Trikster Blog

A couple of weeks ago, the multi-disciplinary artist Carlos Motta released his fascinating research-based art project We Who Feel Differently with talks in Bergen and Oslo.

We Who Feel Differently is the result of Motta’s extensive work on queer activism and the question of alternative thinking, centered around numerous interviews with activists in Colombia, USA, South Korea and Norway. Motta has collected an amazing number of voices and material, and he has been generous enough to present it all for free on a compelling homepage: wewhofeeldifferently.info. Great!

I have just started to read, listen and watch all the fascinating material in the interview, journal, ephemera and theme-sections, and look forward to spend much time on and with this homepage in the future. Here is how Motta presents the structure of the project:

We Who Feel Differently is a database documentary that addresses this question and other critical issues of contemporary queer culture.

Interviews features conversations with fifty queer academicians, activists, artists, radicals, researchers, and others in Colombia, Norway, South Korea and the United States about the histories and development of LGBTIQQ politics in those countries.

Themes outlines five thematic threads drawn from the interviews in the form of a narrative. This section has also been produced as a book.

Journal is a sporadic publication that presents in depth analyses and critiques of LGBTIQQ politics from queer perspectives. The first issue is “Queerly Yours: Thoughts and Afterthoughts on Marriage Equality.”

We Who Feel Differently attempts to reclaim a queer “We” that values difference over sameness, a “We” that resists assimilation, and a “We” that embraces difference as a critical opportunity to construct a socially just world.

I hope Motta’s project will generate critical discussion and debate about politics of difference and sameness, queerness etc. It surely is a gold mine to all scholars, activists, artists and others interested in queer activism, transnational solidarity and alternative perspectives on the “site” of queer politics. I hope to write more about this project in the future!

Here is an incomplete list of queer festivals and other LGBT related events this summer and fall.

It is nice to know where things happen in case one has the opportunity and desire and money to travel. These are some of the places one might want to visit (or avoid, depending):

25 – 29 May 2011: Kashish – Mumbai International Queer Film Festival (Mumbai, India)

27 – 29 May 2011: OffPride (Zurich, Switzerland)

1 – 5 June 2011: TranScreen – Amsterdam Transgender Film Festival (Amsterdam, Netherlands)

1 – 12 June 2011: Euro Pride (Rome, Italy)

12 June 2011: London’s First Ever Sex Worker Film Festival 2011, (London, UK).

17 – 26 June 2011: Skeive Dager (Oslo Pride Festival) (Oslo, Norway)

25 – 31 July 2011: Queerfestival Copenhagen 2011, (Copenhagen, Denmark).

1 – 7 August 2011: Stockholm Pride (Stockholm, Sweden)

5 – 7 August 2011: quEAR: trans*tonale Ohrenfest (DIY queer audio festival) at Schwarzer Kanal (Berlin, Germany)

17 – 21 August 2011: Copenhagen Pride (Copenhagen, Denmark)

18 – 21 August 2011: Queertopia (Norberg, Sweden)

16 – 24 September 2011: Queer Lisboa Film Festival (Lisboa, Portugal)

22 – 25 September 2011: Oslo Queer Festival (Oslo, Norway)

21 – 30 October 2011: MIX Copenhagen LesbianGayBiTrans Film Festival (Copenhagen, Denmark)

25 November – 1 December: Florence Queer Festival (Florence, Italy)

Trikster mourns over the death of the brilliant theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick April 12 2009.

Sedgwick was one of the most influential and important theorists for the development of queer theory, with seminal books such as Between Men (1985), Epistemology of the Closet (1990), Tendencies (1992), and Touching Feeling (2003). Her death at only 59 years leaves a big gap in contemporary queer theory, literary analysis, affect theory, and poetry.

According to the obituary in The New Yorker, it was the breast cancer she had been battling with for over a decade that caused her early death. In A Dialogue of Love (1999), her book on her diagnosis of breast cancer, she writes about one of her conversations with her therapists, where she says “What I am proudest of is having a life where work and love are impossible to tell apart.” That’s an ideal to strive for.