240204 SE Critical Scientific Practice (2022W)

Methodologies of In_visibility: Gender & Sexuality, Art & Theory

Visibility has an important place in queer-feminist, critical race, and dis_ability politics. Visibility is seen as necessary to gain social recognition and equality. Practices of invisibilization are often violent. They pervade media, for example, representing social homogeneity, instead of showing the diverse lifestyles and people that actually make up society. Legal and other important state and societal discourses also render invisible, thereby denying recognition, equality and inclusion, whether based on racialization, migration biography, gender, class, or dis_ability.
Yet, visibility is ambivalent. Northwest European feminist and queer politics racial critique and activisms often assume that more visibility means more political presence, more participation, and more access to privilege. Such politics overlook the complex processes at work in the field of visuality. Hence, it is important to think about "who is given to see, in what context-and most importantly: how, that is, in what form and structure." (Schaffer 2008: 12)
Moreover, visibility and invisibilities are not necessarily stable binary oppositions. What happens when meaning is concealed and a new type of speech emerges? What happens when necropolitics need to be addressed in public space? What happens when the interviewee refuses to speak?
Through a theoretical overview of the potency of notions of opacity and invisibility, visibility and transparency as used in Gender, Queer, and Postcolonial Studies (Anzaldúa, Glissant, de Villiers, Stella) the students will become familiar with the multitude of ways these methods have been used by minorities, artists, theorists in modern and contemporary culture.

The seminar will offer specific examples from different eras and cultural settings (e.g. research produced by the “Magic Closet and the Dream Machine” which explores conceptualizations of queerness within the former soviet space and which showcases alternative ways of sharing research data in emotive and creative ways). With examples from different cultural texts from the 1960s till the present day (video, music, performance, dance, art in public space, film) students will become acquainted with artists and cultural producers who have used in_visibilities and opacities to communicate sociopolitical causes and mobilise communities while flying under the radar of authorities. Artists include Félix González-Torres, Andy Warhol, Hugh Paddick and Kenneth Williams, Dope Saint Jude and Angel Ho, and Paola Revenioti. Both literature and artistic/cultural examples cover an array of sociocultural and linguistic loci (the Caribbean, Greece, S. Africa, the UK, the US).

The seminar will be focusing on collaborative ways of learning and will encourage exchange between the students.
It will employ different formats: brief lectures, screenings, discussions, presentations, group crits, and brief free writing exercises. Students will be expected to read and prepare texts/audio materials for discussion prior to each session.