Two lectures at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna

Anatomy Hall, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna
Photo by Athena Athanasiou

Feminist Methodologies: Two Lectures
November 18, 2023

Organized by Prof. Dr. Elke Krasny
Anatomy Hall, Schillerplatz 3, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna

As part of the Feminist Methodologies lecture series, Athena Athanasiou and Elena Tzelepis give two talks on queer feminist knowledge production and issues of the wake, and on the dimension of the political in art and the tragic as situated knowledge.

Queer feminist knowledge production in the wake: Moments and movements
by Athena Athanasiou

In this lecture, Athena Athanasiou takes critical poetics of mourning and agonism as a way to attend to the question whether and how the contingencies of vulnerability are taken up as situated knowledges of queer feminist political imagination. To do so, she proposes to probe the question of being in the wake as a queer feminist method for critical presents. Thus understood, the wake bears connotations of fragility, vulnerability, the aporias of solidarity, and collaborative practices of critical caretaking connected with intersectional thought and struggles. Indeed, it involves fragility as method. Athena Athanasiou asks: what accounts of brokenness, care, and repair do practices of wake offer in these critical times of rising neofascisms, anti-feminisms, and enduring colonial capitalist injustices, but also terfisms, feminist transphobia and gender-critical feminisms? She reflects on the implications of mourning, care, and (un)breathability in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement and the global mobilization against gendered violence by deploying Antigone’s decolonial feminist instantiations in the context of contemporary activisms.

(The) political (in) art: Tragic acts as situated knowledges
by Elena Tzelepis

There is a long and variegated line of situational and translocal re-appropriations of Antigone that implies a heterogeneous and multilayered legacy which includes the voices and silences of subaltern and oppressed groups. Such readings present eccentric, mobile, postcolonial and anticolonial reconfigurations of the classic canon and the tragic element on the theatrical stages and social scenes of the contemporary world. These re-appropriations compel us to range across European thought from the “global South” to provide a critical assessment of thinking (with) Antigone in differential configurations of democratic agency and beyond pretenses of universalism. Addressing this performative plurality as a new form of knowledge production, the lecture considers the dynamically dissonant gesture of reappropriation: a move that attends as it unsettles. In this analytical frame, the question that is raised is how to deploy Antigone’s multifaceted performative and philosophical genealogy in order to grasp the present historical moment and its conditions of displacement, political violence, neoliberal de-democraticization, and border securitization.