SUMMER SCHOOL FOR

SEXUALITIES, CULTURES AND POLITICS

(August 18-24, 2014, Belgrade, Serbia)

organized by
IPAK.Center - Research Center for Cultures, Politics and Identities

in cooperation with
Faculty for Media and Communications, Singidunum University, Belgrade, Serbia

FACULTY AND STAFF:

Lecturers:
• Jack Halberstam (University of Southern California, CA, USA)
• Eszter Timár (Central European University, Budapest, Hungary)
• Bracha L. Ettinger (European Graduate School, Saas-Fee, Switzerland)

Special Guest Lecturer:
• Tomasz Sikora (Pedagogical University of Cracow, Poland)

Special Artist Appearance:
• Velimir Žernovski (FRIK, Skopje, Macedonia)

Staff:
• Jelisaveta Blagojević (SSSCP Director, IPAK.Center/Singidunum University, Belgrade, Serbia)
• Stanimir Panayotov (SSSCP Coordinator, IPAK.Center/Central European University, Budapest, Hungary)
• Slavčo Dimitrov (SSSCP Coordinator, IPAK.Center)
• Anđela Čeh (SSSCP Coordinator, IPAK.Center)
• Mirjana Stošić (Guest Moderator, IPAK.Center)
• Milica Mirazić (Guest Moderator, University of Belgrade, Serbia)
• Katarina Lončarević (Guest Moderator, University of Belgrade, Serbia)
• Tatjana Popovic (Finances Officer, IPAK. Center)

Other staff: Nikola Herman (IPAK.Center), Milka Vasilijević (IPAK.Center), Jovana Timotijević (IPAK.Center)

Locations:
• FMK at Singidunum University (Address: 65 Karađorđeva Str.)
• Cultural Center Rex (Address: 16 Jevrejska Str.)
• Cultural Center Grad (Address: 4 Braće Krsmanović Str.)

PROGRAMME:

17 August (Sunday)
Arrival of participants

18 August (Monday)
Course 1 by Jack Halberstam: Wild Bodies: Gender, Sexuality and Power

09.45-10.20: Registration of participants (FMK, 5th floor)
10:20: Welcome note by the organizers
10:30-11:30: Lecture by Jack Halberstam: Sexuality, Race, Coloniality
11:30-12:00: Coffee Break
12:00-12:45: Discussion
12:45-15:00: Lunch Break
15:00-17:30: Afternoon Seminar and Presentations
Chair: Jack Halberstam, Moderator: Prof. Jelisaveta Blagojević
15:00-15:30: Frida Lyonga: Shades of Homophobia: A Framework for Analyzing Negative Attitudes towards Homosexuality
15:30-16:00: Darja Davydova: States of Rescue, and Other Desires: Eastern European Migrant Sex Workers in Contemporary Film
16:00-16:30: Coffee Break
16:30-17:00: Anja Kocman: Sexism in the Slovenian Choral Music Scene
17:00-17:30: Laura Jorgensen: “I Want To Be Normal”: Representations of Gender and Sexuality in the Music of Former Yugoslavia
20:00: SSSCP 2014 Welcome Party and official opening of Velimir Žernovski’s project Pieta at Cultural Center Rex

19 August (Tuesday)
Course 1 by Jack Halberstam: Wild Bodies: Gender, Sexuality and Power

10:30-11:30: Lecture by Jack Halberstam: Bio-Politics, Utopia, Dystopia
11:30-12:00: Coffee Break
12:00-12:45: Discussion
12:45-15:00: Lunch Break
15:00-17:00: Afternoon Seminar and Presentations
Chair: Jack Halberstam, Moderators: Prof. Jelisaveta Blagojević and Katarina Lončarević
15:00-15:30: Chiara Pignedoli: Do It Yourself: Drag King Architectures
15:30-16:00: Antonia Anna Ferante: In Drag We Trust: Queer Bonds and Normative Drives in Ru Paul’s Drag Race
16:00-16:30: Coffee Break
16:30-17:00: Hari Byles: On the Toilet: Epistemologies of the Water Closet

