Conference Intimately Material 20-21 May 2024 – Report

Report on Conference “Intimately Material – Violence, Social reproduction and Queerness in transition” (EUI 20-21 May 2024).

Written by Riccardo Bulgarelli, Marta Chmielewska, Moisés Fernández Cano, Benno Gammerl, Lois Kalb, Mónica Morado Vázquez.

On May 20th and 21st 2024, the EUI Queer and Feminist Studies Working Group organized the international conference “Intimately Material – Violence, Social reproduction and Queerness in transition” which reflected on the pervasiveness of systems of oppression, how they create subjects, and how those subjects in turn find spaces of dissidence and resistance.

We started this conference by highlighting how different political endeavors have occupied Florence lately, redesigning its geography through collective acts of resistance, rebellion and solidarity against the imperial and violent actions of the neoliberal and globalized system, patriarchy, neocolonialism. Our conference took place simultaneously with the Alternative State of the Union, a researcher-led activist event at the European University Institute, and those two events were locally connected with other forms of mobilization in Florence’s city centre: the student intifada that resulted in a 10-day occupation of the Piazza Shireen Abu Akleh (formerly Piazza San Marco) and the collective march and occupation led by Collettivo ex-GKN #insorgiamo, a factory workers’ collective that since 2021 began a permanent assembly and a bottom-up model to protect GKN factory from the risk of industrial dismantling and relocation. The theme of a Marxist materialist approach to queer and gender studies was particularly timely in this context of collective, bottom-up and grassroots action that was happening at the EUI and in the city at the same time. The organizers of the Alternative State of the Union and the Collectively Material organizing committee were both active in these student and worker-led initiatives by proposing to think together about the ways in which individuals doing academic research can build not only inclusive but resistant spaces, capable of tracing the historical, cultural and social reasons for marginalization and exploitation, power and forms of privilege.

The intimacies panel explored how intimate relationships intersect with broader social and political contexts. Emrah Karakuş opened the panel by addressing the lingering impacts of racial violence and the strategies of collective care within queer Kurdish communities based on extensive anthropological research. Georgia-Taygeti Katakou followed with a presentation exploring the gendered intimate bonds formed within the Greek communist movement and their implications for collective solidarity. Virginia Niri joined online to discuss BDSM as anti-capitalist sexual dissidence. Based on the work of queer communist activists and researchers, she offered a critical perspective on the differences between BDSM and kink practices. She explored this distinction in depth and asked which one can be a form of resistance to capital. Hossein Cheaito concluded the panel providing an in-depth analysis of Lebanon’s economic crisis, supported by extensive historical context and statistics, and highlighting how these crises reshape queer kinship networks in Lebanon.

Together, these presentations highlighted the need to include intimate relations in economic and social research, as they are shaped by and shape larger socio-political forces, offering nuanced perspectives on solidarity, resistance, and kinship in diverse contexts.Be it in a dungeon or in debt-ridden Lebanon, relationships rely on imbalances of power, and queer forms of kinship can save us from those oppressive structures such as the nuclear family, which serve for economic and social control while producing heterosexuality, but can also be a source of violence and inequality.

The second panel focused on the role of racialized, gendered and sexualized labor in defying the individual and collective struggles and subjectivity formations. Ramona Dima and Simona Dumitriu led an interactive session where the audience, role-playing as queer migrant workers from Eastern Europe in Sweden, had to choose between resisting exploitation or giving in to unfair labor conditions. Despite these choices, the outcomes, shaped by systemic inequalities, often resulted in losing situations, highlighting the harsh realities faced by marginalized communities. The two next papers explored the role of sex work, first as the production of affects, and second as a part of border regimes. Athena Michalakea examined the intersection of labor, migration, and humanitarianism in Greece. Andrea Corrales Devesa’s paper highlighted the labor and material aspects of the production of pornographic images and their role in building a common sexual imaginarium. Sara Petrovic discussed the embodied experiences of female dance workers in Serbia based on her anthropological study of ballet professional dancers in Belgrade. Zoe Steinsberg concluded with a paper exploring how wage work policies established by European Union and member states shape trans identities and subjectivities through their focus on productivity.

Collectively, these discussions underlined the central role of labor in shaping diverse identities, as well as the importance of the struggles for better labor conditions within contemporary socio-political contexts. The panel on labor has helped us rethink the material conditions of sex work, the connection between trafficking and moral norms, and the materials and infrastructures involved in the building of our sexual imaginarium. It showed importance of seeing beyond the labor or non-labor division, and the behind the scenes of the performance of labor, be it in ballet, trafficking, or porn.

The afternoon’s keynote session continued the question of how to write a nuanced queer and feminist critique of capitalism. Bogdan Popa and Jules Joanne Gleeson delivered two keynote speeches that explored the intersections of queer theory, Marxism, and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Popa’s talk, “Between Lacan and queer Marxism: Working through impasses and possibilities,” examined the compatibility and tensions between Lacanian psychoanalysis and queer Marxism. Gleeson’s keynote, “Reproduction, Breeding, Polyvalence – Capital & Transgender Marxism,” addressed the role of trans communities in challenging capitalist structures and generating new forms of social reproduction.

