“Desiring Just Economies / Just Economies of Desire” is an international, transdisciplinary conference that welcomes a wide range of presentations, from academic papers to experimental writing, lecture performances, and visual presentations.
http://www.desiring-just-economies.de/
The conference seeks to explore how desire not only sustains current economies, but also carries the potential for inciting new forms of understanding and doing economy. We propose to focus on the notion of desire as a tool to explore economy’s sexual dimension as much as the economic dimension of sexuality. Drawing on Queer Theory we understand desire as historically structured by heterosexual norms, while simultaneously functioning as a structuring force itself – thus inscribing reproductive heteronormativity to subjectivity and society. Presuming that desire can be envisioned beyond heteronormative restrictions and that this bears on the idea of justice, the question arises whether the pursuit of economic and sexual justice can be made to coincide when economy is queered by desire. Rather than a realisable universal norm, the term justice is employed as a contestable term, offering possibility for debate and political practice. The conference’s twin interest lies in unpacking how sexuality is implicit in economic processes and in unfolding how economy is linked to sexuality. How do current global economic processes (including production, reproduction, consumption, circulation, speculation) constitute specific sexual identities and practices that collaborate in relations of exploitation, domination, and subjectivation? Conversely, how do ways of organizing sexuality influence economic processes?
In addition to exploring the reciprocal relation between sexuality and economy, the conference inquires into how a queer reconceptualization of desire may emerge as a destabilizing and transformative force in economic relations. One of the aims of the conference is to fashion space for imagining “other” economies or imagining economy “otherwise”, as well as for the deployment of the concept of desire in ways that allow for a reworking of social relationships and economic practices. The presumption here is that global capitalism is not a monolith; rather, there exist diverse capitalisms and diverse economies. For instance, economic practices in the fields of migration and diasporas, subcultural economies, gift and barter economies and cooperative economies do not all conform to the capitalist logics.
Within the large field of exploring other economies and their potential to unsettle global capitalism, one focus of the conference is on the connection between heteronormativity and neoliberal capitalism. How does neoliberalism mobilise desire in order to obtain compliance from individuals? What is the role of the increasing socio-cultural integration of diversified genders and sexualities? What role does homo- and trans-phobia play in contemporary economic developments? Is there a ‘necessary’ or rather ‘historical’ connection between heteronormativity and capitalism? In how far do the notions of heteronormativity and capitalism have to be problematized as eurocentric or occidentalist? In order to tackle these questions, it is necessary to engage critically with the transnational mechanisms of sexual and economic exclusion, exploitation and superexploitation. Why is the question of sexuality foreclosed from critiques of capitalism and redistributional activism? To what extent do political struggles for sexual justice in the global North inadvertently reinforce sexual injustice in the South? How can one consider the colonial, post- and neocolonial legacies and restructurings that underlie the forms of exploitation induced by the current financialization of the globe without ignoring its gendered and sexualized dimensions? How is sexual injustice in the global South instrumentalised to enable the self-constitution of the West as ‘progressive’ and thereby consolidate its hegemonic position? What is the link between justifications of economic and sexual violence?
While desire for economic justice tends to accept and perpetuate the principle of reducing all value to its pecuniary equivalent, desiring other economies can also take the form of envisaging alternate modes of recognizing value beside financial compensation. The prevalent view understands desire as being ultimately grounded in a fundamental lack, incited by a longing for recognition. According to this framework, the quest for capital, property and consumption beyond what is defined as “basic need” appears as but a particular avenue of being re-assured of one’s value and as an ultimately futile attempt to cover up lack. This raises questions like: To what extent do existing and imagined alternative economies challenge this false promise? How far do they replicate scarcity in a symbolic register and use symbolic recognition as a cheap, exploitative substitute for financial compensation? How may justice be imagined in the realm of desire to be recognized and valued? Does the value of recognition rely on unequal distribution? Can it grow indefinitely?
Substituting the concept of “desire as productivity and becoming” for the model of “desire as lack” does not provide an exit from capitalist economy either. While such a concept of plenitude and excess renounces normative restrictions and disciplinary arrangements of desire, it nonetheless risks appropriating difference to capitalist economy, celebrating it as the principle capitalist renewal. Thus, it seems essential to ask critically how specific economies deploy desire, and which concepts of desire allow for what kind of economic thinking. Moreover, the main concern of the conference is to reflect upon and, perhaps, invent queer conceptions of desire beyond the logics of both lack and excess, in order to ask what they offer in view of just economies of desire, of a desire for economic and sexual justice
PARTICIPANTS
Kate Bedford (Univ. of Kent, UK): "Bingo capitalism: gender, sexuality, and gambling in efforts to regenerate local economies"
References to casino capitalism abound as a way to talk about – and critique - the recent valorization of risk in finance capital, on both sides of the Atlantic. In turn casinos have themselves been promoted by many governments seeking to regenerate impoverished local and regional economies through gambling. Debates about gambling and capitalist regeneration in the UK have, for example, been dominated by casinos - a situation replicated in several other countries. This paper is an attempt to shine some light in other areas, in order to take gender and sexuality seriously in debates about gambling and reformulations of capitalism. In it I ask: what does bingo reveal - differently from casinos - about the intertwining of gender, class, and sexuality in attempts to promote local development? What might be more visible to us in terms of gender, sexuality, and markets if we spoke of ‘bingo capitalism’, rather than ‘casino capitalism’? More specifically, I seek to present the results of a new research project looking at the gendered consequences of changes in gambling regulation in the UK. In 2005 the UK overhauled its gambling law, and embraced gambling as a legitimate leisure industry with the potential to help regenerate impoverished communities. Casinos have been promoted, while bingo halls (a traditional site for women’s homosocial leisure and for camp-performing working class men to find employment as bingo callers) have suffered. Based on research in casinos and bingo halls on the new regulatory regime, and interviews with local council staff charged with enforcing the new law, I identify the sexualized impacts of the new approach, and its impacts on homosocial and “camp” working class space. This is part of a broader effort to take gender, sexuality, and class seriously in debates about capitalist regeneration strategies. .
to take gender, sexuality, and class seriously in debates about capitalist regeneration strategies. .
Kate Bedford is at the Kent Law School, University of Kent (Canterbury, UK)
Bobby Benedicto (Univ. of Melbourne, Australia): "Bright Lights, Fast Bodies: Mobility, Complicity, Gay Manila"
This paper investigates the role of technologies of mobility in shaping privileged gay life in twenty-first century Manila. Drawing on auto/ethnographic accounts derived from fieldwork conducted between 2006 and 2010, I explore how forms of intra-urban and transnational travel enable the production of what I call a “bright lights gay scene” – a world-in-the-making complicit in the neoliberal systems of privilege that order the “third world city” and which is underpinned by a triangulated yearning trajectory or a desire to move outwards towards “the global,” upward towards middle/upper-classedness, and forward towards an always elusive “gay modernity.” In the first part of this paper, I examine how the practice of driving and infrastructures of automobility such as flyovers allow gay men, not only to move between pockets of “the first world in the third world,” but to speed past and rise above the metropolitan disorder that marks Manila’s streets. I look at how the ability to navigate the urban contradictions that have come in the wake of late capitalism, modernisation, and post/neo-colonialism helps sustain a sense of belonging in “gay globality.” In the second part of the paper, I briefly examine how this sense of belonging is ruptured during travel, when privileged Filipino gay men encounter their own Otherness through racialization. I focus on anxieties surrounding the feminized figure of the Filipino migrant worker, which is read as a representation of the place of the nation in the global political economy and circulation of laboring bodies. In looking at these forms of mobility, my aim is to unsettle the figuration of subjects as either “winners” or “losers,” “oppressors” or “oppressed,” “colonisers” or “colonised.” Here, the “third world queer” re-emerges, not as a purely abject or “resistant” figure, but as a figure that participates in the reproduction of the fanstasy-desires for speed and free movement that animate capitalist modernity and its attendant cultures of domination.
Bobby Benedicto is completing a PhD in Cultural Studies at the University of Melbourne. His research interests include critical ethnography, the intersections of postcolonial and queer theory, and critiques of technology, mobility, and modernist architecture. His work has appeared in journals such as GLQ, the Journal of Homosexuality, Asian Studies Review, and English Language Notes.
