Präsentation und Diskussion von und mit Antke A. Engel (in English)

Mi 23. August 2023, 16:00 – 18:00 CET, online

This presentation proposes planetary pluralism as a vision, as modalities of social organizing as well as institutional forms, and potentially a political system. When built upon the principle of queerversity, planetary pluralism acknowledges not only diversity but conflictual heterogeneity, and fosters cohabitation as a state of living with conflict. Living with conflict, however, does not mean submitting to conflict, but looking for practices and politics of embracing conflict as an impulse for transforming relations of power and domination: queer cultures of conflict, that is?

graphic by sophie spiral

Planetary pluralism is a form of pluralism that supports cohabitation of all non/human and more-than-human beings, while following a denormalizing, yet egalitarian perspective of what I call trans*versal justice. Avoiding a depoliticized celebration of diversity, queerversity not only points out hierarchies and inequalities inherent to social heterogeneity. It also embraces (and politicizes) non-categorizable, inassimilable difference, here called alterity, the irreducible otherness of the other. Planetary pluralism refrains from liberal individualism and meritocracy. Instead, a power-sensitive attention to relational interdependencies, to desiring relations as well as interlocking systems of domination, oppression, and violence organizes political analysis and practice.

I will introduce the principle of queerversity, discuss the planetary and pluralism by themselves, and then explain how I see queerversity linking the planetary and pluralism for enabling what I call queerverse cohabitation.

Guiding questions are:

• Is it possible to propose planetary pluralism as a political system, without universalizing it in a neocolonial way and imposing ‘one model for all’?
• Along which criteria do we differentiate between neo/liberal, socialist, radical, or authoritarian pluralism, and the different state or institutional forms used to take or may take in the future?
• What is the role of queerversity in finding answers to these questions?

A meeting of iQt’s international colloquium Queer Arts and Politics  – OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Please register to receive the link for online participation: mail (at) queer-institut.de