Friction. Cultural anthropological and gender theoretical perspectives on tensions

19th Conference of the Commission for Gender Studies and Queer Anthropology of the German Society for Empirical Cultural Studies (DGEKW)

19-21 June 2025
Alte Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen
Organisers: Institute for Cultural Anthropology/European Ethnology and Gender Studies at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen

The call for papers ended on 15.11.2024. Further information will follow.

“Wars, crises and conflicts: the world under constant stress” was the headline of the German news broadcast tagesschau in 2023 (Frahm 2023). It was referring to the multitude of current global and social upheavals. Along a multitude of ‘trigger points’ (Mau et al. 2024), agonisms are channeled into dissent and division, militarisation and violence, devastation and displacement. From a gender perspective, current frictions are manifested, for example, in the (criminal) legal persecution of sexualised violence, especially against women and LGBTQI* people, care crises, nature-culture hierarchies and the corresponding handling of the climate crisis, the legal and political recognition and self-determination of trans*, inter* and non-binary people or the migration policy defence against young Muslim men constructed as sexist and queer-hostile (Hark/Villa 2017). Radical attempts to create homogeneity and unambiguity, ending dialogue or silencing negotiations authoritatively are particularly evident in political fields of the present. The 19th conference of the Commission for Gender Studies and Queer Anthropology of the German Association for Empirical Cultural Studies (DGEKW) 2025 will use the theme of friction to address the various tensions. It aims to bring together contributions from European ethnology/cultural anthropology and gender studies that deal with frictional forces and dynamics in empiricism, theory and methodology and thereby explore both destructive and productive effects in the context of interwoven power relations.

The perspective of friction as a dynamic encounter between imagined and socially constructed differences as well as moral or epistemic contradictions can be linked to various cultural anthropological perspectives and gender theories. Anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (2005) definesfriction as a constitutive dynamic of more-than-human coexistence rather than as a supposedly slowing disruption of an otherwise smooth routine. She conceptualises friction as the translocal encounter of individuals, things, bodies, imaginations, politics, knowledge and environments as a momentum in which these can coalesce into unpredictable productive arrangements and thus drive societal transformations. Cultural anthropological regime analysis uses the conflict itself as a method (Riedner 2018) by taking an ethnographic approach to moments of struggle and negotiation and using these as starting points in order to examine complex configurations of conflicting practices and discourses (Gutekunst/Schwertl 2018; Hess/Tsianos 2010). These approaches are part of a 20th century cultural anthropological tradition that breaks away from Western binary epistemes, no longer treats interstices and hybridity as disruptive and flawed, and instead problematises the processes of differentiation themselves. Third spaces and figures are understood as forces of mediation and signify the (seeming contradiction of the) heterogeneous normality of (post)modernity (Koschorke 2020, 14).

In gender studies history, it was initially Black and migrant feminists who analysed, theorised and criticised such processes of difference – generated by social relations of inequality such as racism, sexism and class oppression. This is less about recognising different identities and more about dealing with the violent conditions and effects of persistent colonial differentiation and enforcement to which people marked as ‘other’ are still exposed today (Gutiérrez-Rodríguez 2011). At the same time, with concepts such as ‘third spaces’ (Bhabha 2004) or ‘borderlands’ (Anzalduá 1998), they challenge homogeneous concepts of identity and draw attention to how new things can emerge in the unstable spaces in between. Approaches from gender and queer studies which use figures of the third – e.g. ‘gender trouble maker’ (Butler 1990), “female masculinity” (Halberstam 1998), “cyborg” (Haraway 1985), “feminist killjoy” (Ahmed 2023), “monster” (Stryker 1994; Braidotti 2013) and “nature cultures” (Haraway 1989) – show how these can have a political-transgressive effect in the sense of interrupting, irritating and disrupting dominant-binary gender, human-technology and human-environment relations. For social movements and activisms, setting oneself apart from a legal, political or normative status quo that is understood as unacceptable in turn becomes a frictional, yet productive momentum (Heywood 2017).