Paul Bonin-Rodriguez (Univ. of Texas at Austin, USA): "Staging Queer Economies: Desire and the Performance Space"
This experimental presentation combines academic writing with very short performance excerpts to show how queered economies have created and sustained queer performance spaces in the United States for much of the last half-century and contributed significantly to the growth of its performance field(s). In particular, this presentation examines how the expansion of queer performance spaces at the height of the U.S.’s AIDS epidemic gave rise to a model of artist-community interaction and exchange based on multiple forms of intimate relations – social, sexual, political, among them. I argue that these forms of interaction, which are based on desire and contesting of models that emphasize pecuniary remuneration, continue to support the careers of working performers. Moreover, the systems of mutual support embodied by spaces comprised of audiences, presenters and performers, express their own multivalent ecology of exchange, one that invites closer examination in the study of desire and just economies. My argument comes a critical time: since the publication of Investing in Creativity in 2003, a landmark study of the lives of U.S. artists conducted by the Urban Institute, many U.S. cultural policy theorists and practitioners have adamantly advanced notions of artist professional development based on entrepreneurial business models without a significant study of affective interactions. As a performing artist and scholar who toured original work nonstop throughout the United States and Canada between 1992 and 2000 and who now studies modes of artist sustainability (and occasionally performs and tours shows based on them), I continue to be inspired by the ways that artists contest, test, and elaborate on economic models, often for the purpose of deeper community engagement. Also, with the increased privatization of artist professions beyond the United States, this presentation is relevant to broader studies of the relations between economic markets and desire.
Paul Bonin-Rodriguez is an Assistant Professor in the Performance as Public Practice Program at the University to Texas at Austin. Formerly a writer, performer, and dancer, who toured throughout the U.S. between 1990 and 2006, he now studies the economic and social histories of artist incomes and serves as an advisor to Leveraging Investments in Creativity (LINC), a ten-year initiative dedicated to improving the lives of artists in the United States. His paper is drawn from his manuscript-in-progress, The Artist-Producer: How New Market Economies and Cultural Developments Changed the Role of Artists in the U.S. and Abroad (1960-2000). is assistant professor for Performance as Public Practice / Performance Studies and Cultural Policy at the University of Texas at Austin, USA
Gavin Brown (Univ. of Leicester, UK): "Post-Crisis Queer: geographies of sexualities in a changing economic world"
Anglophone geographers of sexualities have invested considerable effort, in recent years, critically examining debates surrounding the achievement of considerable social and political gains for lesbians, gay men and other sexual/gender minorities in many national contexts. This work has frequently debated whether increased public acceptance of lesbian and gay lives, increased corporate interest in lesbian and gay consumers, and the achievement of various forms of civil partnership, same-sex marriage and other forms of legal ‘equality’ (albeit unevenly) constitutes a new state of ‘homonormativity’ (Duggan 2002). If we accept, as Duggan suggests, that this homonormativity has been an expression of ‘the sexual politics of neoliberalism’, how might sexual politics change in the coming period, as neoliberalism changes (and is even replaced as the dominant political economic model favours by national and global elites)? In a period when global recession, the threat and consequences of climate change, and the need to make the transition to a low carbon economy begin to affect every aspect of everyday life, what new forms of sexual politics might emerge? How might existing sexual identities change in the coming period, and what new forms of identity might emerge? Which urban economies might emerge as drivers of these changes? This agenda-setting paper will review recent work by geographers of sexualities to assess the conceptual frameworks that are likely to prove useful in meeting the challenges of the coming economic period and to identify the gaps in this repertoire of ideas and methods that urgently need to be addressed.
Gavin Brown is in the Department of Geography at the University of Leicester, UK.
Christine Decker (Humboldt Univ., Berlin): "Queering the Welfare State?! How the nursing care insurance reform in Germany in 2008 is complicit with and resistant to neoliberal welfare state restructuring"
So far the connection between (homo)sexuality and neoliberal capitalism has been mainly explored by looking at the (legal and/or societal) recognition of homosexual partnerships and the consequences for children born and raised within theses partnerships. One prevalent argument is that the recognition of various, queer family constellations is part of the neoliberal project to re-/familiarize former (welfare) state duties and to privatize the costs of care (see Ganz 2007). In my paper I will explore this argument further by looking at the reform of the nursing care insurance in 2008 in Germany. I will focus on two „queer“ changes by the reform: first, the new law aiming at facilitating the combination of paid work and elderly care obligations (Pflegezeitgesetz) and second the possibility to pool payments of the nursing care insurance. The „Pflegezeitgesetz“ queers traditional family concepts by recognizing homosexual common law partners and the children of the homosexual common law spouse as family. At the same time it is complicit with the neoliberal agenda to privatize care by raising the number of potential private carers. The effects of the possibility to pool payments of the nursing care insurance are also ambivalent. The intention is to decrease the spending of the national budget on health care. At the same time it has positive impacts and makes queer projects possible. One example is „Regenbogenvilla“, a housing project in Berlin primarily for elderly gay men but also their female friends and lesbian women. In my paper I show to what extent these two changes of the nursing care insurance make queer, resistant practices possible and in what way they are complicit with the neoliberal agenda.
Christine Decker is currently doing an MA in Gender Studies at the Humboldt University in Berlin.
Nikita Dhawan (Frankfurt Research Center for Postcolonial Studies, Germany): Organizer
Nikita Dhawan is Junior Professor for Political Science with focus on Gender and Postcolonial Studies, Co-ordinator of the Frankfurt Research Center for Postcolonial Studies and one of the Principal Investigators at the Cluster of Excellence “Formation of Normative Orders” at Goethe-University Frankfurt. In Spring 2008 she was Visiting Research Scholar at Columbia University. In Winter Semester 2006/07 she was Maria-Goeppert-Mayer Guest Professor at the Institute of Political Science, Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg. She received her doctorate in philosophy in 2006 from Ruhr-University Bochum and holds a double M.A. in German Studies and Philosophy, from Mumbai University. Her research specializations are feminist postcolonial theory, queer diasporas and political philosophy. Recent publications are Impossible Speech: On the Politics of Silence and Violence (Academia: 2007) and Postkoloniale Theorie. Eine kritische Einführung (co-authored) (transcript: 2005). Jointly with María do Mar Castro Varela and Antke Engel, she is co-editing Hegemony and Heteronormativity: Revisiting ‘the Political’ in Queer Politics (Ashgate, forthcoming).
Lisa Duggan (New York Univ., USA): "Households of Desire"
Lisa Duggan is Professor of American Studies and Gender and Sexuality Studies at the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. In her book The Twilight of Equality: Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics and the Attack on Democracy (2003, Beacon Press) she explicitly draws the connection between sexuality and economy. Herein she argues that neoliberal transformations depend on cultural politics which explicitly engage in sexual issues, be it the policing of sexual subcultures or the celebration of sexual diversity. Lisa Duggan is also author of Sapphic Slashers: Sex, Violence and American Modernity, co-author with Nan Hunter of Sex Wars: Sexual Dissent and Political Culture, co-editor with Lauren Berlant of Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and National Interest. In her present book The End of Marriage? The War Over the Future of State Sponsored Love (University of California press, forthcoming), she pleads for a broader, more diverse democratic range of partnership and recognition of forms of household, rather than the sole focus on marriage.
