PRESENTATION

PRESENTATION

Is it possible to describe the works of Proust, Virginia Wolf, Genet, Oscar Wilde or Sarah Waters in terms of "homosexual literature"? Are fictions of the literary canon representative of what Monique Wittig calls "heterosexual thinking"? How do fictions of feminist and queer political movements join dominant speech types? Which is the impact of post-colonial decentering in imperialist fictions?

When in 1991, Teresa de Lauretis invented the chimerical term of "queer theory", she brushes away in a single stroke, the essentialist pretensions of localizing a hard core in gay and lesbian identities, yet at the same time the attempts to make invisible the discourses, fictions and representations that emerge in minority cultures, feminist, gay, lesbian, trans and post colonial discourses. In this way the will to explore both dominant types of fiction as well as minority ones is stated as forming part of a single unique complex device for identity production.

Far from the pretension of identifying or historising a supposedly "homosexual literature" which would be formed by literary works written by gay and lesbian authors, what is explored here is the breakage and fugue lines opened in the texture of textual production done by dissident fictions. Using Foucaultian analysis, it is a matter of understanding writing simultaneously as one of the normative episteme through which sexual, genre and racial identities are built, yet at the same time, as a possible space for resistance and subversion in which, by working in the existing gaps that exist in dominant discourse, invent new political subjects. Thus "minor fictions" can appear, to use Deleuze and Guattari's term, which infect and inhabit dominant fictions from Cervantes to Proust or Virginia Wolf, Lydia Lunch to Kathy Aker, Guillaume Dustan or Tiptree, through punk, science fiction, comic literature, theatre of the oppressed, post colonial critique, self-fiction or performance writing.

Projection will be granted in this encounter to re-readings that deviate from the literary canon (to end up by discovering that marginal literature contaminates and infiltrates norm fictions), as well as "damned" or minority authors, collective and oral fictions that emerge from the collision between feminist movements, butch lesbian, trans, punk or anarchic-queer movements and the dominant discourse. We will attempt to identify the political power of fiction as well as the way in which language lets itself be modified by the political experience.

This encounter proposes three types of interventions, three intensities, three levels of participation: a monographic seminar with Eve K. Sedgwick, Proust and queer gods, which will serve as a rizomatic matrix around which a set of historic and theoretical conferences will be articulated (Didier Eribon, Beatriz Suárez Briones, María José Belbel, etc.) and a series of readings/performances by contemporary authors (Michelle Tea and Katastrophe, Virginie Despentes, Lydia Lunch…). Lastly, as parallel activity, a workshop headed by the Ex_Dones group.

PROGRAMME

PROGRAMME

SEMINAR PROUST AND THE QUEER GODS
Eve K. Sedgwick
23-25 May 07, 11.00 h. - 13.00 h.
* Prior inscription is required
* Place: Universidad Internacional de Andalucía (c/ Américo Vespucio 2. Isla de la Cartuja. Sevilla)

This seminar proposes an approach to the critical elaborations that emerge from gay, lesbian and queer studies using the reading of the work A la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust as an analytical framework. We will explore the range of historic models of homosexuality with which Proust negotiates in a dynamic way, as well as the relations of visibility, hiding, simulation and theatricality through which the "homosexual" topos is built in his writing. As part of a general project of de-Oedipusation of Proust's interpretation, we will also discuss the importance of Proustian neo-Platonism, by examining his irresistible and ubiquitous fascination for pagan gods and protective spirits. Thus in this way a new approach is traced around the matters of subjectivity, affection and identity. This will also be a chance to critically go over the paradigms elaborated, from the History of Sexuality by Foucault onwards, by queer theory of the nineties, confronting hermeneutics of suspicion and glamourization of repression that has dominated the queer interpretation of sexual subjectivity, with the Proustian model. It is not so much a matter of offering a definite reading of Proust, as much as that of exploring the impact of queer criticism in re-reading the fictions through which the modern subject is constructed.