20 August (Wednesday)
Course 2 by Eszter Timár: Derrida’s Queer Bio-Politics

10:30-11:30: Lecture by Eszter Timár: Derrida’s Queer Bio-Politics, Part 1
11:30-12:00: Coffee Break
12:00-12:45: Discussion
12:45-15:00: Lunch Break
15:00-17:30: Afternoon Seminar and Presentations
Chair: Eszter Timár, Moderator: Stanimir Panayotov
15:00-15:30: Steph Rogerson: Queer Archives
15:30-16:00: Marius Henderson: (An Anagram of) Notes on Queer “Necro” Practices and Sensibilities
16:00-16:30: Coffee Break
16:30-17:00: Thomas Muzart: Pornography Must Be Defended: Resisting Sexual Hierarchies, Creating New Subjectivities
17:00-17:30: Jennifer Vilchez: Hard to Swallow: Porn Star James Deen’s Arousing Work and Young Women Fandom
19:30: Open Lecture by Jack Halberstam at FMK: On Behalf of Failure
Discussion Moderators: Slavčo Dimitrov and Stanimir Panayotov

21 August (Thursday)
Course 2 by Eszter Timár: Derrida’s Queer Bio-Politics

10:30-11:30: Lecture by Eszter Timár: Derrida’s Queer Bio-Politics, Part 2
11:30-12:00: Coffee Break
12:00-12:45: Discussion
12:45-15:00: Lunch Break
15:00-17:30: Afternoon Seminar and Presentations
Chair: Eszter Timár, Moderator: Slavčo Dimitrov
15:00-15:30: Axel Gonzalez: The Potentials of Queer Theory in Foreign Language Instruction
15:30-16:00: Azra Husanović: Promising Spaces in Leslie Feinberg’s Stone Butch Blues: Gender Theory Lessons from “Real Life”
16:00-16:30: Coffee Break
16:30-17:00: Melisa Slipac: When a Woman Loves a Woman: Lesbian Love and Homosexual Desire in Ajla Terzić’s Novel Mogla je biti prosta priča [Could Have Been A Simple Story]
17:00-17:30: Christine Mangan: Unspeakable Narratives: Sodomitical Discourse in Francis Lathom’s The Midnight Bell
21:00: Official SSSCP 2014 Party at Cultural Center Grad with performance by IPAK.Choir and DJ JTKT.Crew

22 August (Friday)
Free day!
OPTIONAL: BELGRADE CITY GUIDED TOUR. A SIGN-UP LIST WILL BE PROVIDED ON AUGUST 18.

23 August (Saturday)
Course 3 by Bracha L. Ettinger: “The World Is Gone, I Must Carry You”: Daring the Shock of EMUN (Trust). On the Transjective Subreal in Art and Psychoanalysis

10:30-11:30: Lecture by Bracha L. Ettinger: To Become Humane (ENOSH - אנש, Heb.) - To Carry (NOSSEE - נשא, Heb.). Daring the Shock of Trust (EMUN – אמן, Heb.). Art and Trust after the end of Trust
11:30-12:00: Coffee Break
12:00-12:45: Discussion
12:45-15:00: Lunch Break
15:00-17:30: Afternoon Seminar and Presentations
Chair: Bracha L. Ettinger, Moderator: Milica Mirazić
15:00-15:30: Anna Wates: Grieving as Political Action: Narratives of Loss in the UK Disability Rights Movement
15:30-16:00: France Rose: The Space in Between: The Deconstruction of Gender through Art
16:00-16:30: Coffee Break
16:30-17:00: Claire Finch: Mutating France’s Queer Territories
17:00-17:30: Monica Guerreiro: Intense, Animal, Imperceptible: Deleuze, Guattari and Agamben in Vera Mantero’s Dance Solo “One Mysterious Thing, Said e.e. cummings”
19:30: Open Interactive Lecture by Tomasz Sikora at FMK: Living with an Alien; or, (Again) Against Representation
Discussion Moderators: Slavčo Dimitrov and Stanimir Panayotov

24 August (Sunday)
Course 3 by Bracha L. Ettinger: “The World Is Gone, I Must Carry You”: Daring the Shock of EMUN (Trust). On the Transjective Subreal in Art and Psychoanalysis