Julie Passanante Elman (New York Univ., USA): "Interdependency, Rehabilitation, and Necropolitics: Dis/ability and Desire in the Emergent Global Order"
(with Robert McRuer)
In 2009, Joni and Friends International Disability Center, an organization dedicated to “global outreach to the disability community,” celebrated its 30th anniversary of “ministry … to people with disabilities and their families across the US and the world.” Founded by Joni Eareckson Tada, who became disabled after a diving accident in 1967, Joni and Friends has since its inception encouraged and participated in various forms of evangelical/disability activism. Our presentation analyzes this activism in the context of queer and disability critiques of neoliberalism and globalization. We are particularly interested in the ways in which certain forms of transnational disability activism—along with the desire for new understandings of disability and disability identity—can be problematically articulated in and through emergent forms of homophobia and neocolonialism. For this reason, we examine two contemporaneous initiatives in which Joni and Friends has been involved: 1) “Wheels for the World,” a global wheelchair outreach program that accepts donations of used mobility-assistive equipment (equipment that is then repaired by trained prison inmates in twenty-two correctional facilities throughout the United States and distributed in over forty countries throughout Eastern Europe, South America, Asia, and the Middle East by teams comprised of able-bodied and disabled missionaries) and 2) the Manhattan Declaration, a manifesto issued by evangelical, Catholic, and Orthodox Christian leaders and signed and globally disseminated by Tada’s organization. The Manhattan Declaration explicitly avows support for the pro-life, traditional marriage, and religious freedom movement and condones civil disobedience against laws regarding abortion and gay marriage. It emerged at the same moment that Uganda put forward the Ugandan Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009, which proposed lifetime imprisonment or the death penalty for gay men and lesbians.Recent work in both disability and human rights scholarship has suggested a model of shared vulnerability and interdependence as spaces of possibility for a more expansive vision of human rights and global disability activism in the era of globalization and neoliberalism. However, this language—of defending “the weak and the vulnerable”—has also been taken up by global evangelical groups, such as those crafting the Manhattan Declaration, to describe their affective, moral, and spiritual commitments. At the same time, we argue, the new discursive mobility of a seemingly-innocent “interdependency” can at times mask the ways in which relations of power in the new world order are currently being reconfigured around rehabilitation, incarceration, and a necropolitics that targets unruly populations for elimination. Our presentation examines the queer role of disability, as it lends enfleshment to political and spiritual narratives of “shared vulnerability” and human rights, and of disability activists within what Melani McAlister has named the new “enchanted internationalism” of global evangelicals. We are particularly interested in the unprecedented global circulation of, and emergent desire for, disabled subjects. Focusing on a range of complex rehabilitative logics currently at work around queer, incarcerated, and disabled bodies, we argue that in our contemporary moment rehabilitation itself has emerged in and as a neoliberal economy of desire.
Julie Passanante Elman is at New York University, USA.
Antke Engel (Institute for Queer Theory Berlin/Hamburg, Germany): Organizer
Antke Engel is director of the Institute for Queer Theory situated in Hamburg and Berlin. She received her Ph.D. in Philosophy at Potsdam University (Germany) in 2001, and held a visiting professorship for Queer Theory at Hamburg University between 2003 and 2005. The focus of her work is on feminist and poststructuralist theory, on conceptualizations of sexuality and desire, and on the critique of representation. She has published widely on sexual rights and sexual politics, particularly on the critique of tolerance pluralism and politics of integration. 2007-2009 she was research fellow at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICI) in Berlin. Her project on images of sexuality and economy is published under the title Bilder von Sexualität und Ökonomie. Queere kulturelle Politiken im Neoliberalismus (Bielefeld: transcript 2009). A condensed, English version of it will be published in the forthcoming issue of Cultural Critique (2010) under the title “The Surplus of Paradoxes. Queer/ing Images of Sexuality and Economy”.
Amalia Fischer-Pfaeffle (Rio de Janeiro, Brazil): "Social Funding and Sexual Justice in Brazil"
Amalia Fischer-Pfaeffle was Professor of Political Science at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Mexico for 20 years. She is founder and Executive Director of the Angela Borba Fund for Women based in Rio de Janeiro. A Mexican-Nicaraguan feminist activist since 1975, Dr. Fischer founded the Fund in 2001 with nine other women to raise awareness surrounding women’s contributions and women’s issues while changing patterns of traditional philanthropic giving. The Fund works to modernize the culture of philanthropy and social investment in Brazil, with the goal of transforming people’s ‘hand-out’ mentality on giving into a deeper understanding about the importance of investing in diversity and transforming gender relations. Fischer Pfaeffle is also an Ashoka Fellow and serves on the board of the Urgent Action Fund for Women’s Human Rights.
Kevin Floyd (Kent State Univ., USA): "Neoliberalism and the Queer Persistence of Utopia"
This presentation will consider recent re-engagements in U.S. queer studies with the category of utopia (most notably in the work of Jose Munoz) in relation to queer studies’ ongoing critical engagement with the dynamics of neoliberalism.
Kevin Floyd is Associate Professor of English at Kent State University. His main areas of research comprise 20th Century U.S. Literature and Culture, Historical and Cultural Materialism, Gender and Masculinity Studies, and Queer Studies. In his most recent book The Reification of Desire. Towards a Queer Marxism (University of Minnesota Press 2009) Floyd brings queer critique to bear on the Marxian categories of reification and totality and considers the dialectic that frames the work of Georg Lukács, Herbert Marcuse, and Fredric Jameson. He takes two critical perspectives rarely analyzed together and productively scrutinizes these ideas both with and against each other to put forth a new theoretical connection between Marxism and queer studies. Floyd theorizes a dissociation of sexuality from gender at the beginning of the twentieth century in terms of reification to claim that this dissociation is one aspect of a larger dynamic of social reification enforced by capitalism. Among his most notable publications for our conference beside his recent book are his articles “Lukacs and Sexual Humanism” in: Rethinking Marxism 18.3 (2006): 399-405 and “Rethinking Reification: Marcuse, Psychoanalysis, and Gay Liberation,” Social Text 66 (2001): 103-28. Floyd is a recent recipient of an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Transcoop Grant, which is funding a research project on comparative and transnational masculinity studies, in collaboration with Prof. Dr. Stefan Horlacher of Technische Universität Dresden, where he was also a Fulbright professor in spring and summer 2009
Kathrin Ganz / Do. Gerbig (TU Hamburg-Harburg / AG Queer Studies, Germany): "Deconstructing capitalism with passion"Coming from a poststructuralist and queer-feminist tradition of boldly thinking things otherwise, we try to make cautious first steps towards deconstructing monolithic “capitalism”. For us, the omnipotent image of capitalism prevalent in some leftist anticapitalist critique occludes the already existing diversity in economic relations, as shown by J. K. Gibson-Graham. Following Judith Butler’s work on materialization of assumed binary sexes, we argue that the term capitalism works as a regulatory fiction everyone and everything has to live up to but that can never be fulfilled completely. We argue that there are traces of transformation to be found in our everyday practices when we question those normalizations of capitalist hegemony. Instead of waiting for a worldwide revolution abolishing the monster, we think it’s fruitful to discover, accredit, reflect and intensify the already existing potential for change that tends to be excluded from economic discourse.While walking this path we try troubling the identity of capitalism, think of class as an intersectional process and take into account the productivity of sexual labour. Looking for examples of non-exploitive economic practices, we focus on complex figurations of power within the perfidious freedom of neoliberal governmentality. We believe that a deconstructivist and queer-feminist perspective on sexual and economic identities allows for pushing transformations and awakening a desire for passionate political projects. Eventually, these projects will be based on the idea of living, thinking and working not in binarities but rather diverse and full of relish.
Kathrin Ganz holds a degree in Political Science, Sociology & Gender and Queer Studies from Hamburg University. She has just started working on her dissertation about the social movement evolving around internet politics and culture at Technische Universität Hamburg-Harburg (Arbeitsgruppe Arbeit-Gender-Technik). She worked as a lecturer in Sociology and Gender & Queer Studies at Hamburg University. As a member of the AG Queer Studies, she co-edited "Verqueerte Verhältnisse. Intersektionale, ökonomiekritische und strategische Interventionen" (2009). Her fields of interest are queer/feminist and intersectional thought, internet politics and culture, families within the welfare state and queer-feminist perspectives on neoliberalism and economy. Kathrin blogs at iheartdigitallife.de.
Do. Gerbig gained her Sociology degree in 2007 with a thesis on subjectivity, agency and resistance from a queer-feminist perspective. Her concept of a "processual-strategic agency" is outlined in the article "Das prozessual-strategische Subjekt in Bewegung" (2009). Do. is a member of the AG Queer Studies in Hamburg and currently works as research assistant at the TU Hamburg-Harburg in the workgroup Arbeit-Gender-Technik. She also worked as lecturer in Sociology and Gender & Queer Studies at Hamburg University for two semesters. Her main interests are queer-feminist theory and activism. Over the last two years, queer critiques of economy came into focus. On this topic, Do. Gerbig and Kathrin Ganz published the article "Diverser leben, arbeiten und Widerstand leisten. Queerende Perspektiven auf ökonomische Praxen der Transformation" in Arranca! 41 (2010).