PANTOJISMO (*) WORKSHOP
Ex_Dones group
25-26 May 07
Saturday: 11.00 - 19.00 h.
* Prior inscription is necessary
* Place: Universidad Internacional de Andalucía (c/ Américo Vespucio 2. Isla de la Cartuja. Sevilla)

Neither all the des/post/queer theories we can absorb nor the strongest will to maintain our reactions under restraint have been able to banish from our sleepless nights the love pathos of popular song, the corrosive and sweet spite, compulsive jealousy, victimistic pulsation. There is nothing that can be done; Love is the bête noir against which all our self-constructions falter. Why not obtain aesthetic benefits from so much queen drama rage? Pantojism will enable you to make up with your soap opera heroine through the paradoxical recreation of the worst you have done, that has happened to you by taking as a pattern television programmes designed to rip apart people's emotional lives which you swear you never watch.

(*) N. of T.: a reference to Isabel Pantoja, a famous Spanish folklore singer.

LECTURES
23-26 May 07, 18.00 h. - 21.00 h.
* Free entrance
* Place: Universidad Internacional de Andalucía (c/ Américo Vespucio 2. Isla de la Cartuja. Sevilla) 

· 18.30 h. Conference by Didier Eribon: Theories of Literature: the Lessons by Charlus, Divine and some others…
Proust and Genet are not only writers; they are also theorists of genre and sexuality. But their theories appear to fade away as they are exposed. Either because other characters offer diverse approximations or because the same character thinks himself or herself in a contradictory way. The discourse about sexuality is always threatened by instability and multiplicity.

Thursday _24 May 07
· 18.00 h.
Conference by Beatriz Suárez Briones: Does Campness Hide a Metaphoric Penis?
If lesbian is not a word that indicates the self, but rather the way of being in the world; if being a lesbian is not an ontological statement but rather a pragmatic one, a modus or a practice, a style (that anyone could adopt), What mark or marks label a text as lesbian, which would be the (style) features that would reveal the lesbian contained in the text?

· 19.00 h.
Conference by Mª José Belbel Bullejos: Hot Topic is the Way we Rhyme
A tour through feminist and queer politics in the musical pop scene in the Spanish State: from cabaret to trans-folklore, nova cançó to the punk and after punk movements: Guillermina Motta, Vainica Doble, Alaska, Carlos Berlanga, Almodóvar-McNamara and Dominio Austrohúngaro.

Friday_25 May 07
· 19.00 h.
Conference by Francisco-J. Hernández Adrián: Queer Territories, Bodies, Coloniality
What capacity of intervention would queer criticism and politics have to debunk the knowledge/power of teleological time, open territoriality of the other, and constitution of the Kantian dialectics of minority/majority? What limits of queerness can be stated from the so called postcolonial theory onwards? The answers, perhaps, may be placed in the plane of figurations of performative ethics capable of re-inventing points of view and spaces for interventions that are territorial, political and culturally decentered and fugitive.

Saturday_26 May 07
· 19.00 h.
Conference by Eve K. Sedgwick: Repression and its Alternatives: Beyond the Queer Theory
By means of a review of the development of the queer theory in the United States during the last 25 years, Sedgwick proposes an evaluation of the political and psychic trope of repression and its effects on the way we collectively imagine construction/deconstruction of subjectivity.

READINGS/PERFORMANCES
23-25 May 07, 21:00 h.
* Free entrance
* Place: Teatro Central (c/ José de Gálvez s/n. isla de la Cartuja. Sevilla)

Wednesday_23 May 07. Lydia Lunch.
· Performance Real Pornography. Using as a starting point a crude and irreverent view as opposing the banality of evil in contemporary American culture, Real Pornography examines the cycles of abuse and domination that underline family relationships, the transformation of religious tropes into political slogans and the spread of panic, violence and war as end means of subjecting the masses. In tension half way between a radical post-feminist manifesto and a political-Gothic ceremony, this multimedia work presents the memory, the body and pleasure as living knots skewered by power and thus, as possible axes for rebellion and historic mutation. A multimedia performance with musical improvisation and video highlighting the physical power of the spoken word.

