14.09.2017 / HISTORY & KNOWLEDGE
11:00-14:00 – Vika Kirchenbauer, Reading Circle Session #1, please register at: research@schwulesmuseum.de
I decided against an artist talk in favour of a reading circle because I believe the questions arising from the exhibition urge for mutual engagement rather than a lecture format. Four texts will be discussed that reflect not my mastery and expertise, but that can serve as cornerstones for stimulating conversations to be had amongst a group of people with different perspectives. The first session focuses on Eve Sedgwick’s “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading” and Édouard Glissant’s “For Opacity”, since both essays fundamentally question thought practices habitual to critical theory and leftist political discourse, making room to refigure such naturalised approaches. Then, for the second session, Wendy Brown’s “Resisting Left Melancholy” will be juxtaposed with an excerpt from Paul Gilroy’s “Postcolonial Melancholia” as together they help complicate notions around disavowed forms of political affect. Because, as becomes clear, through melancholy the West simultaneously accesses a strategy to detach itself from dealing with its imperial and colonial history as well as a means to remain attached to its own (un)dead past. The participants will be sent links to the four texts and are expected to read them in advance. Printed copies will be available at the workshop. The total number of participants is limited to 15.
18:00 – Conversation with Fiona McGovern and Andrea Rottmann on exhibition histories and queer representation.
19:00 – Film Screening, Desire – Sexuality in Germany 1910-1945, Stuart Marshall (1989)
From 1910- 1945 Germany was subjected to one of the most turbulent periods of social and political change that has been experienced by any European country in the twentieth century. In Desire, Stuart Marshall traces cultural and official attitudes towards sexuality through this period as competing forces struggled to define the meanings of masculinity and femininity. The pre-revolutionary youth movement and its connections with the naturist movement or ‘body culture’ are humorously illustrated with contemporary promotional footage from the German Nudist Movement. Sensitive and incisive interviews with historians and eye-witnesses document the history of the homosexual rights movement and the social sexual experiments of the revolutionary Weimar period which culminated in the extreme persecution of sexual radicals under the Nazis. Throughout the film, idyllic images of German landscape and oppressive Nazi architecture are set to the music of Schubert and Mahler creating a moving and stirring backdrop to the testimony of the survivors. Commissioned for the gay and lesbian TV magazine Out on Tuesdays, Channel 4.
Special thanks to Maya Vision and Rebecca Dobbs.