This project explores the performativity of sexual and gendered identites and their artistic and subcultural production in the context of social transformation. The focus lies upon narrative literatur, subcultural and artistic performances, and photography and media art. The leading questions are: How can the present mobilisation and individualisation of sexual and gendered identities and lives be described with the aid of the performative model? Which technologies of the self and which social strategies are enacted in gender discourses, identity politics, and subculturals aesthetics. The project newly investigates in the effects of economic and labour transformations on the precarisation of identities and on the intervention of artistic and subcultural practice into these economics and labour organisation. This perspective allows to consider the relation of everyday practice, cultural practice, and social change. The project continues the work that up to now had been entiteld: "Re/Presentations of Gender - Narrative and Performative discourses in contemporary erotic and aesthetic cultures" and "Borders of Gender - Practices, Spaces, Symbolic Forms". The new title expresses the shrinking importance of narrativity in favour of an orientation towards an aesthetical and empirical analysis of social transformation. The notion of 'precarisation' is introduced in order to connect to its usage in gender and social theory as much as in political movements that adress the ambivalence of individualisation and decreasing traditionality on the one hand and social inequality and instability on the other. The notion is put under critical scrutiny, it will be elaborated and sharpened. The main interest lies on the instable, over-determined and thus precarious subcetivities that result from this ambivalence. During the present and last work phase, the project investigates in the effects that the dislimitation of traditional definitions of gender and sexuality has in everyday cultural practice and in the effects of economic and labour transformations on these very definitions. Therefore, the notion of precarisation opens a perspective on the active, the passive, and the destructive effects of performativity. That implies also a new perspective on gender and its felxibilisation: How does artistic and subcultural practice intervene into economy and labour? In this respect the project fills a gap within the cultural and aesthetic analysis of the relation of sexuality and society.
Subproject 1 (Gert Mattenklott): Betrayal and Gender in the Context of Precarisation
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Subproject 2 (Renate Lorenz): Transitions: Textual and Visual Practices, Sexuality and the Precarisation of Subjectivity
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Subproject 3 (Volker Woltersdorff): Performing Sadomasochism in Art, Subculture and on the Internet
The subproject points at raising and discussing several controversial hypotheses that go as follows: The field of power in modern societies is thoroughly marked by sadomasochistic dynamics. There is continuity between sadomasochistic subculture and the performativity of power in all day life. These very dynamics can be considered in all day life as a subtext put under taboo whilst pushed in the very centre of SM subculture and of the art work that is inspired by it. That implies a significant shift. Libidinous impacts and mechanisms of the performance of power are not only exposed but also modified by a special framing that guarantees pleasure for all participants - and be it merely the pleasure of pain and fear... While contradiction and ambivalence otherwise bother and therefore are repressed, in sadomasochistic settings they acquire a special appeal and are to be confronted with high intensity.
The possibility to deal with contradictions and borderlines in a playful and fictitious way brings subcultural sadomasochistic practices into a close context with aesthetic practices. The subproject aims to analyse this specific quality of the performance of power in sadomasochistic subculture, in its virtual counterpart on the Internet and in its artistic adaptations. Its main interest lies in understanding and criticising the performativity of power, violence, gender, community, and the subject. Therefore the conference tries to describe "SM" as a ludic state of emergency where subject positions become precarious and where a multiplicity of borderlines is transgressed, suspended and reinstated. The conference finally asks whether "SM" can be considered as a specific mode of cognition that allows insights in the specific libidinal economy by which all participants are involved in the reproduction of dominant positions. That implies the fascination by violence and authority, the pleasure in transgression and in the politically incorrect. They are no exclusive particularities of the sadomasochistic subculture but determine the collective imaginary of a society.
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