Conference materialistic queer feminist perspectives on violence in Innsbruck

Conference from 5.-7. Dezember 2024 | Künstler*innenhaus Büchsenhausen, Innsbruck (Austria)

Conference description

The examination of violence from a materialist (queer) feminist perspective makes it clear that it is interwoven with social structures in its various forms. From this perspective, it is important to make institutions, economic constraints and conditions, practices and forms of knowledge visible that normalize cis heteronormative, patriarchal, racist, postcolonial and classist social structures and thus create a set of conditions for diverse forms of gendered, sexualized and normative violence.

As early as the 1970s, Marxist feminists such as Silvia Federici, Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Selma James pointed out the structural interconnectedness of capitalism, gender inequality and violence. By pointing out the constitutive significance of gendered and racialized population policy and the gendered division of labour for the reproduction of capitalism, they laid important foundations for analysing and criticizing violence from a structural perspective: Violence as exploitation, violence as the conditioning of bodies, violence as the prevention of self-determination, violence as physical control, violence as discipline, violence as the denial of gender and sexual diversity.

The aim of the conference is to develop theoretical and empirical perspectives on capitalism as an intersectional social formation that structurally produces and reproduces violence. We want to explore how, from a materialist-(queer)feminist perspective, violence can be conceptualized as exploitation, violence as the prevention of life chances and security, and violence as a normalization that inscribes itself into the constitution of gendered, sexualized, racialized and classified subjects, bodies and populations. In light of the multiple crises of the present, we also want to discuss which theoretical and conceptual tools are needed to combat authoritarian anti-feminism, rising queer and trans hostility and attacks on bodily self-determination.