Philosophie du viol — une archéologie du déni 

Keynote by Elsa Dorlin

September 8, 11:30–12:30pm
Kollegienhaus, Lecture Hall 102
Keynote in French with simultaneous interpretation into English
 

Il s’agit dans cette intervention de s’appuyer sur la bibliothèque des philosophies féministes pour problématiser le viol comme ce qui constitue l’une des dimensions principielles du déni de réalité. A distance des interprétations psychanalytiques de la notion, une philosophie et une historiographie sociale et politique qui fait retour sur les héritages de la modernité pourrait s’interroger sur les processus de déréalisation qu’initient ou qu’entérinent l’ordinaire du viol.

In this keynote, Elsa Dorlin will draw on the library of feminist philosophies to problematize rape as one of the principal dimensions of denial of reality. Distancing itself from psychoanalytic interpretations, a socio- political philosophy and historiography, which returns to the heritages of modernity, could interrogate the processes of de-realization that initiate and endorse the ordinary of rape.

Elsa Dorlin is an award-winning French philosopher and professor of philosophy at the University of Toulouse-Jean Jaurès. Before joining this university in 2021, Dorlin held positions at Paris-Sorbonne University, University of California, Berkeley, CUNY, and Paris 8 University. Her main research interests include the epistemology of domination, the genealogies of capitalism, the articulations of gender, race, and class, as well as the relations between bodies, violence, and subjectivity. Dorlin’s work has resulted in several influential books such as La matrice de la race. Généalogie sexuelle et coloniale de la nation française (2006), Sexe, genre et sexualité (2008), Black Feminism. Anthologie du féminisme africain-américain, 1975-2000 (2008), Penser avec Donna Haraway (2012, with Eva Rodriguez), and Se défendre. Une philosophie de la violence (2017). For Se défendre, Dorlin received the 2018 Frantz Fanon Book Prize. Her contributions to feminist philosophy were recognized with the CNRS Bronze Medal in 2009.

Beyond Doomscrowledge. For a cyber_trans_feminism

Keynote by Katrin M. Kämpf

September 9, 13:30–14:30pm
Kollegienhaus, Lecture Hall 102
Keynote in English

Once upon a time, no one on the Internet knew you were a dog. Today, your period tracker may out you as trans or abortion seeking, your doomscrolling will fill the “Kill Cloud” (Ling/Westmoreland) with more and more data, and your open access publications will be harvested to train commercial AI applications. Data doubles, data derivatives or data shadows determine what news we get to see and thus shape what we perceive as our reality. The distinction between data bodies and data about bodies has become blurred. 

In current technecologies, data promises absolute objectivity. It is interpreted as an immanent digital reality rather than as knowledge produced through material-semiotic practices. With these promises of truth and objectivity, new forms of governance have become possible. On the one hand, data abstracted from bodies, body data, become the statistical basis of biopolitical modes of governance and, on the other hand, data doubles, data bodies, become the targets of precisely these forms of governance. At the same time, AI slob, AI image production, and cyberlibertarian forms of fascization seem to have abandoned truth claims or theories of objectivity altogether. 

In this talk, I will scroll through artistic, cyberfeminist, scholarly, and activist interventions into these algorithmic regimes of power, looking for technecological forms of care and dividual forms of desubjectivation.

Katrin M. Kämpf, Dr. phil., lehrt und forscht zu Queer Studies und Science & Technology Studies an der Kunsthochschule für Medien in Köln. Die Kulturwissenschaftlerin promovierte an der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Sie untersucht queerfeministische Technologien der Sorge, Subjektivierung im Digitalen, Sexualitätsgeschichte und Queer Theory.

