by Team
International conference of the Helene Lange Kolleg "Queer Studies and Intermediality: Art - Music - Media Culture"
Perverse Structures. Heteronormative orders of inter/medial queer
29-31 January 2015, University of Oldenburg
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 in terms of the extent to which they re/formulate territorialisations, codings and organisations of bodies and sexualities.