Embodying/ Performing/ Affecting

Koordinator*innen

  • Kateřina Kolářová, Charles University Prague, Czech Republic, cakaba[at]seznam.cz
  • Inka Greusing, Technical University of Berlin, Germany, greusing[at]kgw.tu-berlin.de
  • Stephan Trinkaus, University of Cologne, Germany, s.trinkaus[at]gmx.net
  • Sibel Yardimci, Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Turkey, sibelyardimci[at]gmail.com

  • The theme of the conference asks us to think about ways in which feminist practices confront hegemonies and mechanisms of dispossessions, as well as about the ways in which they can in fact contribute to them and uphold them. This conference-stream focuses on exploring the triadic interconnections between affect/matter/performativity. Building off of the earlier theorisations of the political, contextual and performative nature of the ‘matter’, recent feminist scholarship elaborates these interconnections vis-à-vis material forms of racialised, sexualised, disability-, class- and religion-specific forms of empowerment as well as dispossessions and abandonment.
    This stream is interested in exploring the ways in which the many recent theorisations of performativity, matter and materiality for example in works of new materialism, affect theory, post-humanism and animal studies, debility and disability studies, critical race theory and decoloniality reconceptualised the notions of normative violence, hegemony and of the political at large. We are also particularly interested in contributions that follow tensions embedded in the matter, the material conditions of oppression on the one hand, and the openings for resistance and change on the other, and discuss the many ways in which performing inhabits such ambivalent positions.

    The Embodying/Performing/Affecting stream thus seeks papers and panelists that might engage with such broad questions as the following:

  • How do recent theorisations of performativity, matter and materiality through new materialism, affect theory, post-humanism, debility and decoloniality change the horizons of ‘the political’ and imaginaries of the resistance?
  • How do bodies, bodily movements and immobilities, bodily in/capacities become repositories of structural violence, how do they bear witness to the structural hurt and how do they materialise the complex and paradoxical ways of resisting and confronting these violent structures?
  • Whose bodies are made vulnerable in the fight for broader social justice and in the acts of confronting the hegemony?
  • How do affects register the political horizons, how do they allow us to register the implicit, the inarticulable, the as yet-unspoken and how they can be used in imagining and forming/articulating the politics of resistance, alliances and bridges between political projects and positions?
  • What platforms for articulating forms of critique, of witnessing and reaching across ‘differences’ do performative arts offer?
  • What alternative forms of protest and political critique can be fostered through performative art?
  • How do multiple biomedical technologies (surgery, toxicity and chemical substances etc.) work to re-produce normative expectations about dis/ability, race, gender and sexuality and how can they used to subvert or appropriate them?

  • 1. Remembering/Representing/Signifying
  • 2. Destructing/Reconciling/Transforming
  • 3. Teaching/Learning/Facilitating
  • 4. Legislating/Politicising/Institutionalising
  • 5. Networking/Solidarising/Bridging
  • 6. Playing/Watching/Observing
  • 7. Embodying/Performing/Affecting
  • 8. Investigating/Analysing/Measuring
  • 9. Healing/Coping/Caring
  • 10. Believing/Moralising/Reasoning
  • 11. Working/Struggling/Organizing


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