Lydia Lunch is accompanied by music by Ian White and Marc Viaplana. Video by Lydia Lunch, Marc Viaplana and Josep Maria Jordana. Translation screened in Spanish. Ian White has played percussion and any other thing capable of creating noise for over 20 years. Drummer in Gallon Drunk yet also composer of soundtracks for films and the BBC.

Thursday_24 May 07. Virginie Despentes and MIR.
· Reading presentation of King Kong Theory (Melusina 2007). The destroyer punk diva of French arts, author of novels in which the characters occupy positions traditionally reserved for men (blood, sex and rock and roll) and the controversial and censured film Fuck Me (2000), offers us an essay in first person in which the taboos of liberal feminism are attacked: rape, prostitution and pornography. The transformation of old genre models and sexuality are underway. Indispensable and therapeutic.

The author will read a series of extracts from her new book in Spanish and French and is accompanied by the dj MIR.

Friday_25 May 07. Michelle Tea and Katastrophe.
· Musical reading and performance Lost in No Man's Land. Michelle Tea presents a reading of her most recent novel, Rose of No Man's land, a fictional story that deals with the themes the author has become recognized for in her work: a grubby feminism, wild youth culture, working-class heroics, sex, and drugs, and rock n roll. Tea will also give a brief introduction which contextualizes Rose within her larger body of work.

· A Night of Katastrophe. FTM transsexual hip hop artist Katastrophe performs his original work, featuring intelligent rhymes and hot electro beats that'll have your feet moving while your mind considers gender, politics, subcultural shit-talking, queer marriage, and many more musings from a leader of the U.S. queer hip hop movement.

PROGRAMME

Wednesday, 13 May 2007
· 11:00 -13:00 h.
Seminar of Eve K. Sedgwick. Proust and the queer gods.*

· 18:00 h.
Presented by Beatriz Preciado.**

· 18:30 h.
Conference by Didier Eribon. Theories of Literature: the Lessons by Charlus, Divine and some others…**

· 21:00 h.
Performance: Lydia Lunch. Real Pornography.***

Thursday, 24 May 2007
· 11:00 -13:00 h.
Seminar of Eve K. Sedgwick. Proust and the queer gods.* 18:00 h
Conference by Beatriz Suárez Briones. Does Campness Hide a Metaphoric Penis?** 19:00 h
Conference by Mª José Belbel Bullejos. Hot Topic is the Way we Rhyme.**

· 21:00 h.
Reading presentation of Virgine Despentes and music of MIR. King Kong Theory (Melusina 2007).***

Friday, 25 May 2007
· 11:00 -13:00 h.
Seminar of Eve K. Sedgwick. Proust and the queer gods.*

· 19:00 h.
Conference by Francisco-J. Hernández Adrián. Queer Territories, Bodies, Coloniality.**

· 21:00 h.
Musical reading and performance Michelle Tea [Lost in No Man's Land] and Katastrophe [A Night of Katastrophe].***

Saturday, 26 May 2007
· 11:00 -19:00 h.
Pantojismo Workshop of Ex_Dones group.*

· 19:00 h.
Conference by Eve K. Sedgwick. Repression and its Alternatives: Beyond the Queer Theory.**

* Prior inscription is necessary. Place: Universidad Internacional de Andalucía.
** Free entrance. Place: Universidad Internacional de Andalucía.
*** Free entrance. Place: Teatro Central

PARTICIPANTS

PARTICIPANTS

María José Belbel Bullejos
Graduate in English Philology, she furthered her training in Berkeley and studied an M.A. in the Queen Mary College of London. She has participated in the feminist movement since the seventies. She was a participant in the exhibition 100 x 100 (Museum of Contemporary Art of Seville, 1993), in which she presented her work by means of posters, phonocollages, visual poems and the publication of a fanzine. She has directed, with Erreazkioa, Re-politization of Sexual Space in Contemporary Artistic Practices (Arteleku, 2004) and Feminist Mutations in the project Disagreements along with Beatriz Preciado and Erreazkioa (Arteleku, 2005). Her interests revolve around the intersection between sound fictions of punk feminist groups, visual arts, writing and transgenerational construction of new feminisms.

