Desiring Tension:Towards a Queer Politics of Paradox

The article provides a close reading of the video Sometimes you fight for the world, sometimes you fight for yourself, dir. by Pauline Boudry/Renate Lorenz (2004, 5’). It reads the video as promoting what it calls a ‘queer politics of paradox’, that is, a politics that acknowledges desire as a constitutive moment of the political and at the same time challenges the political via a queer understanding of desire in order to make room for the political articulation of the Other. The article argues that a reworking of the political — one that aims at de-centring its hegemonic dynamic and creating space for Otherness — becomes possible if one invites paradox as a specific, anti-identitarian, and agonistic mode of tension to function as a constitutive moment of desire and of the political.Antke Engel, ‘Desiring Tension: Towards a Queer Politics of Paradox’, in Tension/​Spannung, ed. by Christoph F. E. Holzhey, Cultural Inquiry, 1 (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2010), pp. 227–50 <https://doi.org/10.25620/ci-01_12

Das Bild als Akteur – das Bild als Queereur. Methodologische Überlegungen zur sozialen Produktivität der Bilder

The Image as Agent and as Queering Agent. Methodological Reflections on the Social Productivity of Images The article investigates the social productivity of images, or, more specifically, their capacity to queer the heteronormative social order. Focusing on the agency function of images, it suggests a form of ekphrastic reading that acknowledges the power relations at work in the reading process itself. This process doubles the image through a detailed description, which step by step takes in elements of an unexpected discourse. Such an approach is exemplified through the reading of the series Pin Ups For Beginners, produced by the Hamburg-based artist durbahn in 2005. The work is viewed in the light of queer and feminist discourses on sexual representations and critical disability studies.