The second day one opened with a panel on transitions, as we asked how to research and theocratize historical changes influenced by geopolitical power structures. It especially asked about the tensions between the center and periphery, as well as the role of colonialism in constructing racialized queer subjects. It explored the possibilities of transitions as focus of analysis and as ways of tracing histories in which change is not essentialized. It also explored the nation-building processes that are produced through moral threats embodied by specific parts of the population, a collective that is also considered an annoying surplus by capitalist and imperial forces, be it in Egypt, Kerala, or Palestine.

Łucja Staszkiewicz explored gender labor and care practices in the 2000s Poland, exemplified by the representations of transwomen in contemporary postsocialist art. Jamil Mohd provided a historical analysis of sex panics that resulted in anti-LGBT+ policies, stigmatization of sex work, and production of cisheterosexual norms in 20th century Egypt. Sbitan asked about the role of colonialism and anti-muslim racism and their impact on queer communities in Egypt. Shilpa Menon continued these themes as she presented online challenging the materialist historiography of trans identities in India thought the research on Hijra community in Kerala region. Paweł Bagiński concluded the panel, discussing the media portrayal of the new legal and social category of “sexual harassment” that emerged in the 1990s Poland.

The last panel has focused on infrastructures, but we have also heard a lot about space and time. It discussed temporalities of citizenship and ownership, and queer understandings of time. Regarding space, it also explored symbolic violence within the context of traditional land ownership, and the role of “queer social reproduction” in assessing how livable some spaces are for queer people. The panel concluded with analysis of different forms of ethics and politics that counter destructive practices in the Anthropocene, or materialist virologies that can help us build intersectional solidarities and internationalist movements. Shariq Waheed, Ra’ana Malik, and Fareha Siddiqui examined the impact of urbanization on gender marginalized groups in Pakistan. Xinyu Guan discussed the state’s role in shaping queer temporalities through housing policies in Singapore. Jih-Fei Cheng presented a paper on the intersections of virology, racial capitalism, and queer critique. Ignacio Elpidio Dominguez Ruiz joined online to discuss spatial inequalities in queer communities. Franca Midori Marquardt concluded by analyzing resistance strategies in patriarchal-capitalist contexts.

We finished the conference with a workshop that offered an interactive space to reflect about our own material and intimate relation to the academy. In small groups, we worked both individually and collectively to write notes about what makes us “sick” in academia and academic work, namely structural, cultural, political elements that have a negative impact on our daily life and projects. Those collective writings highlight how precarity affects our work in many ways. Beside economic and contractual conditions, precarity invades our spare time, our personal projects, our affects, our communities. This is produced by the commodification and colonization of knowledge where the need of production and being productive according to certain values and needs appears as the only attribute of our work and personal sphere. Opposed to the culture of narcissism and individuality that prevails in academia, this moment of collective sharing helped us to think about alternatives and solutions. Most of our notes urge for a politics of collective care in academia. Discussion and collaboration emerge as the only way to build a more equal, inclusive as well as resistant academic space where voices can meet and join to highlight privileges, thinking about alternatives, contrasting neoliberal approaches to intellectual work. That is why we also talked about the need to organize our struggles into collective movements shared with local and global momentum, such as the Palestine protests and pro-workers movement.

Throughout the conference, discussions emphasized the connections between identity, intimacy, labor, and capital. Papers talked about tensions between violence and connections of queer kinship, labor struggles, colonial power relations, and the infrastructural challenges faced by marginalized communities. “Intimately Material” highlighted the ongoing relevance of Marxist and materialist analyses in understanding contemporary queer and feminist issues. The conference fostered an exchange of ideas, promoting interdisciplinary collaboration and solidarity among activists, artists, and scholars from around the world. The papers presented and the participants came from different academic backgrounds (such as economy, sociology, anthropology, history and literary/art studies) and their themes varied in context and time periods. We have aimed to create an intimately material space of collective reflection about how to engage with ambiguities, how to go beyond binaries of margin/center, male/female, north/south, east/west, and how to live in spaces of perpetual transition.

Following the conference, we visited the encampment together, embedding the materialist theories and debates we discussed within the current political and historical context of Florence. This experience connected our academic reflections to the on-the-ground struggles and protests, reinforcing the relevance of our work and the potential for social change.

Organizing committee:

Riccardo Bulgarelli (EUI researcher)

Marta Chmielewska (EUI researcher)

Moisés Fernández Cano (EUI researcher)

Benno Gammerl (EUI Professor of History of Gender and Sexuality)

Lois Kalb (EUI researcher)

Mónica Morado Vázquez (EUI researcher)

Sponsored by EUI History Department

Administrative work: Francesca Parenti (EUI Administrative Assistant).