May 15, 7 pm

Antke Engel

Sexuelle Diversität unter neoliberalen Vorzeichen

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The present-day pluralization of sexual and gender lifestyles is taking place in the tension-charged field between neoliberal economic transformations and political movements predicated on sexuality. Interesting in this context are both the discursive overlaps that result from individualization as standard and the ideology free shaping of one’s own gender identity and sexuality, as well as the contradictions that undermine the supposed coincidence of sexual freedom and the free market. Even though socio-economic integration cannot be equated with policymaking power, the normalization of divergent sexual lifestyles certainly goes hand-in-hand with certain gains in freedom. What do these look like? Who profits from them? And at what cost? What seems characteristic to me today is a paradoxical simultaneity of respect for privacy and the outing what is private: While on the one hand a depoliticization of sexual lifestyles is propagated, so that sexual deviance or dissidence seem to be private affairs, at the same time the reproduction and circulation of public images is fostered, which in particular mark out some forms of homosexuality as not only being acceptable, but veritably celebrate them as avant-garde neoliberal subjectivity. I would like to proffer the term “projective integration” for capturing the normalization process that ties privacy to making public. According to my thesis, “projective integration” is the means by which a new hegemonial consensus emerges that takes advantage of the ambiguity of the hetero/homo opposition to address socio-economic contradictions.

Antke Engel, a doctor of philosophy, is a feminist Queer theorist who does freelance work in research and cultural production. She directs the “Institute for Queer Theory” (Berlin/Hamburg: www.queer-institut.de), which has since 2006 been initiating projects dedicated to a “queer politics of representation” in which academic and activist, philosophical, political and artistic practices are interwoven. Since fall 2007 she has been a fellow at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICI) in Berlin.