People’s relationships to paid work are many and varied. For some it is an important indicator of their identity, while for others it is a form of inescapable drudgery, boredom, or a place of exploitation. For those under- and unemployed, this unbearable state of boredom might itself be an aspiration. Current literature on queer identities and…[Read more]

A review of a series of interviews with prominent political theorists (Wendy Brown, Braidotti, Jean-Luc Nancy, Negri, Vogl, Esposito, Tariq Ali, Saskia Sassen, Maurizio Lazzarato, and Angela McRobbie). All of them reflect on contemporary political crises and the concept of crisis itself. This review considers their political positions as well as…[Read more]

They say the global proliferation of colonial and neoliberal (ir)rationalities and the techno-managerial enclosure of the ‘commons’ (Hardt & Negri 2000; Harvey 2004) has resulted in a ‘foreclosure of politics’, prompting calls for a renewed technocultural hegemony for a post-capitalist future (Srnicek & Williams 2015) or a return to the revolut…[Read more]

PrEP (Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis) is a relatively new drug-based HIV prevention technique and an important means to lower the HIV risk of gay men who are especially vulnerable to HIV. From the perspective of biopolitics, PrEP inscribes itself in a larger trend of medicalization and the rise of pharmapower. This article reconstructs and evaluates…[Read more]

Diskriminierung und Menschenrechtsverletzungen gegenüber LSBTI-Personen werden heute international thematisiert und angeprangert – ein vergleichsweise neues Phänomen. Dennoch tragen die herrschenden Normen von Zweigeschlechtlichkeit und Heterosexualität weiterhin zur Diskriminierung bei: So sind gleichgeschlechtliche Partnerschaften in fast alle…[Read more]

Menschenrechtsverletzungen aufgrund sexueller Orientierung und Geschlechtsidentität (SOGI) wurden auf internationaler Ebene lange Zeit kaum zur Kenntnis genommen. Doch seit einigen Jahren wird dem Thema in den Vereinten Nationen breiterer Raum eingeräumt. Die Yogyakarta-Prinzipien und eine Studie des Amtes des Hohen Kommissars für Me…[Read more]

Christa Winsloe’s Mädchen in Uniform texts offer a means to examine the role of education in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century German society while also exemplifying the genre of boarding school literature. This article provides an overview of educational debates in Prussia and the German Empire in the second half of the nineteenth ce…[Read more]

This essay argues, through various personal anecdotes, for a university in which our work and lives would turn away from impersonal professionalism and more towards a praxis where we would recognize better, as Brantley Bryant has written, that our “very strength, our very expertise, comes from darkness, indeterminacy, unmarketably disastrous…[Read more]

A plea for more generous modes of reading each other’s scholarship in order to arrive at a University that values productive dissensus within a framework of shared endeavor and solidarity. The essay also argues for new relational modes in which personal, professional and other identities would be rejected in favor of cruising each other’s thought and work.

This paper presents a reading of Sarah (Genesis 11:29-23:19) as a proto-trans(gender) figure. The author addresses the problem of cisnormativity and its impact on biblical interpretation. In particular, throughout this paper Sarah is presented as a character who has been cisnormalised within the literary tradition of the Biblical text in order to…[Read more]

“Unter Männern” weaves together three threads of, first, historically relevant memory recited by its chosen protagonists; second, some personal history on the part of the primary filmmaker (i.e., director Ringo Rösener); and, third, between and among them, filmic artifacts or evidence of life in the GDR. This documentary presents the a…[Read more]

This chapter introduces the volume on East German film. The chapter and the volume it introduces surveys a range of depictions of gender and sexuality in East German film and television, from stereotypical and ideologically compliant understandings of femininity and homosexuality to more ambivalent constructions of androgyny, gendered agency, and…[Read more]

This essay examines the circumstances of the production and appearance of East Germany’s first film about homosexuality (the short documentary “Die andere Liebe” or “The Other Love”), while considering the role it plays in our understanding of the development of German lesbian and gay history. More specifically, this essay provides a reading of…[Read more]

“Confessions of a Frigid Man: A Philosopher’s Journey into the Hidden Layers of Men’s Sexuality” is the translation of a Japanese 2005 bestseller. Soon after the publication, this book stirred controversy over the nature of male sexuality, male “frigidity,” and its connection to the “Lolita complex.” Today, this work is considered a classic in…[Read more]

In the twenty-first century, the majority of people are living in cities—at least this is the credo communicated frequently. This statement has been strengthened by the “urban renaissance” that dawned at the beginning of the twenty-first century and by a globally evident increase in capital investment in urban-development projects. Such plann…[Read more]

This is an interview conducted to Pedro Lemebel, a Chilean visual artist and writer, who in the 1990s established himself as one of the most provocative and wrenching voices in the contemporary literary culture of Chile and Latin America in general. His chronicles direct their most confrontational barbs towards practices that regulate the traffic…[Read more]