When does it become violence?

Countering day-to-day violence through queer cultures of conflict

a series of events by the Institute for Queer Theory, starting November 2017,
contributing to Caring for Conflict

Is it possible to counter day-to-day violence through queer cultures of conflict? This series of events looks at the multiple shapes that violence takes and calls for a queer answer of how to affectively and effectively counter widespread normative, symbolic and epistemic violence.

How to engage with the different forms of violence, which can range from humiliation, sexual assault, day-to-day racism, emotional blackmail, dispossession, impoverishment, the asylum system, terror, discrimination by state institutions, war, to the war on terror? Does the term gain from or lose precision due to these different meanings?
How to disrupt hate and symbolic violence, which is by now widespread in social media and public encounters? Notably, in right wing polemics against feminism, gender studies and queer politics, which translate gender politics into a means of fostering racism.
Finally, what would “queer cultures of conflict” look like amidst the ongoing shadows of structural inequality and a historical legacy of violence? How may queer ways of dealing with conflict effectively counter normative, symbolic and epistemic violence?

Let us turn the aquarium into a space, where people feel welcome in bringing their particular social and geopolitical backgrounds, their diverse bodies and capabilities, their various wishes, values, interests, and aims. Let us invent ways of finding pleasure in talking with each other in respect, friendship, humor, sincerity, and conflict. Queer sociality as queer vision.

Concept: Antke Engel and Ferdiansyah Thajib

Events:

where: aquarium (Südblock), Skalitzer Str. 6, Berlin-Kreuzberg

Thu 16 November 2017

Epistemic Violence – queer, feminist, and antimilitaristic perspectives
Talk and Workshop with Claudia Brunner and Thomas Mickan (in German!)
> more

Tue 05 December 2017

Trouble: Queerness and Violence
Talk and discussion with Terrell Carver (University of Bristol, UK), in English
> more

Thu 25 January 2018

The Right to Provoke: Free Speech, Hate Speech, and the Politics of Censorship
talk (in German) and discussion (Engl./German) with Nikita Dhawan
> more

Fr 11 May 2018

Solidarity in Conflicts
Urmila Goel, Najwa Ouguerram and Sabine Mohamed in discussion with each other and the audience, in German, partly in English, translated into DGS (German Sign Language)
> more

Sat 27 October, 2018

Stress Factor: Hearing Ignorance
an evening on audism and deaf culture
with Xenia Dürr, Silvia Gegenfurtner, Simone Lönne, Melanie Loy
> more

01 February, 2019

there is an ‚I‘ in LGBT*QI
with Joris Gregor
> more

04 July, 2019

Queer Modes of Endurance
With: Ferdiansyah Thajib (moderation: Mike Laufenberg)
Queer bodies and subjectivities are enduring hegemonic normative structures that are tenaciously in place. They (have to) stay with, withstand, live through and suffer impossible conditions.
In this talk, I wish to engage with the political potentials of endurance
> more

note also: Don’t Panic!
Moralizing and polarizing are not the only options (Dec 2017)