Colloque (Dé)faire les catégories (Web)

Time: 08.-10.10.2024
Venue: Paris and virtual space
Proposals by – extended: 15.12.2023

Aiming to make its components distinct, observable, and as a consequence controllable, Euro-US modernity remains inseparable from processes of mass objectification of the world. The contemporary importance of „categories“ and categorisation for framing and governing societies, individuals and non-human realities depends upon epistemologies and practices of theoretical abstraction, definition, classification, hierarchisation, differentiation and, as such, assignment to a category. The production of tools for understanding and analysing the world must therefore be considered in conjunction with the historical transformation of relations of domination and the imposition of uneven material living conditions (Chow 1998; Curiel 2013; Grosfoguel 2022; Colin and Quiroz 2023).
The conference „Undoing Categories“ considers hegemonic categories as attempts to produce, naturalise, and legitimise relations of power and a hierarchical social order in terms of class, race, gender, and sexuality (Scott 1986; Vicente 2021). It is, however, imperative to note that the labour of assigning and maintaining order does not operate without faultlines nor without producing its own margins (Kosofsky Sedgwick 1990; Lemebel 1996; Bento 2006; Cabral 2011; Espinosa Miñoso 2016). It is in this sense that certain bodies, certain entities and certain social movements refuse to subscribe to a normative course, and organise in a manner to make and hold space, or even more radically, to overthrow the existing order. Read more … (Web)

• Strands: TELLING: Genealogies, archives, epistemologies | DECOLONISING: Racialisation and sexuality | INTERPRETING: Psychoanalysis and queerness | ABOLITION

The conference supports three languages of presentation and discussion: French, English and Spanish.

Source: qstudy-l@mailman.rice.edu