Aeyal Gross (Tel-Aviv Univ., Israel): "'Thinking Is in the Grey Area': Family, Home, Gender and Diaspora in the Paper Dolls"
The stories of Philippine migrant workers in Israel who put on drag shows was documented in Tomer Heymann's film Paper Dolls. The diasporic-immigrant identity represented in the film blends elements of gender and sexuality configurations typical of the country of origin with those characteristic of Israel. The “Paper Dolls” are depicted in the movie as “gays”, but since they not only appear in drag at the club at night but some actually live a full feminine gender identity, in many senses, they are more reminiscent of transgenders. My talk will look at the role of gender performance in the life of the immigrant worker, as a site that challenges his usual role in the global economic order and citizenship stratification in Israel: for the Paper Dolls, the gender boundary crossing in their shows is also a channel for performance of Israelism. Moreover, their performance challenges their place in the Israeli economy and citizenship stratification in that it enables them to temporarily switch their roles as workers who do the “lowly” jobs reserved for immigrant laborers for the glamorous persona of a star. Their identity is hybridic both in the gender-sexual sense and in the national sense and challenges the role that the global economy allocated them. This discussion raises also questions regarding what is home, what is family, and what is kinship: the Paper Dolls as a diasporic group constitutes for its members both family and home that exist outside the normative models of home and family. But this hybridity encounters a number of formidable regulatory mechanisms — on the sexuality and gender axis that does not fall under either the gay or transsexual models, on the family and home axis that does not fall under the patriarchal - heterosexual model of kinship, and on the nationalism axis that does not fall under the ethno-national model that is so strong in Israel. This queer hybridity runs up against the homonormative regulation of the Israeli gay community as well as the nationalistic and neo-liberal regulation of the Israeli Immigration Police.
Aeyal Gross is Associate Professor in Faculty of Law of Tel-Aviv University, Israel and Visiting Reader at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, UK.
Serena Guarracino (Univ. of Naples, Italy): "Justify My Love: Theorizing a Musical Economy of Desire"
This paper explores the economies of queer desire in the context of contemporary corporate music production and distribution. Elaborating the relationship between neoliberal capitalism and music production and consumption, it focuses on the use of queer imagery as a sales tag, and hence on queer desire as object of consumption through music and performance. The articulation of desire in relationship to music includes the desire to 'consume' the performer as an object of love as well as a an product: hence, in music the body of the performer is both an erotic and an economic body. As a consequence, while corporate music endorses queer desire for commercial purposes, queer consumers may eventually find out to have been “seduced and abandoned” by the music industry, as the title of Richard Smith’s volume has it. The interplay between the erotic and the economic body of the performer can bring to a commodification of desire; yet, it can also lead to a manipulation of economy to articulate alternative patterns of desire: recent musical phenomena, such as the formerly indie punk group The Gossip, show how a ‘corporate-aware’ use of mainstream music can elaborate the queer in music as a counterdiscourse to corporate normativization of queerness. Opting for a decidedly normative pop-dance musical language in their last work, Music for Men (Columbia Records, 2009), the Gossip have acquired world-wide success while at the same time retaining their a-normative queer stance. This happens especially – but not exclusively – through the band’s leader, lesbian and fat-affirmative Beth Ditto, whose public persona and performative body articulate an economy of desire that challenges corporate musical discourses from the inside.
Serena Guarracino is in English Literature, Cultural Studies, Film and Music Studies at the University of Naples “L'Orientale”, Italy.
Evangeline M. Heiliger (Univ. of California, Los Angeles, USA): "When “The Economy” Isn’t Enough: A Feminist Desire for Economic Bodies"
This paper speaks to my feminist desire, as well as several years of scholastic endeavor, to partially dis-unify the powerful ideology of “the economy” as a closed system. Following Gibson-Graham (2006) in recognizing multiple forms of capitalism, and embodiment theorists in recognizing the porousness of bodies, I propose thinking of economies as bodies. This useful contemporary metaphor, read through recent scholarship, allows a more complex picture of economic processes, particularly those utilized by poor and other marginalized people as survival strategies. Building on the work of JK Gibson Graham, Arturo Escobar, Jose Muñoz, Anne McClintock and Liz Grosz, I posit that it is useful to re-introduce the metaphor of an economy functioning like a body, provided one also applies queer, embodiment and performance theories, as it is the intersubjective, communal, polymorphous components of these fields that amplify the metaphor of the body and de-center conventional capitalism as a monolithic economic process. Bodies are not simply closed systems, but have complex interactions with other bodies. I suggest that economic bodies, controlled through human forces, behave in human ways, including active engagement with other economic bodies, and the utilization of forms of social control and power. Racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia and ableism serve neoliberal aims through their visual and discursive association both with certain human bodies and with non-“normative” economic bodies. Thus, imperialist legacies of association serve to re-entrench discrimination and ensure blindnesses through the valorization of certain forms of capitalism and the rational, modern, heterosexual Davos men presumed to work in them. Re-theorizing economies as bodies is not merely a metaphorical undertaking, but a way to recognize as work forms of embodied labor that are not generally visible within conventional, or even alternative, capitalisms.
Evangeline M. Heiliger is in Women’s Studies (Ethical Consumerism) at University of California, Los Angeles, USA.
Christoph F.E. Holzhey (ICI Berlin, Germany): Organizer
Christoph Holzhey is the founding director of the Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICI Kulturlabor Berlin), which he has directed since 2006. He read physics at the University of Oxford and received his first Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from Princeton University in 1993 with a dissertation on the entropy and information loss of black holes. At Columbia University, he studied German Literature and wrote his second dissertation on economies of paradoxical pleasures, masophobia and sexual difference in aesthetics (Ph.D. 2001). Returning to Germany, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin (2001-03) and in the project “Mystik und Moderne” at the Universität Siegen (2003-06). He published articles in theoretical physics, on German literature, and on the intersections of science and literature concerning especially the life sciences and psychoanalytical theories of sexual difference. He edited Biomystik: Natur - Gehirn - Geist (München: Fink 2007) and co-edited with Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky and Anja Michaelsen Der Einsatz des Lebens: Lebenswissen, Medialisierung, Geschlecht (Berlin: b_books 2009).
Maja Horn (Barnard College, USA): "The Currencies of Queer in the Dominican Republic"
In comparison to other Latin American countries, such as Brazil, Argentina or Mexico, the Dominican Republic is often perceived as a particularly homophobic country; yet, I want to show in my presentation how since the 1980s queer subjectivities, practices and symbols have accrued significant currency in various, albeit limited realms, including television, academia, the arts, NGOs, tourism, government, etc. While this newfound currency of queer is closely tied to the pervasive impact of global capitalism on the country, these developments do not simply equate with greater justice for queers in the Dominican Republic. These developments as much have foreclosed as opened up spaces for queers, have restrained queer agency in some contexts and enabled new forms of agency in others. Focusing on mass media (television), (sex) tourism, and non-governmental and governmental institutions, I will show how queer subjects have negotiated these manifold transformations in the past decade. I then suggest how these negotiations challenge our predominant understandings of notions such as sexual “liberation” and sexual justice in the global North, as well as what we perceive as being “progressive” (and its converse: “backwardness”) and finally ask how one can work towards greater sexual in terms that better account for the queer realities lived in the Dominican Republic.
Maja Horn is Assistant Professor in the department of Spanish and Latin American Cultures at Barnard College, New York, USA.
