FYI
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What’s Queer Here?
ASCA-Soirées 2008
Thursdays, November 6, 13, 20 and 27
Evenings, dinner included
The Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) invites scholars working in queer studies--either comfortably or uncomfortably, in the social sciences or the humanities, as staff members or Ph.d. researchers--to participate in the 2008 Soirées, entitled “What’s Queer Here?”
“What’s Queer Here?” was the advertising slogan for the 1998 art exhibition From the Corner of the Eye at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. The phrase highlights the epistemological and political usage of ‘queer’ as a signifier that does not identity or represent. It inquires into a ‘what’ rather than a ‘who’: a phenomenon, inclination, or potential. Moreover, it connects that ‘what’ to a ‘here,’ suggesting that what is queer here may not necessarily be queer there, and vice versa. The cover of the exhibition catalogue shows Ugo Rondinone’s Don’t Live Here Anymore (1997), a photograph of a wispy guy who looks away from the camera and outside the frame, as if to displace the identifying gaze elsewhere; or, as if to focus attention on something more compelling that is happening just outside our, but not his, field of vision.
The ASCA Soireés of 2008 will try to devise a research perspective that is similarly situated and slanted, addressing established themes, priorities, and objects of the field in relation to marginal ones, perhaps ones yet outside our common purview, within a limited set of contexts, asking anew each time, “What’s Queer Here?”
The four soirées are subdivided as follows:
What’s Queer about Queer Theory?
Since its Foucauldian inception in the U.S., queer theory has developed into a recognized scholarly field in the Western academy. In this session, we reflect on the queer pertinence of contemporary queer studies, engaging critically with the historical and geographical trajectories of its main concepts, arguments, and themes. How did we get where we are today, and how does that ‘backstory’ enable and constrain our work? What kinds of temporality and spatiality inhere in queer theory’s conception in the transatlantic passage of French philosophy to the U.S. academy? What possible roads were not taken, what avenues trod bare? Moving between forgotten possibilities and necessary dead ends, this session undertakes an archaeology of queer theory to sketch out possible strategies for future and other contexts. Contact: Sudeep Dasgupta (S.M.Dasgupta@???)
What’s Queer in Popular Culture?
Relatively recently, advertising and television have accorded lesbians and gays an unprecedented visibility in the West. This session evaluates the consequences, negative as well as positive, of the commodification of queer lives and the qualified recognition of gays and lesbians as target consumers and audiences. What identifications are sanctioned in this way, and what identifications are simultaneously abjected or disavowed? Through diets, peircing, and exercise, moreover, mass media and commerce also increasingly participate in the formation of 'homonormative' bodies, excluding other bodies, sexualities, and genders. What are the constraints and queer possibilities, if any, of the commercial 'emancipation' of sexual minorities? Contact: Jaap Kooijman (J.W.Kooijman@???) and Jules Sturm (J.V.Sturm@???)
What is Queer There?
Queer theory is a scholarly enterprise that is driven by Anglo-American work. Because of that pedigree, its questioning of the politics of identity risks a conceptual imperialism that erases the specificity of non-Western lives, practices, and imaginaries. At the same time, the insistence on the particularity of queer experience outside the West runs the danger of an essentializing cultural hegemony. Acknowledging both these risks, this session attempts to move towards a qualified cosmopolitan understanding of what’s is queer here and what’s queer there, based on intensive dialogue, mutual translation, conceptual modesty, and theoretical curiosity. Intersectional and comparative approaches are especially welcomed. Contact: Jeroen de Kloet (B.J.deKloet@???)
What’s Queer in Amsterdam?
Self-described 'gay capital' of Europe, a popular holiday destination, and stopover on the party circuit, the city of Amsterdam seems established homeground for a particular gay subject: male, affluent, cosmopolitan. Yet, that subject's inhabitance of the city may at any time be interrupted or deflected by other queer subjects, who follow their own trajectories through its streets: for example, the immigrant young men who are linked to increasing incidents of gay bashing, who are also frequent victims of abuse, who make up a large number of the city's male prostitutes, and who have emerged as a new subject of discipline in Dutch politics; transgender performers and activists staking out unfamiliar ground; and lesbians who maintain a smaller, yet defiant and transformative scene. This session attempts to draw a dense map of Amsterdam, marked by unpredictable, sometimes incommensurable, encounters between variegated queer subjects. Contact: Murat Aydemir
(M.Aydemir@???)
If you would like to participate, please send your abstract of no more than 400 words for 20 mins. presentations to the contact of the respective soirées before October 1, 2008.
The 2008 soirees are part of the What's Queer Here? research project at ASCA, initiated by Jaap Kooijman and Murat Aydemir. Participants: Jules Sturn, Sudeep Dasgupta, Jeroen de Kloet, Eliza Steinbock, Laura Copier, and Mireille Rosello.
www.hum.uva.nl/asca