10:30-11:30: Lecture by Bracha L. Ettinger: Subrealism and Transrealism
11:30-12:00: Coffee Break
12:00-12:45: Discussion
12:45-15:00: Lunch Break
15:00-17:30: Afternoon Seminar and Presentations
Chair: Bracha L. Ettinger, Moderator: Prof. Mirjana Stošić
15:00-15:30: Aleksandra Andrzejewska: Anxiety and Art
15:30-16:00: Olga Kasyanova: A Human-Being in the Russian Contemporary Art-House
16:00-16:30: Coffee Break
16:30-17:00: Iva Dimovska: Rethinking the Notion of Writing through Shame’s Queer Performativity
17:00-17:30: Kamila Kolebacz: Affects in Aleksandra Waliszewska’s Artistic Creation
17:30-17:45: Break
17:45-18:80: Handing of certificates

25 August (Monday)
Departure of participants

COURSES DESCRIPTION

Course 1 by Jack Halberstam: Wild Bodies: Gender, Sexuality and Power

• Lecture 1: Sexuality, Race, Coloniality
• Lecture 2: Bio-Politics, Utopia, Dystopia

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 by Eszter Timár: Derrida’s Queer Bio-Politics

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 by Bracha L. Ettinger: "The World Is Gone, I Must Carry You": Daring the Shock of EMUN (Trust). On the Transjective Subreal in Art and Psychoanalysis

• Lecture 1: To Become Humane (ENOSH - אנש, Heb.) - To Carry (NOSSEE - נשא, Heb.). Daring the Shock of Trust (EMUN – אמן, Heb.). Art and Trust after the end of Trust
• Lecture 2: Subrealism and Transrealism

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 oflove 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 will suggest a radical re-thinking of both the subject and the human being: I am thence I was carried. I am therefore I carry; I am thence I was carried in the Real. I am therefore I carry in the Symbolic. She will articulate the feminine-maternal-matrixial ethical position through the conjunction of the Hebrew signifiers Carry (Hebrew letters: Nun.Shin.Alef), Human (Alef.Nun.Shin), Trust (Hebrew letters: Alef.Mem.Nun) and Caring-nursing-supporting (Hebrew letters: Alef.Mem.Nun). One of Ettinger’s touch points will be the early Kabbala and the Bible – Genesis 4 (Cain and Abel).
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.

OPEN LECTURES

Open Lecture by Jack Halberstam: On Behalf of Failure

Why argue on behalf of failure? How might we make a case for failure that does not reinstate the zero-sum logics of success? What are the politics of failure and how might failure offer us a methodology for queer studies? Does failure offer an epistemological framework that allows for different distributions of merit, value and relevance? Should we, to quote Beckett, fail well and fail often and if so, how?
Without proposing to answer all of these questions, I do want to take a stab at a few of them as a way of beginning a conversation about failure, its uses, its abuses, the angle it offers us on human action and inaction and the potential dangers of thinking with and through failure as they are unevenly distributed across populations. So, I will proceed through about 3 sections each framed by a question, explained by way of an example and summarized in relation to some counter-intuitive lessons about life, loss and the exquisite texture of losing.

Open Interactive Lecture by Tomasz Sikora: Living with an Alien; or, (Again) Against Representation

The lecture (or lecture-performance) proposes a politics of queer that draws from (theorizations of) art and aesthetics rather than from the liberal-legalistic vocabulary of recognition, representation and rights. Just as an avant-garde artist, by creating modes of signification and relationality that do not fall into a pre-existing framework of legibility, addresses a (virtual) audience that is yet to come (and thus faces a high risk of failure, as the audience may never come to materialize, after all), so – arguably – queer activism (and queer theory) performs a politics that is “not the terrain of the representation of a people […] but of their creation,” to use Nicholas Thoburn’s characterization of the Deleuzo-Guattarian concept of “minor politics,” i.e. a politics where “the people are missing.” Or, as Julia Kristeva puts it (paraphrasing Albert Camus), “I revolt, therefore we are to come.” Not that questions of access, privilege and (re)distribution (especially the distribution of “livability”) become irrelevant in this perspective; on the contrary, it is precisely through these questions (“I revolt”) that the queer “politics without a people” can articulate, or – better – materialize itself at all. This (possibly unintelligible) articulation and materialization is a matter of intensity, not of representation. To put my argument rather formulaically, just as art never ceases to create (ontologically) “queer objects” (with a broad definition of object), so queer politics never ceases to create queer practices, subjectivities and socialities beyond the current liberal-humanist epistemological normativities. While all of the above may sound rather abstract, I hope to make my points clearer by illustrating them with specific examples from (mostly Polish) LGBT(Q?) activism and (not only Polish) art.