Susie Jolly (Univ. of Sussex, UK): "Not a luxury: Sexuality in Development"
There is now widespread recognition that sexual ill-health can contribute to poverty (eg. in The Maputo Plan of Action, adopted by Ministers of Health from 48 African countries in 2006). But there is less acknowledgement of how pressure to conform to norms around sexuality influences poverty levels and well-being more broadly.How do norms around sexuality influence material realities? This presentation will consider this questions, drawing on research and experience by southern partners of the IDS Sexuality and Development programme.People can suffer economic consequences for diverging from norms around sexuality. LGBT, sex workers, single women, women who have sex outside of marriage, and non-macho men, may face discrimination in housing, health care, and the informal and formal economy. This is why ‘Gays and Lesbians of Zimbabwe’ (GALZ) provides emergency shelter for members thrown out by their families, and vocational training, so that their members have more chance of earning a livelihood, and gaining acceptance by contributing economically. For GALZ, sexual and economic justice are inseparable.Those who conform to dominant norms of sexuality may also pay a price in terms of health, opportunities, and well-being, for example if they undergo genital mutilation, early marriage, or engage in unequal or unsatisfying heterosexual relationships. Research by ‘Women for Women’s Human Rights’ in Turkey shows that many parents take their daughters out of school to increase their likelihood of remaining chaste and marrying according to their parent’s wishes. At the same time, economic status can be improved by conforming or diverging from particular sexuality norms.The international sexual rights movement needs to engage more with economic realities, and poverty reduction and economic justice efforts need to challenge inequalities generated by sexuality norms. An exploration of the interconnections between the two areas can identify synergies and ways to move forward.
Susie Jolly convenes the Sexuality and Development Programme at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex, Brighton, UK. Her recent publications include Cornwall, A, Correa, S and Jolly, S (2008) Development with a Body: Sexuality, Human Rights and Development, London: Zed Books, and Jolly, S (2007) 'Why the Development Industry Should Get Over its Obsession with Bad Sex and Start to Think About Pleasure', IDS working paper 283. Susie Jolly previously lived in China for many years working with UNDP and other organisations on HIV/AIDS and poverty reduction, and joining in local sexual rights and feminist activism.
Ratna Kapur (New Dehli, India): "Out of the Colonial Closet and Stuck Inside the Liberal Box: The Market and the Legal Regulation of Sexual Subjectivity in Postcolonial India"
In this paper, I examine how the story of sexuality in contemporary India cannot be understood or framed within a heteronormative/non-heteronormative binary. It is more appropriately framed within the logic of the colonial encounter and contemporary economic global processes. I discuss how this framing helps in understanding the issue of homosexuality within a postcolonial context, namely India, and the tension produced in the area of queer desire between the ostensibly liberating influences of the market in the public arena and the continued constraints imposed by the dominant cultural, sexual and familial norms that inform the legal regulation of sexual subjectivity.
Ratna Kapur is Director of the Centre for Feminist Legal Research, and lectures at the Indian Society for International Law. Her book Erotic Justice. Law and the New Politics of Postcolonialism (Cavendish Publishers 2005) provides invaluable contributions to the question of economic and sexual justice. Professor Kapur is currently a Fellow at the Programme for the Study of International Law at the International Institute for Graduate Studies in Geneva. She practiced law for a number of years in New Delhi, and now teaches and publishes extensively on issues of international law, human rights, feminist legal theory and postcolonial theory. She has been part of the Global Visiting Faculty at NYU School of Law, visiting faculty at Georgetown University Law Centre, and the National Law School of India University, and a Visiting Fellow at Harvard Law School, Drake Law School, and the University of Miami School of Law. Since Professor Kapur also works as a legal consultant on issues of human rights for various UN bodies, including the Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights, UNICEF and the Division for the Advancement of Women she combines in a most interesting way theoretical debates from the legal studies with legal politics and vice versa. Her other influential books are Secularism’s Law Sigh? (co-authored, Oxford University Press, 2001) and Subversive Sites: Feminist Engagements with Law in India (co-authored, Sage, 1996).
Akhil Katyal (Univ. of London, UK): "Just Asking for Love: Indian Men on Planet Romeo"
"Hi wanna fuck me then pay me" (paymebucks, Bangalore, India). "Looking for true friendship with love and fun.I dont like money-makers and cheaters" (lovingraju, Chennai, India). "Hi guys, I need a true, trustful friend cum lover...like a warm deep hug, walking on the road by holding his hands, lying on his thigh, drinking cool drinks in same bottle, eating in a same plate, sleeping in same bed...our relationship must go for life long...not only for sex but for true love! money minders and cheaters pls stay away" (lack_of_love, Tiruchirapalli, India). "Have you gotta something else, except money, ass and dick?" (backafterbreak, Pune, India). Whereas desire is always crude enough to be in trade, love is doomed to be 'something else', always a gesture of solidarity that compounds no interest. Objects of desire can openly be bought - or blackmailed - but the concept of love, true love, sustains itself by denying its tie with capital. The men in the Indian section of the international men's dating website planetromeo insist on this contradiction, on this covert architecture of love. They seek to enter the matrices of consumption that always prop up relationships - usually between men and women - which 'go for life long' and yet they make this entry by that very bon sens denial of money implicit in a love utterance. Paving such an entry means that sex trade, casual sex, sex outside relationships or many lovers - i.e. situations propelled by desire without longevity, or by its immersion in capital, cheaters and money-makers are the same here - and even sex between women, are increasingly framed as disturbances in this special narrative of love between men. They obstruct ideas of a respectable, safely consuming 'gay community' that, in recent years in India, has eaten off the political claim to justice from the state (Naz Foundation vs. Union of India, 2009). The symbolic sign of the gay community is itself a bid for repectability as a cosmopolitan, consuming urban minority. My short presentation would calculate the stakes of realizing this justice. It would also cite spaces like planetromeo to point out that a just reading of the passions will always be contradictory; the most unjust and cruel thing is always desire itself.
Akhil Katyal is a writer currently based in London where he is pursuing his PhD in autobiography and same-sex desire in modern India at the School of Oriental and African Studies. He blogs at akhilkatyalpoetry.blogspot.com.
Irene León (Quito, Ecuador): "Resignifications of diversities in 21st-century societal changes "
Latin America is going through an unprecedented political spring, in which different societies are seeking to rethink themselves and outline their present and future through new parameters. In this context, innovative conceptualizations of diversity are emerging, with definitions that put it at the core of the new visions of society. This is evidenced in countries that are going through refoundation processes based on the concept of Sumak Kawsay (Good Living), just like those evolving around Communitarian Socialism or Socialism of the 21st century. These create, through a reconceptualization that relates them to economic diversity and/or approaches of extended reproduction of life, scenarios which facilitate the redefinitions of political economics from what has been considered private or subjective, such as sexualities.
Irene León is member of the Board of Directors of Agencia Latinoamericana de Información and Director of its Women's Program. She is also former coordinator of the Forum of the Americas for Diversity and Pluralism, a preparatory space of NGOs of the region for the World Conference Against Racism, and editor of several books on gender issues, globalization, and resistance in Latin America including Retos Feministas en un Mundo Globalizado (Porto Alregre, 2002); Mujeres en Resistencia (Quito, 2005) and Mujeres Contra el ALCA (Quito). She has also published extensively on the World Social Forum, in which she has been actively engaged.
Desiree Lewis (Univ. of Western Cape, South Africa): "Redefining Sexual freedoms in South Africa"
Desiree Lewis is a senior lecturer in women's and gender studies at the University of the Western Cape, and has worked as a lecturer and researcher at the University of the Witwatersrand, the University of Natal and the University of Cape Town, and as an independent researcher and editor. She has published many articles on African feminism and South African literary cultural studies, and is the editor of African Feminist Theories, Concepts and Methodology, which will be published by the Nordic Africa Institute in Sweden.
Renate Lorenz (SFB Kulturen des Performativen, Berlin): "The sexual household"
This input takes as its material historical photographs and the film “Normal Work” (Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz 2007, 13’). It refers to a relationship between domestic worker Hannah Cullwick and bourgeois advocate Arthur Munby in Victorian England: Hannah Cullwick not only cleaned from early in the morning to late in the evening in various households, she also produced a series of remarkable staged photographs, numerous diaries, and letters. These materials present her strength, her muscles, and her big, dirty hands: embodiments of her gender that were obviously directly connected with her working practices and which she was very proud of. Hannah Cullwick's portraits and self-portraits, which show her not only as a domestic servant, but also in “class drag” or “ethnic drag”, were part of a sadomasochistic relationship that she had with Arthur Munby, a man from the bourgeois class. Interestingly, it was the elements of her hard work in the households that provided the material for their shared SM scenes. The work that Cullwick carried out as a domestic servant was later restaged together with Munby in their meetings in his home. My input will provide three theoretical concepts, sexual labour, crossings and drag, which allow to show how the Victorian household as an economic entity depends on desire, and how desire is at work in what I call “crossings”. The crossings of social positions that Cullwick staged in the photographs - which show her as a bourgeois woman, as a young bourgeois man, or as a slave in blackface - partly also play a role in Cullwick’s everyday life, for instance when she travelled with Arthur Munby in “bourgeois drag”. The photographs can be understood as a technology to control these crossings, or to reflect on the great efforts and constant deliberation that were connected to them. The film “normal work” asks whether the crossings of social hierarchies of class, gender, and “race” that Hannah Cullwick staged and that she obviously desired have today become generalized into a paradoxical requirement in the field of labour.
