Over her Dead Body - Notes

keynote judith butler

• villa casandra
• aesthetics emerge at the edge of the unfathomable
• aesthetics, evidence and politics
• gender is a way to describe relations and not identity
• being/becoming feminized (femicide)
• South American state violence is complicit in the upholding of the power structure
• enormous networks as form of political resistance
• Necropolitics, horror and Aesthetics
• theatrical enactment of bans through embodiment
• militant grieving
• our bodies are bound up from the beginning to interdependency

panel

• twin peaks is the same age as ‘over her dead body’
• duplicity between active and passive in her dead body (protagonist), speaking with/about/for her
• the grievable has to be deconstructed

playful engagement with constraints (1990) it seemed like that utopia was just around the corner now crisis seems the word of the day

• morbid symptoms

what is the current situation exactly “grab women by their pussies” retroping of the image of grabbing fortuna by the lock (shakespear)

• nuclear annihilation - i never really feared that
• maybe the robots will also go to the stores

“i want you to do two things. I want you to think about how scary it is, and I want you to think about what you will do about it (and listen to judith for that)”

today we suddenly have to explain what (gender studies) we do and why - what are our relationships to the global apex what are our relationships to public life we have to move outside of our comfort zone we’re forced outside into the public

butler: there seems to be a loss in connection between activism and theory (you were supposed to cheer me up)

vinken: we have made a fetish of science fetishitation of the factual

butler: we have to publicly discuss and defend geisteswissenschaften how do make meaning of this world it is actualy not just an attack of gender studies but on the humanities

we need a really robust public intervention and show how we do discourse trump is a living attack on the humanities

butler: there never has been feminism without a backlash

Necropolitics and Aesthetics

Nach Judith Butler ist Gender eine Beschreibung von Beziehungen (relations) nicht eine gegebene Identität. Das heisst, dass Gender immer wieder in den Diskurs getragen werden muss. Der Unterschied oder die Spannung von jetzt zu vor 25 Jahren ist folgend, dass dieser Diskurs nicht mehr in der Öffentlichkeit ausgetragen wurde. Die Feministin_en von damals haben sich in einer Erwartungshaltung der kommenden Utopie gewähnt. Es scheint auch eine Divergenz zwischen Aktivisimus und Theorie zu geben.

Judith Butler ruft dazu auf, aus der akademischen/theoretischen Komfortzone auszubrechen und im öffentlichen Diskurs die Geisteswissenschaften zu verteidigen.

Butler interpretiert Bronfen insofern, dass Aesthetiken am Rande des Unergründlichen entstehen. Die Aesthetiken, welche Bronfen in ihrer Arbeit ‘Over Her Dead Body’ untersucht, beziehen sich unter anderem auf Necropolitics. Sie untersucht also jene Beziehungen welche Gender und zu jenen Machtgefügen haben, welche über den Tod entscheiden (wer darf wann und wie sterben).

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• relevance of stories

keynote: mandy merck

• weiner as his own villain and his wife as his victim
• sexual scandal has theme, melodrama

victorian style

• short stretch between victorian melodrama self expression to contemporary self production
• is there a anti-semitic part to the weiner scandal

the dead will not rise

• reframing the role nongqawuse’s role in the cattle killing the prophecy and consequent cattle killing movement is a form of resistance against a military stronger colonial occupier the prophecy was against witchcraft and was in accordance with colonial teaching even the general grey wasn’t able/didn’t know how to handle the lang sickness

alessandra violi / ghosting her dead body

• the hidden mothers (cloaked helpers, who hold children for photographs) are celebrated in linda fregni nagler’s archive, due to the fact, that they couldn’t be hidden completely. their ghostly presence are a visual sign of the 1800 - 1900 and after 1990. → a feminist visual archive
• foto galatasaray for 50 years same tech (black and white glas) and same setting (deco) become cultural limbo the archive is now used to imagine a different future/imagine a different way
• women at the mirror liberating self confidence, haunted by the ghosts of hollywood ideals
• identicals (mother and child made identical)
• gender photographs document men dressed up as women / transvestites sometimes performing heteronormativity
• men holding hands, homoerotic photographs

shanhinyan’s archive draws us into a political imagination

• the archive is rewriteable

isabel capeloa gil - theory in the post-theoretical world: béyonca and the afterlife of over her dead body

• for vogue chimamnda became a feminist symbol after beyonce used parts of her speech in her music
• pop culture can be an involuntary forum for feminism
• beyonce’s construct of feminism can’t be trusted, it is to simplified
• she symbolises te two bodies, butler talked about. being in power and subjugating at the same time
• the link between beyonce’s hold up and butler’s figure of the hysteric as protest
• the seductive of the black body gives the dead women a voice
• beyonce’s aesthetics as way to do practice in a post-theoretical world