SUMMER INSTITUTE

FOR SEXUALITIES, CULTURES, AND POLITICS

QUEERNESS, COMMUNITY, AND CAPITAL:

TOWARDS NEW ALLIANCES OF THE POLITICAL

(August 13-18 2012, Skopje, Macedonia)

organized by
Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities “Euro-Balkan” (Skopje, Macedonia)
in cooperation with
Faculty for Media and Communications at Singidunum University (Belgrade, Serbia)

PROGRAMME SECTIONS

Programme Section 1: Queerness, the Political and Community (Lecturers: David M. Halperin, Jelisaveta Blagojević)

This programme subject will try to research, discuss and problematize the complex interweaving of sexuality, politics and community. The lectures and discussion will try to explore the position of sexuality in relation to hegemonic forms of communities, and community, in its Western conception, in general. Thus, some of the core problems that will be addressed include the imaginaries, discourses and institutional practices strategically deployed in communist, as well as nationalist utopian and communitarian projects, in relation to marginal and non-hegemonic sexualities (practices, communities and identities) and non- normative bodies. Further, these communal experiences will be regarded, differentiated or aligned, in relation to the contemporary European communal ideals and inspirations, and will further explore the impact these political apparatuses have on sexual struggles for justice and recognition. Of particular importance will be the exploration of the entanglements of governmentality tactics and biopolitical dispositives and the construction and proliferation of sexual identities, as much as their compliance or resistance to sexual normalizations.

Departing from contemporary political theories and political philosophy’s scholarship, the programme will further investigate the following subtopics: Queerness and the redefinition of the Political; State utopias, justice, jurisdiction and queer sufferings; Community immunization and queer exposures; Homonationalisms and (neo)liberalisms; What is the political in queer politics?, etc.

Programme Section 2: (Queer) Arts, Culture, and Resistance (Lecturer: Marina Gržinić)

The lectures, presentations and discussions covered by this programme subject will try to think about and analyze the multiple cross-cuttings of artistic practices and cultural production with the sexual regimes defining the common, which is to say who belongs and who does not belong to a community?, which emotions and relations are considered as legible?, which bodies are rendered visible and whose statements are registered as audible? Departing from a variety of traditional art practices, through new media deployment, cultural activism, participatory art, different art collectives, performing and video arts, interventionist artistic actions and practices of reclaiming public spaces, artists and cultural workers and activists, we will explore the entire spectrum of tactics and strategies, forms and media, topics and modes of representation deployed and how do they contest and reconfigure the dominant political modes of sexual hierarchy, organization and framing of the common(s) and community. Not only being a medium for representation, art and cultural practices are to be observed as fields for making, instituting and creating, and thus their potential for transfiguring the dominant regimes of sexual visibility and publics will be saliently explored. Besides the actualized capacity for breaking with the existing regimes of relations and making communities otherwise, artworks will be also critically explored in their being the symbolic and cultural apparatus for moral and didactic political and sexual appeal as well as for sustaining current status quo in the dominant modes of communal relations and sexual inequalities. In this regard, a question of particular importance will be how current global position of arts and creative cultures, in relation to neo-liberal and consumerist demands, influence cultural practices and aesthetic regimes of resistance and critique in the field of sexuality.
Furthermore, not only art, but multiplicity of cultural forms and Media cutting through the limits of community, assigning roles and distributing parts, such as pamphlets, billboards, city lights, media and video campaigns, public spaces, social networks etc. will be scrutinized as cultural practices sustaining sexual normalizations, but also as potential tools for undoing sexual hegemonies.

Programme Section 3: Queering the General Strike and the Occupation (Lecturer: Jamie Heckert)

What has emerged as a “movement” – the Occupy Movement – finds itself in a complex existential state: how does a movement define itself in the process its own emergence? How does a leaderless movement addresses society without authority? Occupy bears the mark of radical disidentification which runs both risks – of self-dissolution and conceptual expansionism, just as some 20 years ago queer theory emerged as an “X” which has to be saturated analytically but has been recognized as existential and ontological hybridity. This resemblance has been already noted (for example by Michael Warner) and raises pressing concerns related with the organization of the multitude.

Namely, how radically open is – and could be – the Occupy? How does the notion of occupation change when communal and micropolitical interests are inscribed in it – what makes the occupation queer? Is identity politics deconstructed from within inside Occupy? What is the status of queer – particular, universal, zeroed? – in the collective social choreographies of the general strike and the general intellect? Is Queer too theoretical and closed a concept to be used as theoretical and conceptual strategy of paradoxic principle of self-organizing?