BIOS

Jack Halberstam (University of Southern California, CA, USA)

Jack Halberstam is Professor of American Studies and Ethnicity, Gender Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. Halberstam is the author of five books including: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Duke UP, 1995), Female Masculinity (Duke UP, 1998), In A Queer Time and Place (NYU Press, 2005), The Queer Art of Failure (Duke UP, 2011) and Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal (Beacon Press, 2012) and has written articles that have appeared in numerous journals, magazines and collections. Halberstam has co-edited a number of anthologies including Posthuman Bodies with Ira Livingston (Indiana University Press, 1995) and a special issue of Social Text with Jose Munoz and David Eng titled “What’s Queer About Queer Studies Now?”. Jack is a popular speaker and gives lectures around the country and internationally every year. Lecture topics include: queer failure, sex and media, subcultures, visual culture, gender variance, popular film, animation. Halberstam is currently working on several projects including a book titled The Wild on queer anarchy, performance and protest culture, the visual representation of anarchy and the intersections between animality, the human and the environment.

Eszter Timár (Central European University, Budapest, Hungary)

Eszter Timár is assistant professor of Gender Studies at Central European University, Budapest. She received her Ph.D. in comparative literature from Emory University. Her research focuses on Derridean analyses of fraternity, sexuality, and embodiment. She is working on a book manuscript on the shared tropes of democratic citizenship and male homosexuality; her articles on Derridean autoimmunity and recent scientific developments in immunology appeared and are forthcoming in Parallax, The Glossator and Inter Alia: A Journal of Queer Studies.

Bracha L. Ettinger (European Graduate School, Saas-Fee, Switzerland)

After recent solo exhibitions in the Musée des Beaux-Arts d'Angers; in Casco, Utrecht; in Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona; and in the Museum of History Museum in St. Petersburg (2010-2013), and a recent group exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw (2013-2014) – and on her way to solo exhibitions in three museums in Mexico (Mexico City, Guanajuato and Toluca 2014-2015), Bracha L. Ettinger will give a seminar at Faculty of Media and Communications, Singidunum University, Belgrade. Bracha is a prominent international artist, a painter who, working in series (Eurydice, No Title Yet, Medusa, Crazy Woman, Family Album) around personal and trans-generational trauma and the links between feminine/maternal/matrixial unconscious and cosmic consciousness, and researching in different techinques, the majorly in oil painting, the color as light and lines as the inscription of traces of events and their loss, has developed new paths in contemporary figurative and abstract painting. She participated in many international exhibitions including elles@centrepompidou, Centre G. Pompidou, Paris, 2010-2011; ARS06 Biennial, KIASMA Museum, Helsinki 2006; Face à l'Histoire, Centre G. Pompidou, Paris, 1996; Inside the Visible, ICA, Boston, 1996, National Museum for Women in the Arts, Washington, 1996, Whitechapel, London,1997; and her solo exhibitions includes Freud Museum, London, 2009; The Drawing Center, New York, 2001; BOZAR – Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, 2000.
Both artist and a distinguished thinker and psychoanalyst, Bracha L. Ettinger, who lives and works between Paris and Tel Aviv, is one of the world’s leading psychoanalytic theorists in the realm of the sexual difference and French feminism, whose writings have influenced film and literary thinking, queer studies, art and art history thinking in the last twenty years. Bracha developed a series of concepts for rethinking the Unconscious, including the matrixial time, space and gaze and metramorphosis, which led to a new understanding of both the feminine body-psyche and the human subject. She is the author of a long series of articles and few books including Matrix. Halal(a) – Lapsus. Notes on Painting 1985-1992 (MOMA Oxford, 1993) and The Matrixial Borderspace (Univ. of Minnesota Press 2006). She is the co-author of few books of conversations, with Emmanuel Levinas (Moma Oxford 1993 and Athena, 2006), Edmond Jabes (Israel Museum, 1991 and Moma Oxford 1993) and Christian Boltanski (Israel Museum 1989 and Artist's Book 1991).
Recent monographs dedicated to her art include: Art in the Time-Space of Memory and Migration: Sigmund Freud, Anna Freud and Bracha L. Ettinger in the Freud Museum, by Griselda Pollock (with forward by Andrew Benjamin), 2013; Kabinet Ω: Bracha L. Ettinger, edited by Olesya Turkina and Victor Mazin (with texts by Nicolas Bourriaud, Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Judith Butler, Bracha L. Ettinger, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Griselda Pollock and the editors), 2013; Bracha L. Ettinger: Art as Compassion, edited by Catherine de Zegher and Griselda Pollock (with texts by Christine Buci-Glucksmann, Judith Butler, Rosi Huhn, Erin Manning and the editors), 2011.
Bracha Ettinger is the “Marcel Duchamp” Chair and professor at the Media and Communication, European Graduate School; faculty member of the Global Center for Advanced Studies; training psychoanalyst at TAICP and member of the Lacanian WAP and NLS, and activist in the Physicians for Human Rights.