Virginie Despentes
Writer and film director, she reached fame with her controversial novel Fuck me (1993), which she later adapted to film with Coralie Thrin-Tinh. The film was X rated by the French Audiovisual Superior Council, it opened an intense polemic debate about the limits of pornographic representation. Since then, she has written several novels such as Perras Sabias (Anagrama, 1994), Lo bueno de verdad (Anagrama, 1997) for which she received the De Flore Award, Teen Spirit (Grasset, 2001) and Bye Bye Blondie (Grasset, 2004) and the porno-punk feminist essay King Kong Theory (Melusina, 2007). She is currently preparing a film version of her work Bye Bye Blondie.

Didier Eribon
Philosopher. Pioneer in gay and queer studies in France, he has been Visiting Scholar of Philosophy and Theory in Berkeley (University of California) as well as Visiting Scholar of the Institute for Advanced Studies of Princeton. Author of the celebrated biography of Michel Foucault (Anagrama, 1989) as well as Michel Foucault and his contemporaries (Anagrama, 1994), as well as many essays of which we point out Reflexions on the gay question (Anagrama, 1999), Une morale du minoritaire (2001) y Echapper à la psychanalyse (2005). He has just finished publishing D'une révolution conservatrice et de ses effets sur la gauche française in French (Leo Scher, 2007).

Grupo Ex-Dones
Ex_dones is a self-provocation, a simulation, something irreverent, an attempt to return to feminist activism from the point of view of a discourse that questions genre and is not entrenched in it, the practice that is fed by our precariousness's and inevitable paradoxes instead of making these indigestible.

Francisco-J. Hernández Adrián
Assistant Professor of Romance Studies in Duke University and Academic Director of the Duke Center for Hispanic Studies in Madrid. His research projects are centered on constructions and theories of insularity concerning imperialistic and modern imaginaries of the Atlantic. His critique interests, publications and the seminars he imparts in Duke, include the fields of avant garde theories, visual theory, genre/sex/queer, colonialism and race in Hispanic Caribbean and the Atlantic.

Katastrophe (Rocco Kayiatos)
Katastrophe is an up-and-coming, genre-busting, emo-hop mc, whose stunning lyrical skills merge with beats that slide from slick to raw to solid to eccentric, creating a sonic otherworld that snags you in a dance-trance while teasing your head with rhymes that snap, pop and educate. He was awarded 2005 Producer of the Year from Out Music awards for his debut CD Let's Fuck, Then Talk About My Problems. His follow-up CD is the critically acclaimed Fault, Lies and Fault Lines. He is a featured artist in the documentary Pick Up the Mic: The (r)Evolution of Homo Hop, as well as the sole subject of the forthcoming documentary State of Katastrophe. Katastrophe has toured both the United States and Europe, and his music can be heard on the current season of the television show The L Word.

Lydia Lunch
Singer, writer, actress. She appears in 1976 with her band Teenage Jesus & The Jerks at the age of barely 16 in New York underground circuits where she participates in the creation of a punk and no wave aesthetics along with musicians such as Nick Cave, Sonic Youth or Die Haut. She also collaborates with directors such as Richard Kern (author of films such as Fingered or The Right Side of My Brain), of experimental theatre such as that of Emilio Cubeiro and punk poets such as Exene Cervenka with whom she produces unheard-of (violent and powerful) representations of feminine sexuality. Among her books we point out Paradoxia: Diary of a predator (1997), today a classic in punk feminism. Her latest album is Deviations on a theme (2006).

