use of the intimate sphere as a site of regulation is not new.  For example, the intimate sphere has always been a heightened domain of regulation for racialized marginal communities.  Understanding this, what lessons can we learn from the history of struggle in African-American communities over issues such as sex, desire and family?  Specifically, we will explore what interventions in theory and practice might be developed from black queer theory to challenge the attack on or use of the intimate sphere in neoliberalism.

Please register for the workshop / bitte anmelden: mail@queer-institut.de

Cathy Cohen (Professor of Political Science, University of Chicago) is the author of the groundbreaking 2005 essay “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens” that has inspired much reflection and response from queer of color as well as critical whiteness thought. In the essay, Cohen criticizes the all-too-simple binary of “queer” versus “straight” and pleads for queer theory and politics to be more attentive to the complex and intertwined power relations of, for instance, sexuality, race, and class. In her early book, The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (1999), she addresses the tensions between NGO and black community organizing, state politics, and the needs of individuals in relation to HIV/AIDS politics and policies. In her most recent book, Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics (2010), Cohen presents a detailed analysis of the racialized and often still racist power dynamics in contemporary US politics that draws on the actual voices of black youth. In her talk, she will connect this understanding of the racialized state to neoliberal developments and the specific forms they take “in the age of Obama.”

Der Vortrag ist organisiert in Kooperation mit und finanziell unterstützt durch / The talk is organized in cooperation with and financially supported by
Institut für Politikwissenschaft der Freien Universität Berlin (Prof. Cilja Harders) & Zentraleinrichtung zur Förderung von Frauen- und Geschlechterforschung an der Freien Universität Berlin.