MC: Antke Engel: Reading Visual Dynamics of Power and Desire: queer assemblages, the strategy of undisambiguation, and the method of engaged ekphrasis

Reading Visual Dynamics of Power and Desire:
queer assemblages, the strategy of undisambiguation, and the method of engaged ekphrasis

The aim of this master class is to understand and discuss three concepts (queer assemblages, the strategy of undisambiguation, and the method of engaged ekphrasis), which I propose as decisive means of approaching art and (audio-) visual culture from a queer theoretical perspective. Queer theory, as I define it, is a post-identitarian mode of thinking and articulating difference (always referring, though never limited to gender and sexuality), which underlines the productive/transformative moments of representation and investigates/activates the dynamic interplay of power and desire in social and cultural relations. The aforementioned concepts and methods bring to the fore the political dimensions of queer cultural studies, which not only analyse and criticise, but disrupt relations of exclusion, normalisation, and violence through its reading practices and ways of engaging with art works as agents.
The article “Queer Reading as Power Play” presents and further elaborates the methodology of my book Bilder von Sexualität und Ökonomie (Engel 2009; Images of Sexuality and Economy) – a power-sensitive, desiring (in short: engaged) ekphrastic reading that enables a discourse analysis of visual material. While the article itself also employs two examples, I suggest combining it with “Tender Tensions – Antagonistic Struggles – Becoming Bird”, since there I demonstrate in detail how one can understand an artistic visual material as functioning as a force of knowledge production and a theorizing agent. “Tender Tensions…” includes a close reading of the video Charming for the Revolution by Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz, which we will watch together and discuss in class. The article “Queer/Assemblages” is meant to provide a clearer understanding of the role of desire as “traveling in images” and how it inspires reading practices. The article contains a short hint to the strategy of undisambiguation (or: equivocation), which I will explain further in my introductory talk.
 

Material for preparation:
Engel, Antke: Queer Reading as Power Play: Methodological Considerations on Discourse Analysis of Visual Material, in: Qualitative Inquiry, forthcoming 2018
Engel, Antke: Tender Tensions – Antagonistic Struggles – Becoming Bird: Queer Political Interventions into Neoliberal Hegemony, in: María do Mar Castro Varela, Nikita Dhawan, Antke Engel (Hg.): Hegemony and Heteronormativity: Revisiting ‘The Political’ in Queer Politics, Surrey (Ashgate) 2011: 63-90
Engel, Antke: Queer/Assemblage. Desire as Crossing Multiple Power Relations, translated by Aileen Derieg, in:  eipcp 8/2011: http://eipcp.net/transversal/0811/engel/en

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“Tender Tensions…” includes a close reading of the video
Charming for the Revolution (Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz 2011, 16mm/DVD, 11 min) https://www.boudry-lorenz.de/charming-for-the-revolution/, which we will watch together and discuss in class.

// Dr. phil. Antke Engel, Institut für Queer Theory, Berlin
(engel@queer-institut.de)