MIR (Miriam Blanch)
She was base guitar of the Pop-Rock band La Morgue and in 1995 forms part of the band Madame X, along with Miguel Rivera from Maga and Miguel Marín-Árbol. Along with Miguel Marin, in 1996, founds the band Explosivos Acme, cutting a record entitled Puzzle, forms part of several collective works of the Karma label such as Warsaw, Tributo al Punk and Instant. Like Explosivos Acme, they perform in different venues and festivals. After this musical proposal, she commences initiation in electronic music as MIR. In 2004 she acts along with DJ Mouse; she forms part of the musical atmosphere creation of the Spoken Words festival in the Lope de Vega theatre of Seville and with “Encuentros en la Vanguardia” she carries out a cycle of three films in Puerto Santa María and Cádiz. In 2006 she founds the band Austter along with David Jiménez in which they join electronic music and amplified instruments such as the base guitar and guitar.

Beatriz Preciado
Philosopher and queer activist, she is the author of the book Manifiesto Contra-Sexual (Opera Prima, 2002) and many articles such as "Multitudes Queer" (Multitudes 12, Paris 2003), "Basura y Género", (Eseté, Donostia, 2004) "Savoirs_Vampires@War" (Multitudes 20, Paris 2005), "Pornotopia: Pornography and Architecture in Playboy Houses" (Cold War /Hot Houses, Princeton, 2004), "Gigantas/Casas/Ciudades. Notas para una topografía política del género y de la raza" (Artecontexto, no. 8. Autumn 2005) and "Sex Design" (Airs de Paris, Centre Pompidou, 2007). She teaches in different Spanish and foreign Universities including Paris VIII University, Saint Denis (France) and heads the workshop of Genre Technologies in the Programme of Independent Studies of the Macba. She will soon publish T yonki, a self-essay about pharmaco-pornographic transgender practices and Vigilar y Complacer: arquitectura y pornografía en las casas Playboy.

Eve K. Sedgwick
Professor of English Literature in City University of New York and author of the initiator book of queer studies Epistemology of the closet (University of California Press, 1991), she has recently elaborated an ambitious reading of the literary canons from Nietzsche to Proust. She is also the author of Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (Columbia University Press, 1985), Tendencies (Duke, 1993), Touching Feeling (Duke, 2003), and the book of poems A Dialogue on Love (Beacon, 1999).

Beatriz Suárez Briones
Lecturer of Literary Theory and Comparative Literature in the Faculty of Philology and Translation of the University of Vigo (Spain). Her priority line of research is feminist theory in its intersections with the theory of sexuality, psychoanalysis and women's writing. She is author and editor of various books of feminist theory and has published many articles in specialized publications. Backer of feminist and/or genre studies in the University of Vigo, she was founding member of the Chair of Feminist Studies of the University of Vigo, she is co-director of the Masters of Educación en Igualdade de Xénero e Políticas de Igualdade, Xénero, Educación y Políticas de Igualdade e Liderado. She is currently codirector of the first Official Programme of Posgrao en Estudos de Xénero existing in Galicia (Spain) -one of the only six taught throughout Spain. She is a member of the Section of Philosophy and Thought of the Galician Council of Culture and is an advisor in the matters of equality and genre of the President of the Xunta de Galicia.

Michelle Tea
She is the author of four memoirs, including the Lambda-award winning Valencia (2000), and the illustrated Rent Girl (2004), which is currently being developed as a television series for Showtime. She is the author of the poetry collection The Beautiful (2003) and the novel Rose of No Man's Land (2006), and has edited three anthologies: Without A Net: The Female Experience of Growing Up Working Class (2004); Pills, Thrills, Chills and Heartache: Adventures in the First Person (2004), and the recent Baby Remember My Name: New Queer Girl Writing (2006). She is the creator of the all-girl performance tour Sister Spit: The Next Generation, and Artistic Director of Radar Productions, which curates indie literary events.