However, current socio-political and global dynamics have long pointed to a growing social intolerance towards the ambiguous, contradictory and unstable. Last but not least, the two previous Commission conferences ‘Troubling Gender. New Gender Policy Turbulence in Europe' (2021) and ’Mapping Gender Struggles. Gender as a field of conflict in contemporary social movements' (2023) pointed to current policies and institutionalisations of division and polarisation, including their disabling and even fatal consequences. Thus, even under the credo of a feminist foreign policy, military force has become an ‘appropriate’ means of improving the human rights situation of marginalised groups. Feminist security research has shown how the military institution is organised around masculin norms and perceptions and how military violence shapes the everyday lives of women (Enloe 2000; Åhäll 2016). The continuous tightening of border regimes, the strengthening of anti-feminist movements, LGBTI* hostility and criminalisation or abortion bans are further examples of the (renewed) need for binary legibility and semantic ‘purity’, which transform third spaces into non-places of ‘monsters’ and transgressive figures into supposed failures and deviations of nature (Koschorke 2020; Breger 2020). It is not uncommon for the law to be used as a political instrument that promises to establish moral clarity. The frictions of the here and now reveal divergent moral attitudes – ranging between solidaritybased action and a struggle for the common good on the one hand and a neoliberal paradigm of responsibility on the other – in which individuals, social movements, state institutions and (trans)national imagined communities are embedded. Individuals and institutions often legitimise their own actions through the powerful assignment and attribution of vulnerabilities (Bstieler/Schmidt/Angeli 2024).

It therefore seems hardly surprising that gender studies, whose paradigm includes deconstructing the norms and creating epistemic unrest, has itself become a source of friction and attack (Hark 2017). But even within activist fields, enduring dissent and tensions don’t seem easy, so that different definitions of problems and political strategies are contested in moral registers and can lead to irreconcilable disagreements, while other differences allow ‘to agree to disagree’ (Heywood 2018). Accordingly, ethnographic research faces the challenge of dealing with tensions, dissent and conflict both among the research partners and between the researcher and the field. Utilising the methodological potential of friction means to endure moments of epistemic, moral and political non-understanding, to analytically measure the disparate forms of knowledge and to use them to gain a better understanding of the field and to reflect on researchers’ positions. At the same time, research relationships must be carefully navigated in order to avoid disruptions and disagreements (Faust, Binder, Sekuler 2021).

Following on from these developments and insights, the conference asks when, where and how moments of friction take effect in a productive and reorganising way, and when, where and how they lead to conflict and antagonism, precisely because they are socially omnipresent and constitutive of social realities. How can the spectrum of everyday frictions and contradictions be taken into account in terms of cultural anthropology and gender theory without trivialising the fact that some lead to violence while others are productive? The conference welcomes empirical, conceptual and methodological contributions from contemporary and historical research on the following questions, among others:

Where and how do frictions lead to new transformative arrangements or unexpectedly productive alliances? Where and how do they produce dissent, ruptures and unbridgeable rifts? Which frictions are desired (by whom), which are accepted or ignored, and which are experienced and handled as disruptive, destructive and sometimes violent?
In which arenas, with which instruments and through which media are frictions generated and negotiated? How do these have a formative, standardising or enabling effect on (distinct) rationalities, concerns, ethics or policies?
Which theoretical or methodological approaches can be used to understand frictions and systematically consider gender as an interdependent category?
To what extent are gender relations in their intersection with other power relations constitutive for social antagonisms and conflicts? To what extent do they themselves become a source of friction?
What frictions between theoretical approaches or concepts arise in/through current empirical research on gender? How do differences between theoretical approaches shape research fields or empirical analyses?
Which methodologies and methods can be used to move frictions between the researcher and the field from the margins to the centre of the research process? Which analytical potentials, but also (ethical or practical) difficulties does research with/on frictions create?

Friction. Cultural anthropological and gender theoretical perspectives on tensions

19th Conference of the Commission for Gender Studies and Queer Anthropology of the German Society for Empirical Cultural Studies (DGEKW)

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