Renate Lorenz is at the SFB Kulturen des Performativen, FU Berlin, Germany
Gundula Ludwig (Univ. of Vienna, Austria): "Desiring ambivalences of desires"
Usually, in the tradition of critical social theory, the relationship between economy and desire is theorized by focussing on the aspect of subjection. Either desire is framed as being repressed through the mode of production or it is understood as constituted to serve specific patterns of working and consuming. My starting point is that such perspectives are one-sided and problematic because the underlying understanding of the relationship between (economic) power and subjects remains juridical. The focus is either that an already existing subject with already existing desire(s) is being repressed by economy or that subjects and desires are solely subjugated through (economic) power. On the contrary, in line with Michel Foucault, I assume that power in ‘highly developed capitalist’ ‘western’ societies predominantly operates through the non-juridical form of governing. Consequently, the relationship between economy and the constitution of desire cannot be reduced to subjection either. Rather, within a specific historical mode of production there are also desires constituted that open up spaces for emancipation, critique and subversion. Foucault outlines these ambivalences with the promise of liberal freedom that goes hand in hand with the spreading of capitalism. That subjects are considered as ‘free’ clearly on one side enables a specific mode of production. On the other side, the promise of freedom also incites desires for not being subjected. In my contribution I want to propose a theoretical perspective to understand the ambivalences of desire in relation to the dominant mode of production. I will approach Foucault’s understanding of power in terms of governing, ground it with a Gramscian understanding of capitalist economy as relying on a specific subject constitution and revisit it from a queer-theoretical perspective in order to understand the triangle of economy–governing–desire beyond a judicial frame of economic relations and power.
Gundula Ludwig is in the Department of Political Science at the University of Vienna, Austria.
Laurie Marhoefer (Syracuse Univ., USA): "The Queer Empire: Nineteenth Century Legacies for Twenty-First Century Economies?"
Scholars across the disciplines have lately argued that there is a historical link between empire building and sexual desire. Europeans imagined their colonies as places of sexual openness. This inspired many to join colonial projects. My paper investigates the queer dimensions of this history. Queer imaginings forged a link between scientific knowledge and sex tourism that shapes international economies to this day. I examine how German authors of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century linked queer desire and identity through sex tourism. I consider the work of men who established sexology, including Iwan Bloch and Magnus Hirschfeld, and popular publications that spread sexological knowledge, such as the Sittengeschichte (histories of morality). This literature depended on the economies of empire because its authors used stories of queer liaisons told by tourists and colonial administrators as evidence for sexology. In this work, knowledge about sex with colonized peoples helped to produce the model of biological homosexuality. Hirschfeld and others argued that the presence of men who had sex with men beyond Europe proved that homosexuality was biological, not environmental. This notion provided the foundation for more sex tourism in an imagined queer empire. Sexology promised a global population of biological homosexuals with whom Europeans could experience the thrill of short-term romance. My paper considers how this history shapes international economies and politics today. I draw on the robust interdisciplinary literature on queer sex tourism in order to argue that although some cultural tropes of queerness in and outside of Europe have shifted (with Europeans and North Americans imagining how hostile former colonies are to queer desires in comparison to Europe and North America), the foundational tropes have not, and economic arrangements in the form of queer sex tourism are still very much in place.
Laurie Marhoefer is Assistant Professor of History at Syracuse University, USA
Jamila M. H. Mascat (Univ. La Sapienza, Rome, Italy): "Can the subaltern desire? The erotic as a power and the disempowerment of the erotic"
This paper seeks to explore postcolonial desiring practices by developing a political analysis of a literary text. To that extent it will focus on Salwa Al Neimi’s latest novel The proof of the honey (Europa Editions, 2009) in order to discuss the political implications of sexual desire as narrated by the protagonist of this erotic memoir, a Syrian scholar working in Paris.I‘ll assume the concept of desire not only in its sexual meaning, but rather in the Deleuzian sense, as a “productive force”, a tool involved in producing social relations. Consequently I’ll consider the contemporary postcolonial cultural sphere as a tension field where different desiring forces cross and oppose each other while establishing power relations. In this context one can distinguish two main different expressions of the subaltern’s desire: (1) a unilateral and conflictual identity claim made against the dominant (i.e. religious fundamentalism) and (2) a demand for recognition based on negotiation processes of the otherness. Can Al Neimi’s novel be considered as a relevant example of the latter? Since narration of sexuality by Arab women can be interpreted as the counterpart of Western orientalist desire “to open the harem’s door” (F. Mernissi) we can consider such a literary practice as a display of the subaltern' s desire reduced to “a desire to be desired”. In this case the use of the erotic doesn't challenge the codes of othering imposed by the dominant (A. Lorde), rather it accomplishes the disempowerment of desiring as a productive force: the erotic becomes a tool for satisfying the dominant’s desire of “eating the other” (b. hooks).
Jamila M. H. Mascat is Teaching Assistant for the Chair of Practical Philosophy at Università La Sapienza, Rome, Italy
Anne McClintock (UW Madison, USA): "Skin Hunger: A Chronicle of Sex, Desire, and Money"
Anne McClintock is the Simone de Beauvoir Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at UW-Madison, having previously taught at both Columbia and New York University. Her work on historical and current forms of imperialism and postcolonialism suggests complex interrelations between gender, sexuality, race, and class as being the mutually constitutive elements of transnational capitalist economy. Elaborating on possibilities of combining Marxist and psychoanalytic thinking from a feminist perspective McClintock takes desire as a decisive moment for understanding political and economic processes. McClintock is best known for her now canonical book, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest (Routledge 1995) and the collection Dangerous Liaisons: Gender, Nation and Postcolonial Perspectives, co-edited with Ella Shohat and Aamir Mufti. For the conference she will present ideas from her forthcoming creative non-fiction book Skin Hunger: A Chronicle of Sex, Desire and Money. Two other publications are also on their way: The Sex Work Reader, and Screwing the System, a collection of essays on sexuality and power.
Robert McRuer (George Washington Univ., USA): "Interdependency, Rehabilitation, and Necropolitics: Dis/ability and Desire in the Emergent Global Order"
(with Julie Passanante Elman)
In 2009, Joni and Friends International Disability Center, an organization dedicated to “global outreach to the disability community,” celebrated its 30th anniversary of “ministry … to people with disabilities and their families across the US and the world.” Founded by Joni Eareckson Tada, who became disabled after a diving accident in 1967, Joni and Friends has since its inception encouraged and participated in various forms of evangelical/disability activism. Our presentation analyzes this activism in the context of queer and disability critiques of neoliberalism and globalization. We are particularly interested in the ways in which certain forms of transnational disability activism—along with the desire for new understandings of disability and disability identity—can be problematically articulated in and through emergent forms of homophobia and neocolonialism. For this reason, we examine two contemporaneous initiatives in which Joni and Friends has been involved: 1) “Wheels for the World,” a global wheelchair outreach program that accepts donations of used mobility-assistive equipment (equipment that is then repaired by trained prison inmates in twenty-two correctional facilities throughout the United States and distributed in over forty countries throughout Eastern Europe, South America, Asia, and the Middle East by teams comprised of able-bodied and disabled missionaries) and 2) the Manhattan Declaration, a manifesto issued by evangelical, Catholic, and Orthodox Christian leaders and signed and globally disseminated by Tada’s organization. The Manhattan Declaration explicitly avows support for the pro-life, traditional marriage, and religious freedom movement and condones civil disobedience against laws regarding abortion and gay marriage. It emerged at the same moment that Uganda put forward the Ugandan Anti-Homosexuality Bill of 2009, which proposed lifetime imprisonment or the death penalty for gay men and lesbians.Recent work in both disability and human rights scholarship has suggested a model of shared vulnerability and interdependence as spaces of possibility for a more expansive vision of human rights and global disability activism in the era of globalization and neoliberalism. However, this language—of defending “the weak and the vulnerable”—has also been taken up by global evangelical groups, such as those crafting the Manhattan Declaration, to describe their affective, moral, and spiritual commitments. At the same time, we argue, the new discursive mobility of a seemingly-innocent “interdependency” can at times mask the ways in which relations of power in the new world order are currently being reconfigured around rehabilitation, incarceration, and a necropolitics that targets unruly populations for elimination. Our presentation examines the queer role of disability, as it lends enfleshment to political and spiritual narratives of “shared vulnerability” and human rights, and of disability activists within what Melani McAlister has named the new “enchanted internationalism” of global evangelicals. We are particularly interested in the unprecedented global circulation of, and emergent desire for, disabled subjects. Focusing on a range of complex rehabilitative logics currently at work around queer, incarcerated, and disabled bodies, we argue that in our contemporary moment rehabilitation itself has emerged in and as a neoliberal economy of desire.