SUMMER SCHOOL

FOR SEXUALITIES, CULTURES, AND POLITICS

IPAK Center and Faculty for Media and Communications, Singidunum Univeristy, Belgrade
18-24 August 2014, Belgrade, Serbia

This year, we offer following courses and events
 

Course 1: Wild Bodies: Gender, Sexuality and Power 
(Lecturer: Jack Halberstam)

In this course we will read contemporary theorists of the body and power to articulate understandings of relations between the state and sexuality; embodiment, will and agency; race, class, mobility and power. This course draws on feminist and queer theory to explore the production of gender and sexuality in relation to a variety of debates about race, nation, human/animal divides, temporality, spatiality, sentiment, disciplinarity and posthumanism. Topics to be addressed include the following:  the formation of discourses of masculinity and femininity and of “perverse” and “respectable” sexualities, under colonial and nationalist regimes; the role of female subjects as both symbols of the nation and active agents in nationalist struggles; the shifting paradigms of gender and sexuality in the context of diaspora and globalization; the possibilities and limits of a queer or feminist framework that spans different geographic contexts; the production of pedagogical methods within feminist theory; the role of gender in debates about the status of the animal; the relations between gender, sexuality and feelings. This class is interdisciplinary in method and scope, as we will examine a variety of cultural texts including theoretical essays, novels, and films.

Course 2: Derrida’s Queer Bio-Politics
(Lecturer: Eszter Timar)

In these two lectures I will try to see how Derridean deconstruction can enrich our understanding of the political tropes of sexuality and gendered embodiment. While Derrida’s oeuvre is sometimes considered to take on a heterogeneity of questions of varying political degree (viewing the early works less and the later works more politically or ethically concerned), one way Derrida was consistent over his works is that he consistently preferred to use terms belonging to what he called the lexicon of biology while discussing the politics of meaning-making in general. His insistence of exploring and deploying the lexicon of the living organism as always already metaphorical is a resource for thinking the regulatory terms of embodiment as always to some extent untethered from the semantic field of the gendered body conceived as pre-social. In the first lecture, I will reread some of David Halperin’s classical texts on the sexual regulations of citizenship in classical Athens through the lens of “Plato’s Pharmacy” to suggest that a disparaging discourse on sycophancy is central in constructing queerly embodied visions of political inauthenticity (the most salient example of this is the figure of the citizen prostitute). In the second lecture, I will look at further examples which are homologous to the way queer figures fit into this discourse of sycophancy but which themselves do not connote queer embodiment: the figure of the actor in the discourse of antitheatricality and the concept of the placebo. In pointing out the consistency with which the figure of the prostitute (as effeminate man), the sycophant, the actor, and the concept of placebo are constructed as a different manifestation of the same failure of political inauthenticity, I will argue that deconstruction can effectively show not only the construction of normal bodies at the cost of excluding some bodies as abnormal, but that the political rhetoric of inauthenticity organizes the logic of life in general.

Course 3: "The world is gone, I must carry you": Daring the Shock of EMUN (Trust). On the Transjective Subreal in Art and Psychoanalysis
(Lecturer: Bracha L. Ettinger)

In the course of two mornings, Bracha L. Ettinger will present the concepts of Eros of borderlinking and wit(h)nessing, and explain the difference between inter-subjectivity and transubjectivity in order to further articulate the human subject as informed by the matrixial-feminine-maternal dimension. Bracha will deal with the relations between trauma, joy and the work of the memory of oblivion, as well as between beauty and the wound, and elaborate on her concept of love intermingled with primary compassion and awe in com-passion, and on the weave composed by the Hebrew words for care, trust and fidelity (as affects and enactments), truth-knowing, art-working and maternality.

Students will come to face directly her newest artwork and meet her current thoughts offered in her unique poetic language, style and formats of expression, worked out in relation to her practice as artist, painter and video-films maker, and as a profound scholar of Freud and Lacan. A reading of Levinas, with whom Bracha also had a project (partly published and partly unpublished yet) in conversation, will be included, as well as an original interpretation of Lacan's passage on the “lamella”. In the course of this presentation Bracha will challenge ideas of other post-Lacanian philosophers from the contemporary French tradition: Badiou and Kristeva. All along, references to other Ettingerian ideas such as translucent transcendency of the kernel of the Thing, matrixial encounter-event, fascinance, the contemporary human subject and more will be clarified so that her most recent thought will be contextualized in the larger field she has developed over the years, in an engaged search to explore and enlarge the aesthetical and the ethical spheres of our lives.

Bracha L. Ettinger and the students will discuss together the pertinence of the psychoanalytical Unconscious and sexual difference in general and her matrixial psychoanalysis and philosophy in more details, for rethinking art, society, the fragility of the self and the vulnerability of the other in the 21th century. The students will have the possibility to present their own work to the group and have a discussion together with Bracha during two afternoons.

Call for Applications

IPAK Center and Faculty for Media and Communications, Singidunum Univeristy, Belgrade invites you to apply for the Summer School for Sexualities, Cultures, and Politics. The 2014 Summer School will take place at the Faculty of Media and Communications in Belgrade, from 18-24 August, 2014.

