Technologies of Gender. Post-identity Micropolitics

Workshop and seminar directed by Beatriz Preciado

This workshop occupies a place at the junction between the production of critical discourses about gender, sex and sexuality, attempting to build up activist strategies, and the creation of devices for aesthetic and political experimentation which aim to restore agency to minorities. In 2004, the starting point for the first edition of this workshop was the exploration of performative and biopolitical discourses as possible sites for action which would be both political and theoretical in relation to gender and sexuality representation. The 2005 edition goes deeper into and further along these same lines of analysis.

In the context of so many aesthetics of identity and the explosion of modern-day institutional gender politics, we shall be referring to post-identity narratives, which displace hegemonic discourses without renaturalizing sexual, gender, racial or national identity: border narratives which occupy contact zones and hybrid spaces. Unlike gender politics and feminist, gay and anti-colonialist identity, which establish binary oppositions between masculinity and femininity, heterosexuality and homosexuality, colonisers and the colonised, giving the second element of the duality the position of political, moral and even metaphysical "exteriority" in relation to their dominators, post-identity theories see the sex-race-capital system as a network of forces, in which there is no room for any kind of exteriority.
The workshop is divided into several modules of different duration which follow on from each other and are interconnected. They will include seminars on theory, public lectures, workshop experience, performances, documentation and interventions.