Tomasz Sikora (Pedagogical University of Cracow, Poland)

Tomasz Sikora is Assistant Professor at the English Department of the Pedagogical University of Cracow (Poland). In the years 2000-2006 he co-organized, together with Tomasz Basiuk and Dominika Ferens, a series of conferences that introduced queer theory into the Polish academic landscape. Three volumes of essays collected some of the work inspired by the conferences: Odmianyodmienca/A Queer Mixture (2002), Parametrypozadania [Parameters of Desire] (2006), and Out Here: Local and International Perspectives in Queer Studies (2006). The collaboration between Sikora, Basiuk and Ferens found continuation in the creation and management of the online journal of queer studies Inter Alia (published in English and Polish), which has run six issues so far. Sikora also published Virtually Wild: Wilderness, Technology and the Ecology of Mediation (2003) and Bodies Out of Rule: Transversal Readings in Canadian Literature and Film (2014), as well as co-edited a number of volumes on American and Canadian studies, including Embracing Otherness: Canadian Minority Discourses in Transcultural Perspectives (2010) and Towards Critical Multiculturalism: Dialogues Between/Among Canadian Diasporas (2011). His main areas of research and publication include critical and queer theory, interdisciplinary American and Canadian studies, political philosophy, ecocriticism, and gothicism. He is also a part-time blogger, journalist and amateur photographer.

Velimir Žernovski (FRIK, Skopje, Macedonia)

Velimir Žernovski (1981, Skopje, Macedonia) is a Belgrade-based artist and is one of the most active artists in the region. Through the media of drawings, videos, installations, object installations in public space, writing and publishing artist books he is exploring notions of identity, urbanity and popular culture as well as sexuality and gender identity.
Graduated at the Faculty of Fine Arts, Ss. Cyril and Methodius University - Skopje. Currently, he is MA candidate at the Department of Cultural Studies at “Euro-Balkan” Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities Research in Skopje.
He realized solo exhibitions in: New York (2010, 2012), Paris (2011), Vienna (2009, 2011), Frieburg (2009), Skopje (2006, 2007, 2010, 2012, 2013); Belgrade (2014); he took part in group exhibitions in Slovenia, Kosovo, Austria, Germany, The Netherlands, Macedonia, Serbia, Turkey and USA. He curated and co-curated several projects and exhibitions and participated in many international projects and collaborations.
He was working as a curatorial assistant at press to exit project space-specific project of the Swiss Cultural Program in Macedonia, worked as a researcher at University Euro-Balkan and actively participating in the program of The Coalition “Sexual and Health Rights of Marginalized Communities” where he is working as a project coordinator. Since 2013 Žernovski is co-founder of IPAK.Center - Research Center for Cultures, Politics and Identities in Belgrade, Serbia.
Since 2008 Zernovski is co-founder and president of FRIK Cultural Initiatives Development Formation, an organization which is working on motivation of socially engaged art production and society democratization, beyond prejudices and stereotypes.