Program contains three courses :

Jack Halberstam (University of Southern California, USA):
Wild Bodies: Gender, Sexuality and Power (18-19.08)

Eszter Timar (Central European Umiversity, Budapest, Hungary):
Derrida’s Queer Bio-Politics (20-21.08)

Bracha L. Ettinger (European Graduate School, Saas-Fe, Switzerland):
"The world is gone, I must carry you": Daring the Shock of EMUN (Trust).
On the Transjective Subreal in Art and Psychoanalysis (23-24.08)

We encourage postgraduate students (preferably MA or PhD student or young researchers) interested in exploring the issues of Gender, Queer, Cultural Studies, Visual Arts and Humanities and related areas. However, outstanding BA students are also considered and have the chance to enroll.
Participants from all countries are eligible to apply.
Artists, curators and cultural workers are also invited to apply.  

Deadline 1 for early applications (20% discount):
April 20th / selection results by April 30th / payment due May 15th
Deadline 2 for early applications (10% discount):
May 20th / selection results by May 31th / payment due June 15th 
Deadline 3 (regular fee): 
June 20 th  / selection results by June 30th / payment due July 15th

Application form and tuition information are all now available on our website and Facebook page.

OHRID SUMMER UNIVERSITY 2013

SUMMER INSTITUTE

FOR SEXUALITIES, CULTURES, AND POLITICS

(August 15-21 2013, Ohrid, Macedonia)

organized by
Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities “Euro-Balkan” (Skopje, Macedonia)
in cooperation with
Faculty for Media and Communications at Singidunum University (Belgrade, Serbia)

IN 2013, WE OFFERED FOLLOWING COURSES AND EVENTS

Course 2: Desire, Power and Fantasy (Lecturer: Antke Engel)

How does queer theory reflect upon the relationship between desire and power? Queer theory provides analysis of desire fueling and/or subverting social power relations, but also of gendered, sexualized, and racialized social powers constituting specific understandings and practices of desire. The aim of the course is to understand how desire can function simultaneously as a most conservative force that reproduces hierarchically gendered and normatively heterosexual social relationships, as well as a promising force that drives transformative imagination, social experimentation, and engagement in new technologies of the self. In order to understand this simultaneity one needs to consider the central role of fantasy in queer concepts of desire. Fantasies, intertwining social stereotypes with personal, idiosyncratic imagery and affect, influence subject constitution as well as macro-political processes such as the economy and the state.To what extent do we need to think about the double- edged interplay of power and desire in order to foster socio-political transformations?

My particular interest concerning my own approach as well as the students’ work lies in combining theoretical concepts and cultural material. For that matter I would like to suggest one or two theoretical texts as reading material for each day and engage those in order to discuss a film, video, or visual art work, which we watch together in class.

Course 3: The Violence of Inclusion and the Ethics of Betrayal

(Lecturer: Tomasz Sikora)

Is not it ironic that at a time when same-sex marriage or other so-called civil rights are being progressively extended onto “gay subjects” across the world’s liberal democracies, one observes a concomitant growing opposition to these developments among more “radical” queer thinkers, activist’s and artists? Doesn’t this, in fact, amount to a “radical drag” that effectively turns into conservatism and a betrayal of the ideals of equality and inclusion? Isn’t queer, decadently, turning against itself? These are paradoxical times, indeed: a tolerance of (a straight concept) of “homosexuality” is becoming not only normative, but even essentialized as part of the modern liberal-humanist identity that continues to distinguish itself against its barbaric “others” (see, for example, the phenomenon of “pink washing”). No wonder that much of queer reflection today is shifting away from its more traditional critique of social, political and cultural exclusion toward a critique of dominant forms of inclusion. Thus, it is of vital importance that we recognize how difference in general, and queerness in particular, are getting subsumed under, folded into, and functionalized by the grand project of liberalism that comprises a) the political framework of representative democracy with its “politics of recognition,” b) the economic framework of a global “free market” and its fetishistic “free choice” philosophy, c) the imperialistic, neo-colonial notions of universal humanism, and d) a particular essentialist view of “human nature” that serves to justify and legitimize all of the above, implicitly or explicitly.

One of the key queer questions today can be formulated as not so much the question of belonging versus unbelonging or inclusion versus exclusion (these are not simple binary oppositions, anyway) as the question of queer (dis)loyalties. How, indeed, can we imagine “queer loyalty” today? To what kind of “common good,” what kind of “us,” what kind of future? Is queer loyalty being traded off in exchange for the liberal state’s formal concessions, such as legalizing same-sex marriage? Can a “negativist” betrayal or boycott of the existing forms of sociality and polity (see the case of Bradley Manning) be considered an instance of loyalty to a radically queer social impulse, to a “future unprogrammed by its past,” to use Wortham’s Derrida-inspired phrase? Could that be a post-capitalistic, and yet not apocalyptic, future? What if queer loyalty is attached less to whatever (received) entities, constituencies and organized wholes, and more to the very transversal movements of desire? I propose to consider a queer ethics of betrayal, where “ethics” is certainly not supposed to be read as any normative model, but rather as a rhetorical gesture whose aim is to disconnect betrayal from the opprobrium it often, too often, evokes.