Gender and Queer Studies, Transgender Studies, Affect Theory, Postcolonial Theory
ICI Berlin
Christinenstraße 18-19, Haus 8
D-10119 Berlin
This project examines recent global activism of transgender/trans* people. Although it is remarkable that trans* activists and their allies have achieved large-scale radical change in the past decade, this project scrutinizes the movement’s inherent ideals of success and goal-orientation as an affectively structured paradoxical temporality. It takes on the critique of the term ‘transgender’ commonly used as a progressive transnationalized and globalized concept of the Global North and West and further elaborates the foundational preconditions of the raced, classed, Euro- and Anglo-centric notion 'transgender' for non-conforming gender representations in activism. By focusing on the surrounding atmospheres and felt temporalities of trans* activism, this project scrutinizes how political emotions beyond the hope of improvement are embraced within the larger scope of a political project committed to the idea of progress. At stake is thus the undoing of the dynamist model of political progress through an elaboration of the errantry of affective activism as the condition of knowledge formations that could constitute an activism allowing for an indeterminate future outcome.