SUMMER SCHOOL BACKGROUND

The Summer School for Sexualities, Cultures and Politics is a permanent project, originally initiated by the Department for Gender Studies at the Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities “Euro-Balkan”, Skopje, Macedonia and the Faculty of Media and Communications at Singidunum University, Belgrade, Serbia. In 2014, the School has moved to and was taken up organizationally by IPAK Center. It has been founded with great enthusiastic efforts, relentless dedication to queer and gender studies research and a restless desire for introducing and revising hegemonic theories of sexuality and gender in SEE, and the ex-Yugoslav region. The Summer School for Sexualities, Cultures and Politics is the result of a years-long academic collaboration and friendship between Slavčo Dimitrov (queer theory scholar from Macedonia), Stanimir Panayotov (queer theory and philosophy scholar from Bulgaria), being the academic coordinators of the School, and Prof. Jelisaveta Blagojević (queer theory and political philosophy scholar from Serbia), being its Academic Director.
The general aim of the School is to gather young post-graduate students, scholars and teaching staff from both Eastern and Western Europe and promote a shared platform for research and trans-disciplinary theoretical reflection on the complex modes of interweaving sexuality, culture and politics, and consequently of exchanging and questioning geopolitically determined discourses in the research of sexualities, gender studies, and queer theory. Our idea is to provide students, scholars and teachers with the opportunity to question, decenter and democratize these areas by way of deferring the notion of theoretical and geopolitical privilege which is often implied by these research areas, and thus to introduce new models of rethinking context-specific phenomena related to sexualities and, vice versa, to enrich theoretical paradigms with context-specific phenomena and research.

In this way, the School’s long-term goal is to:
• Strategically stimulate the particularization and application of key ideas and theories in sexuality research locally;
• Universalize and popularize crucial and underprivileged positions and ideas on the European level, regardless of the East/West divide which is still central to the development of queer theory and sexuality research.

Our endeavor is not to relativize the embeddedness and situatedness of knowledges about sexualities, but to recognize and disrupt the existing invisible borders that obstruct the free dissemination of ideas as they are being determined by various hegemonic forces – political, educational, economic - in both Eastern and Western contexts of doing academic and artistic work related with our desires, bodies, and sexualities.
In its first and founding activity in Summer 2012, The School was thematically focused on the topic “Queerness, Community and Capital: Towards New Alliances of the Political,” and aimed at exploring and reflecting on the complex entanglements of queer theories and practices, the Political, and cultures. We provided space to radically question the hegemonic regimes of political communities’ institutions/sustenance, as well as the global and regional regimes of thinking neo-liberal forces. Departing from such a research framework, the School aims towards re-visioning the dominant forms of queer political struggles and strategies of resistance and tries to investigate the possibilities stemming from queerness and its already existing political embodiments and specific historical experiences, as well as the actual and virtual opportunities in various geopolitical contexts for rethinking our shared and general categories of politics, resistance, and community.
The Summer School includes series of lectures, reading seminars, research presentations, film screenings, discussions, a lot of queer social events, networking and partying.
During the course of the previous two years, the Summer School has offered lectures given by some of the most prominent scholars in the field of sexuality, gender, culture and politics, in the region and worldwide, including David M. Halperin, Marina Gržinić, Jelisaveta Blagojević, Jamie Heckert, Michael O’Rourke, Antke Engel, and Tomasz Sikora.
Starting from 2014, the Summer School is to be relocated in Belgrade, Serbia and is integrated as a core activity of IPAK - Research Center for Cultures, Politics and Identities.

CONTACTS

IPAK.CENTER
office@ipakcentar.org
Karađorđeva 65
11000 Belgrade
Serbia

SSSCP Coordinators:

Slavčo Dimitrov:
slavco.dimitrov@ipakcentar.org
+381-61-1436625

Stanimir Panayotov
stanimir.panayotov@ipakcentar.org
+389-71985473; +359-886419533

Anđela Čeh
andjela.ceh@ipakcentar.org
+381-616891596