Facilitated by Rena Onat and Jin Haritaworn
Every Monday, June 29th – July 27th 2020, 6:00-8:00pm
“Exiled from both the gentrified spaces of queer regeneration and liberal multicultural moulds of respectability, the kitchen tables introduced in this book are crucial sites that wider social movements would be wise to become accountable to. Attending to them with care may well allow altogether different transitions to emerge.” (Jin Haritaworn, 2015)
On four consecutive dates we would like to dedicate ourselves to the book Queer Lovers and Hateful Others: Regenerating Violent Times and Places by Jin Haritaworn, published in 2015: www.plutobooks.com/9781783712700/queer-lovers-and-hateful-others/
The course will be led by Rena Onat and will open with a public online talk by Jin Haritaworn on June 29th about their latest work: #NotGoingBack #NobodyLeftBehind: Leaping into Marvellous Grounds. The talk will take place in spoken English is open to the public, and not restricted to the participants of the reading circle. Pls. find further information here.
On July 27th, Jin will return to facilitate the final session of the reading circle.
The reading circle is deliberately set outside of an academic sphere and is explicitly also aimed at people who do not move within academic circles. The basis for the course is the mutual recognition of different forms of knowledge and knowledge production.
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Course description
The reading circle will mainly take place in spoken German. The opening talk by Jin Haritaworn will be held in English!
In this course we will deal with current issues of bio- and necropolitics, mechanisms of exclusion and marginalisation, and colonial continuities of (Berlin) urban development and urban politics, based on the book Queer Lovers and Hateful Others. In this context, we invite you to relate the themes of the book to current developments. The cultural production of the Covid-19 crisis gives renewed relevance to the question posed in the book, which lives are worthy of protection and which are dispensable: “Who is allowed to live, who must die, and who is left to die?
Selected questions to be discussed in class:
- How does the increasing securitisation and control in public space affect QT*BIPoC?
- To what extent are we experiencing a renewed racist backlash in the wake of the so-called “Corona Crisis” and a repeated shrinkage in the size of spaces in which black people and People of Colour, especially QT*BIPoC, feel safe?
- Which dreams and memories does the book open up? How can the generational knowledge we gain through Queer Lovers and Hateful Others help us to jointly develop new perspectives and decolonising strategies for the future? What possibilities and also increased urgency of exchange at kitchen tables and other places that are rarely perceived as places of social movement exist in times of physical distancing? How can these possibilities of exchange and joint knowledge production be implemented?
- How can a transnational perspective support us in relating processes of marginalisation and systems of inequality and accordingly enable cross-community action?
Book description:
In Queer Lovers and Hateful Others Jin Haritaworn argues that queer subjects have become a lovely sight in the shadow of hateful Others, who are fixed as homophobic and disposable. Rather than an ‘in’ or ‘out’ sexual citizen, Haritaworn treats the queer lover as a transitional object that renders the shift between a welfare regime and a neoliberal regime palpable, and makes punishment and neglect appear as signs of care and love for diversity. Talking back at ‘invented traditions’ of women-and-gay-friendliness, and a queer nostalgia for more murderous times and places, Queer Lovers traces the making of a moral panic over ‘Muslim homophobia’. The new folk devil inherits technologies from older transnational panics over crime, violence, patriarchy, integration, and segregation. In contrast, the book foregrounds the environments in which queer bodies have become worthy of protection, the everyday erasures that shape life in the inner city, and the alternative maps that are drawn at Queer of Colour kitchen tables in inner-city Berlin. In the process, queer lovers, drag kings, criminalised youth, homosexuals persecuted under National Socialism, and other figures of degeneracy and regeneration appear on a shared plane, where new ways of sharing space become imaginable.
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Information regarding participation and registration
Please only register if you can participate in 80% of the sessions. If necessary or helpful for work or training purposes, a confirmation of participation from xart splitta and the facilitators can be issued.
The reading circle is explicitly directed to folks who identify as Black, Indigenous or People of Colour. The willingness to engage with BIPoC Queer and Trans* topics is a precondition for attending the course.
Please register by June 30th at: contact@xartsplitta.net
Your registration must include a short letter of motivation in which the following questions should be touched on:
- Why did I choose to take part in the reading circle?
- In what way have I engaged with Queer of Colour politics and communities, or other topics of the reading circle until now?
- In what way might I contribute to the group I will co-create during the reading circle?
- What are my expectations and hopes in regard to the reading circle?
The link required for participation will be sent to you once we have confirmed your registration.
In this course, we aim to build a space that is grounded in generous and reciprocal relationships where every participant takes responsibility for their own well-being and that of the other course members.
Jin Haritaworn is Associate Professor of Gender, Race and Environment at York University in Toronto, Canada. Born and raised in Germany, they spent their foundational years at Queer of Colour kitchen tables in London and Berlin. Jin locates their work in the tradition of activist scholarship, which attempts to be in the service of communities. Their publications include two single-authored books, numerous articles (in journals such as GLQ and Society&Space), and several co-edited collections (including Queer Necropolitics, Queering Urban Justice and Marvellous Grounds). Jin has made foundational contributions to several fields on both sides of the Atlantic, including gender, sexuality and transgender studies, critical race and ethnic studies, and urban studies, and has left their imprint on various concepts and debates, including gay imperialism, homonationalism, intersectionality, gentrification and criminalization, trans and Queer of Colour archives and politics, and queer space.
Rena Onat is an art and media scholar and is currently working on her doctoral thesis on “Strategies of Resistance, Empowerment and Survival in the Works of Queer Artists of Color in the German Context” (working title). Her research focuses on queer theory, critical race theory, intersectionality, visual culture, contemporary art and artistic knowledge. She has worked as a research assistant at the Institute for Media Studies at the University of Fine Arts in Braunschweig and at the Helene-Lange-Kolleg Queer Studies and Intermediality at the University of Oldenburg. She has also been a lecturer at the University of the Arts in Bremen, at the Alice Salomon Universtity of Applied Science in Berlin and at the Kunsthochschule Berlin Weißensee (in the Foundation Class). Since March of this year, she has been working at the Kunsthochschule Berlin Weißensee as gender equality officer.
This event is part of the project #CommunitiesSolidarischDenken and is sponsored by LADS.
The current conjuncture of quarantine and protest has highlighted the trappings of a modernist realism whose conservative solutions to social problems go back to a paucity of methods, genres and dreams. The wins that the uprisings against anti-Black police violence have put on the horizon, from the dismantling of the prison industrial complex to the creation of alternatives, have been long seeded and prepared for by social movements that dreamed big, and demanded the impossible. This includes a long line of elders and ancestors, many of whom Black, feminist, queer and abolitionist, that have prepared to take fantastic leaps, in the words of the 
