Beyond Deadly Encounters: Queer People of Color and Formations of Alliances for Radical Transformation

This presentation’s focus is on how feminists and queers of color, and ultimately feminists and queers of all colors, come together - or not - in alliances for radical political transformation. The talk concerns a range of practices that Bacchetta calls co-motion, defined as a large rubric for diverse phenomena such as coalitions, solidarities, alliances, networks, linkages, convergences, unities and other political encounters. In a first part, Bacchetta engages with what she calls deadly encounters , or alliances that fail miserably by constructing, enhancing, reinforcing or enacting the obliteration of the subaltern subjects they implicate in the alliance. She then addresses some very constructive current alliances from which we can learn immensely. Bacchetta asks: Why does co-motion fail? What makes co-motion fruitful? How might we rethink and re-enact co-motion for radical transformation, to construct new relations to each other, all beings and the planet, and new ways of life, for our times?

Paola Bacchetta is Professor in the Department of Gender and Women's Studies at University of California, Berkeley. She is also Co-Chair of the Initiative on Political Conflict, Gender and Peoples’ Rights. She serves on the Advisory Boards of Berkeley’s Center for Race and Gender, and Center for Right-Wing Studies. She is an Affiliated Professor at Berkeley’s Institute for South Asia Studies, Institute for European Studies, Center for Middle East Studies, and Center for the Study of Sexual Cultures.

Verena Melgarejo Weinandt studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and at the Instituto Universitario Nacional de Bellas Artes in Buenes Aires. Her artistic practice is interwoven with latin american, decolonial and feminist theory and was especially formed by works of Maria Lugones, Yuderkys Espinosa und Gloria Anzaldua. She works in photography, video performances, collages, screen printing and installations and created two alter egos, in form of “Pocahunter” und “Bolita Berlinesa”.

Imayna Caceres is an Artist, anti-colonial activist and occassional curator from Peru. In my work I seek to weave meanings that contribute towards an understanding of the sequels of colonial structures in the current organization of life, the coloniality of being, of knowledge and arts, of gender and spirituality, and the fracture between mind and body. Graduated in Media Communication and Sociology in Peru, and recently in Fine Arts in Vienna, I am part of the TRENZA collective, where we seek to build community and challenge the codes that sustain mechanisms of exclusion.

Eine Kooperation des Referats Genderforschung mit der Vortragsreihe zu antirassistischen, BPoC und migrantischen Perspektiven im Feld der Kunst und Bildung.