Netpolitics: Circulating Emancipatory Ideas Online

Roundtable
w/ Katrin Köppert, Francesca Schmidt, and Pinar Tuzcu

September 9, 15:00–16:15pm
Kollegienhaus, Lecture Hall 001
Roundtable in English, moderated by Bianca Prietl

This roundtable discussion focuses the sociotechnical conditions, possibilities and ambivalences of circulating emancipatory ideas online. It takes up discussions of so-called netpolitics that have since the 1990s engaged with the possibilities provided by the internet and related net-technologies for advancing feminist goals and emancipatory politics, especially by integrating artistic and activist interventions. Today, this means foremost to take a look at platform based social media and the ways that emancipatory ideas circulate via these current-day net-technologies. #metoo might be the most prominent example of so-called hashtag-feminism, symbolizing the possibilities of developing positions critical of patriarchal and heteronormative power asymmetries and mobilizing large populations against the ensuing violence. At the same time, women and people not conforming to binary gender norms are especially prone to encountering hate speech online due to their gender or sexuality, while social media providers are disinvesting from diversity programs and content moderation rules that were supposed to counteract different forms of online violence. Although social media have been criticized for impeding differentiated and fine-tuned debates, while favoring highly emotionalized and polarizing messages, they are key to today’s netpolitics. The roundtable brings analytical perspectives on feminist netpolitics today in a dialogue with first-hand experiences in circulating emancipatory ideas online.

Katrin Köppert ist Kunst- und Medienwissenschaftler*in und lebt in Berlin. Aktuell vertritt sie* die Professur Medientheorien an der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin und ist Juniorprofessor*in für Kunstgeschichte / populäre Kulturen an der Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig. Sie* studierte Neuere deutsche Literatur und Gender Studies an der Humboldt Universität zu Berlin und promovierte im Rahmen des DFG-Graduiertenkollegs „Geschlecht als Kategorie des Wissens“ an der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin sowie an der Carl von Ossietzky Universität Oldenburg in Kunst- und Medienwissenschaften. Anschließend folgten Tätigkeiten als wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiter*in an der Universität Siegen, Kunstuniversität Linz und Universität der Künste Berlin. Als Gastwissenschaftler*in war sie an der LSE London und USC Los Angeles tätig. An der Ruhr-Universität Bochum vertrat sie die Professur für Transformationen audiovisueller Medien unter besonderer Berücksichtigung von Gender/Queer Theory. Seit 2020 ist sie die Ko-Leitung des DFG-Forschungsnetzwerk „Gender, Medien und Affekt“, seit 2024 des VW-geförderten Projekts „Digital Blackface. Rassisierte Affektmuster des Digitalen“. Sie ist Redaktionsmitglied bei der Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft sowie der Open-Access-Zeitschrift Open Gender Journal. Mit Jiré Emine Gözen leitet sie* die Redaktion von GAAAP_ The Blog der Zeitschrift für Medienwissenschaft. Zuletzt erschienen ist der Band digital:gender - de:mapping affect. Eine spekulative Kartografie (Spector Books, hg. mit Julia Bee und Irina Gradinari).

Francesca Schmidt is a feminist activist and member of netzforma* e. V., working at the intersection of digital policy, decolonial theory, and intersectional feminism. Her focus lies on digital colonialism, feminist infrastructures, and resistance to platform-based power. From a practice-based and theory-driven perspective, she seeks to challenge systemic injustice and co-create emancipatory digital futures.

Pinar Tuzcu is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Queen’s University in Canada, specializing in digital justice. Born in Turkey, she worked in German academia for over a decade before joining Queen’s. As a transnational scholar, her research focuses on algorithmic culture, digital biopolitics and geopolitics, global migration, feminist/postcolonial theory, and decolonial practice. She is the founder of Cybaltern Studies, a decolonial feminist framework that theorizes digital infrastructures as sites of extraction and surveillance, drawing from her neologism combining cyborg and subaltern. While acknowledging their emancipatory potential for certain grassroots communities, Cybaltern Studies critically analyzes digital systems as products of a racial capitalist mindset—endeavours entangled with colonial legacies of data extraction as a form of onto-epistemological violence, enacted through mechanisms of domination and surveillance. Tuzcu is the author of Ich bin eine Kanackin: Decolonizing Popfeminism in Germany and co-editor of Migrantischer Feminismus. She has published in Postcolonial Studies, Feminist Media Studies, and other venues in both English and German. She is also the co-founder and former spokesperson of DeKolonial – Association for Antiracist, Postcolonial, and Decolonial Theory and Practice, based in Berlin.