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Perverse structures. Queering heteronormative orders inter/medially

Media and media dispositives with their configurations of perception and spaces of reception - from cinema to art exhibitions to punk concerts - play a central role both in the creation and maintenance of social orders and in their subversion. The conference Perverse Structures asks how artistic and cultural works make it possible to reflect on the medial structuring of reality and at the same time put other forms of fantasising and imagining up for discussion. The focus is on intermedial effects and the potential of these works to criticise and rework heteronormative, racist and capitalist orders, especially in relation to temporality, affect, art/aesthetics and collectivity.

We understand the use of the word perverse as a performative act through which the pejorative power of the term is transformed and new structures are (to be) modelled. For unlike orders that operate with identities and boundaries,assemblages (assemblage/agencement, Deleuze & Guattari) produce connections between certain multiplicities in which desire and individual worlds of experience are produced in a historically differentiating way. Perverse assemblages are therefore questioned with regard to the extent to which they re/formulate territorialisations, codings and organisations of bodies and sexualities.

Perverse Assemblages. Queering heteronormative orders inter/medially

From cinema to art exhibits to punk concerts, media and medial dispositifs play a central role in the production and maintenance of social orders as well as in the subversion of those stabilising functions. These interrelationships are especially significant given how media and medial dispositifs contribute to configuring our perception and provide spaces to accommodate the reception of art, culture, and more. The conference Perverse Assemblages inquiries into how artistic and cultural works enable and even encourage critical reflection on the ways that media structures reality. By extension, the conference aims to raise discussions about other forms (and products) of fantasising and imagining. The intermedial effects and the potential behind works that criticize and rework heteronormative, racist, and capitalist orders are the focus of the conference, in particular with respect to questions of temporality, affect, art/aesthetics, and collectivity.

Our use of the word perverse is meant as a performative act through which the pejorative connotation of the term undergoes a transformation, thereby (hopefully) allowing new assemblages to emerge. For in contrast to other orders that operate along the lines of identities and that draw lines of demarcation, assemblages (to borrow from Deleuze & Guattari's use of the terms assemblage/agencement; in German, Gefüge) produce connections between specific multiplicities. The resulting connections are, in turn, involved in the historically differentiated establishment of desires and individual worlds of experience. Perverse assemblages are, therefore, to be investigated with attention to the limits and potential of their capacities to re/formulate territorialisations, codes, ways of organising bodies, and sexualities.