Robert McRuer is Professor of English and Deputy Chair of the Department of English at the The George Washington University, where he teaches queer studies, disability studies, and critical theory. He is the author of Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (NYU, 2006) and co-editor, with Abby L. Wilkerson, of Desiring Disability: Queer Studies Meets Disability Studies, a special issue of GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies (Duke, 2003).
Sonja Mönkedieck (USA): "Neo-Liberal Deregulation of the Separation of Economies and Desires: Monkeydick-Productions Performing Praxeological and Discursive Scales of (In-)Justices"
(with Rhoda Tretow)
The presentation approaches the neo-liberal figure of “her enterprising self” from a deconstructive angle. It describes the extent to which the categories gender, sexuality, and labour are subject to transformation in neo-liberal rationalities. To provide a space for the negotiation of such transformation processes, praxeologically as well as discursively, the enterprise Monkeydick-Productions was created to perform the contradictions between the praxeological and discursive level. Employees of the enterprise are encouraged to let the boundary between economy and desire blur, as is the custom in neo-liberal businesses. “Breaching experiments” respective performances conducted by Monkeydick-Productions focus on the inconsistencies between the neo-liberal promise of individual reward for individual performance and the often very different conditions encountered in practice. Inconsistencies of this kind are discussed with the aim of developing a tactic that will contribute to the reintegration of resulting contradictions into discourses instead of uncritically celebrating the deregulation of the separation between economies and desires. The tactic should be a way to articulate that social injustices in neoliberal policies still exist.
Sonja Mönkedieck
Ghassan Moussawi (Rutgers Univ., USA): "Queering the Paris of the Middle East, or the Promise of a Queer Beirut"
This research (still a work in progress), looks at ways that Beirut, Lebanon is being represented as a new gay touristic destination and the ways that it is being incorporated into the global gay tourist economy. In addition it considers the implications that such practices have on the understandings of non-heterosexual and queer sexualities in Beirut. More specifically it will question the ways that the growing organized gay tourism industry in the West is shaping, challenging or effecting queer sexualities elsewhere.First, the study will look at the ways that current Euro-American journalistic accounts and international gay tour guides represent Beirut. It will locate and explore the ways that it is being made intelligible to potential Western self-identified gay tourists, by positing is as both “familiar” and “other.” I will apply Said’s notion of Orientalism in understanding the ways that the “other” is created, both in terms of geography and people. In addition, I will touch upon discourses of discovery, desiring of the other, excitement, danger, authenticity, global gay identity and the creation of gay utopias.Second, I will address the ways that this can potentially change and effect local conceptions of sexuality and non-heterosexual identities. Does the prospect or the presentation of Beirut as a “gay-friendly” city (in relation to the Arab world) change the perception of non-heterosexual Lebanese? How would the interactions between gay tourists and locals change or challenge local understandings of sexuality, if it does? Following those questions, I would ideally be interested in examining the ways that locals might appropriate these representations in order to cater for certain audiences and gay tourists. Whose interests do these representations serve, especially with the proliferation of LGBT human rights discourse? How does the visibility of cities in the global south as “gay friendly” and potential gay touristic destinations effect the locals, especially in places where homosexuality is still considered illegal? Hence, a discussion of notions of social justice in terms of sexuality and sexual identities will be important.
Ghassan Moussawi is a first year PhD student in Sociology at Rutgers University. He holds an MA in Sociology from the American University of Beirut and has done work on "compulsory heterosexuality" and the construction of non-heterosexual masculinities in Beirut, Lebanon. His research interests include: intersections between race, gender and sexuality, masculinities, narrating the self, queer tourism, and queer theory.
Matteo Pasquinelli (Queen Mary Univ. of London, UK): "The Just Masochism of the Imaginary: The Bicephalous Economy of Desire between Mass Media and Internet Pornography"
A common critique recognizes Deleuze and Guattari’s desiring philosophy as a specular incarnation of post-Fordism with no emancipatory potential: their ‘capitalism and schizophrenia’ project is dismissed as late capitalism is said to be already schizophrenic. According to Hardt and Negri only if their desiring production is framed within a biopolitical production, the crucial axis of contemporary economy and the exploitation of affective labour can be understood. This paper addresses critical theory for its inability to elaborate the productive role of the dark side, that is the apparently ‘contradicting’ assemblage of manifest and latent content within today’s hyper-sexualised mediascape.Case study is the role of internet pornography (or indie porn) among queer subcultures in the early 2000s. Some groups investigated how to reinvent pleasure practices and identities within a controversial field of expression. Conversely, others cultivated anonymity and the refusal of such a commodified sphere. In this debate ‘queer’ desire happened also to be neutralised of any obscenity potential. Between the conceptualisation of masochism of the early Deleuze (Présentation de Sacher-Masoch, 1967) and the late Foucault (L'usage des plaisirs, 1984), the paper concludes by showing how the mainstram economy is always driven by ambivalent and ‘bicephalous’ forms of desire. As J.G. Ballard advocated ‘just psychopathologies’ (The Atrocity Exhibition, 1970) to survive the contemporary mediascape, a minor just masochism is suggested to embrace and exceed the ‘schizophrenia’ of late capitalism.
Matteo Pasquinelli is a writer, curator and academic researcher at the Queen Mary University of London where he is concluding his PhD dissertation on the forms of conflict within knowledge economy. He wrote the book Animal Spirits: A Bestiary of the Commons (2008) and co-edited C’Lick Me: A Netporn Studies Reader (2007). In Amsterdam, together with Katrien Jacobs, he organised the Art and Politics of Netporn conference (2005) and the C’Lick Me festival (2007).
Rhoda Tretow (Germany): "Neo-Liberal Deregulation of the Separation of Economies and Desires: Monkeydick-Productions Performing Praxeological and Discursive Scales of (In-)Justices"
(with Sonja Mönkedieck)
The presentation approaches the neo-liberal figure of “her enterprising self” from a deconstructive angle. It describes the extent to which the categories gender, sexuality, and labour are subject to transformation in neo-liberal rationalities. To provide a space for the negotiation of such transformation processes, praxeologically as well as discursively, the enterprise Monkeydick-Productions was created to perform the contradictions between the praxeological and discursive level. Employees of the enterprise are encouraged to let the boundary between economy and desire blur, as is the custom in neo-liberal businesses. “Breaching experiments” respective performances conducted by Monkeydick-Productions focus on the inconsistencies between the neo-liberal promise of individual reward for individual performance and the often very different conditions encountered in practice. Inconsistencies of this kind are discussed with the aim of developing a tactic that will contribute to the reintegration of resulting contradictions into discourses instead of uncritically celebrating the deregulation of the separation between economies and desires. The tactic should be a way to articulate that social injustices in neoliberal policies still exist.
