Queer Cultures of Conflict – what’s that?

Saturday, June 16, 2018 1 – 3pm
Workshop with Antke Engel

Queer doesn’t take anything for granted. Queer doesn’t strive to be normal. It takes pleasure in the strange and unusual. It’s a shape-shifter.

All this might refer to sex, gender, and sexuality. Though it doesn’t have to. What’s important is that queer develops in process, it’s a queering that takes place in relationships – be they personal, or social, or global. How to characterize these relationships as queer cannot be predetermined. It has to be decided from case to case: How is this relationship shaped by power and inequalities? By desire? Are conflicts a defining part of this relationship? What kind of conflicts?

The workshop is meant as a common space for figuring out what it means to address and handle conflicts from a queer perspective. Is it possible to take pleasure in complexity and confusion? Is it still possible, even when a conflict already got under your skin, when the atmosphere got tight and communication has escalated?

Some ideas have already been developed in the course of Caring for Conflict. Others will be our common product. Some art works are invited to join our conversation.

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Antke Engel is director of the Institute for Queer Theory (iQt) in Berlin, a place where art, activism, and academia inspire each other. She travels the world, giving talks, teaching Queer Studies, and passionately writing texts with different audiences in mind.