Rhoda Tretow
Irene Peano (Univ. of Cambridge, UK): "The prostitute’s desire: Nigerian sex workers’ life trajectories beyond need, coercion and calculation"
This paper proposes to explore the meanings of desire in relation to both economy and sexuality, by reference to the life stories of Nigerian migrant women who at some point in their life trajectory sold sexual services on the streets of Europe, and most especially Italy. In particular, it seeks to understand the sexual dimension of desire from the point of view of sexual-services providers: despite the frequent equations of prostitution with the erasure of (female) sexual desire for economic gain, commercial sexual prestations might in fact contain a (residue of) desire. Indeed, the very economic dimension of such exchanges is an index to the underlying desires driving them from the sex worker’s perspective, which includes, but is not limited to, monetary gain.I pursue this line of inquiry by exploring the women’s engagement in relationships to clients, lovers, friends, sugar daddies and husbands, relationships which are predicated on the ambiguity between such different male subject positions and the affective meanings attached to them. The women’s migratory projects, punctuated with coercion as well as driven by desires and needs, might be understood as subjective quests for justice, apparently individualized but often following a concern with social relations and following an ethos of redistribution. The ethnographic material presented was collected during eighteen months of fieldwork, which took place between Nigeria and Italy (for eleven and seven months respectively), and through shorter trips, ongoing conversations and second-hand material.
Irene Peano is currently completing her doctoral dissertation in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Her work is concerned with issues of mistrust, ambiguity and secrecy as they play out in relation to the bonded sexual labour of Nigerian women in Italy. To that end, she conducted eighteen months of ethnographic research, of which eleven in Benin City, Nigeria, and seven in Turin, Italy, exploring relationships between migrant women and non-governmental organisations, states, and other social actors such as kin relations, clients, and lovers. After completion of her thesis, she plans to carry out more research on the articulations of migration with the law, sovereignty and its exception, citizenship, and cynicism in contemporary Italy.
Oishik Sircar Jindal Global Law School, India): "Two Histories of Desire: Who Speaks For 'Indian' Sexualities?"
The title of this paper draws on Dipesh Chakrabarty’s book Provincializing Europe’s two introductory chapters in which Chakrabarty creatively re-reads the idea of ‘lack’ through postcolonial historiography and offers a sophisticated analysis of Marx to understand the “life process” of capital through two historical trajectories – one of capital’s universal narrative that deals with historical difference by temporizing it, with the ability to subsume all progress under its logic (“History 1”), and the other that constantly interrupts the totalizing thrusts of capital and makes room for the politics of human belonging and diversity (“History 2”). Following Chakrabarty, Part I of this paper offers two histories of desire in contemporary India: one that follows the liberal teleology of repression to emancipation of non-heterosexual sexualities; a narrative that feeds into and reproduces the magic of modernity (Desire 1), and the other in which desire is inhabited and performed through bodily habits and unselfconscious collective practices of the everyday and ordinary which are not automatically aligned with the logic of capital (Desire 2). The disruptive potential of Desire 2 is identified by reading its ‘lack’ otherwise and locating it within non-bourgeoisie spaces that Partha Chatterjee calls ‘Political Society’. In Part II, the paper uses insights from Foucaultian Governmentality to understand how the desire for being constituted as a citizen in a globalizing India is being allured through practices of individuation and responsibilization where the borders of citizenship are being expanded to ‘tolerate’ sexual anti-citizens; but as citizenship gets sexualized, its practices get privatized and self-disciplined through the operation of Desire 1. By reading a select set of archives (legal, popular, subaltern) of sexual desire the paper will argue how the ‘birth’ of the modern sexual citizen in India can be directly owed to the pleasures of privacy, and how capital (and its vicissitudes in the market and the state) needs Desire 1 to continuously reproduce itself. The paper will conclude by emphasising on the urgency for recovering the ‘voice’ of Desire 2 which will help us to historicize ‘Indian’ sexualities not from a subject-position from within History 1, but from a location of alterity made available by History 2.
Oishik Sircar is Assistant Professor and Coordinator in the Collaborative Programme on Law, Postcoloniality and Culture at Jindal Global Law School, India.
Kim Surkan (MIT, USA): "Queer Babymaking and the Economy of New Reproductive Technologies"
Desire in a queer context is usually framed in opposition to reproductive heteronormativity – that is, sex without reproduction. Increasingly, however, queer couples are choosing to have children, often utilizing new reproductive technologies in order to achieve pregnancy without having heterosexual sex. This queer desire for families curiously benefits from the neoliberal privatization of fertility services and commodification of reproductive DNA in a capitalist economy, though it privileges only those with the material wealth necessary to afford the high price tags on these services and bio-products. The prevalence of sperm banks and the outsourcing of “wombs for hire” are just two examples of the growing fertility industry, an industry which is poorly regulated (or not regulated at all) in a global economy. This paper examines the phenomenon of babymaking in a queer context, considering the economy of new reproductive technologies and their impact on queer families. Of particular interest is legislation mandating insurance coverage for infertility, which varies radically from state to state and serves in many instances to reinforce conventional heterosexual configurations of state-sanctioned relationships even when reproduction has been divorced from sexual activity by medical interventions such as intrauterine insemination, embryo transfer, surrogacy, and in-vitro fertilization. In Texas, for example, insurance coverage for fertility is mandated only when the woman being inseminated is married to the sperm donor. The conflict between regulation and privatization is therefore strongly felt by queer couples interested in creating a baby using these technologies.
Kim Surkan is in the Department of Women's and Gender Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
Margot Weiss (Wesleyan Univ., USA): "Unpacking the Toy Bag: Commodity and Power Exchange in BDSM Communities"
This paper, from my ethnographic research with BDSM (kinky) communities in the San Francisco Bay Area, examines toys as commodities that produce BDSM practitioners and community. Today in the Bay Area, BDSM is dominated by straight, white, middle-aged suburban professionals: Silicon Valley programmers by day and bondage experts by night. Toys (whips, bondage devices, canes, etc.) are an integral part of this new community; alongside the development of a more formalized, organizationally-focused community has been a tremendous market expansion of BDSM paraphernalia and the techniques these new toys engender. Often custom-made and exceedingly expensive, toys are a crucial mark of community belonging, a primarily way individuals become experienced and knowledgeable BDSM practitioners.This paper shows how buying and using toys produces certain kinds of subjects, desires, intimacies, and larger socialities. I argue that toys are crucial links in the interface between capitalism and embodiment, exploring the relationship between toys and consumers/players in terms of technological prostheses. Such exchanges produce a body simultaneously divided into parts and extended through objects. Thus, I show how commodity exchange creates opportunities for new pleasures and desires, embodiments, and flexible relationalities within the social dynamics of class privilege, an unequal belonging justified through neoliberal rationalities.This tension is registered with ambivalence within the community; many feel that toys – and expert knowledge of toy techniques – has overshadowed more authentic SM practice and intimacy. Reading toys as a fetishistic displacement of cultural contradictions, I argue that this contradictory relationship between sociality and consumerism requires broadening an understanding of “exchange” to account for commodity and power exchange. In this way, I show that the BDSM community is a form of social belonging facilitated, even produced, by the supplemental relationship between community and capital – a community organized around the neoliberal cultural formations and exchanges of late-capitalism.
Margot Weiss is Assistant Professor of American Studies and Anthropology at Wesleyan University, USA.
Volker Woltersdorff (SFB "Cultures of the Performative", Berlin, Germany): Organizer
Volker Woltersdorff, born in 1971, studied German, French and Italian Literature in Munich, Pisa, and Paris. He holds a Maîtrise en lettres modernes from the Sorbonne Nouvelle. Since 1999 he has been research fellow at the Institute for Comparative Literature at the Freie Universität of Berlin. He is member of the interdisciplinary research group “Culture and Performativity”, where he is currently working on a research project on sadomasochistic subcultures. In 2004 he earned a PhD with a study on gay male coming out narratives. In 2007 he organised an international conference on “Performing and Queering Sadomasochism”. He has published many writings in gender and queer studies. Some representative publications are: Coming out - Die Inszenierung schwuler Identitäten zwischen Auflehnung und Anpassung. Frankfurt a. M. / New York 2005. Unbeschreiblich männlich. Heteronormativitätskritische Perspektiven (co-editor), Hamburg 2007. Symbolische Gewalt. Herrschaftsanalyse nach Pierre Bourdieu, Konstanz 2008 (co-editor), “Sexual Politics in Neoliberalism. Managing Precarious Selves” in: Stefanie Ernst/Andrea Bührmann: Control or Care of the Self? The Sociology of the Subject in the 21h Century. Cambridge 2010 (forthcoming). Online publications in English: www.interalia.org.pl, issues 2 and 3.
