Sicherheitslos. Prekarisierung, die Künste und ihre Geschlechterverhältnisse

Abstract

Secureless. Precariousness, the Arts and Gender Relationships

What are the possibilities of resistance against the acute precariousness of life? What needs to be done right now? How can we think autonomy and freedom if they are no longer to be understood as concepts exclusively evoking dissident practices of life, but work within the training procedures of neoliberal individual responsibility. How can the critique of an economy of individual self-optimization be made productive in order to share, co-share, and communicate an ethical responsibility for the fundamental securelessness of life, of all our lives? The issue is based on papers that were given at the symposium Sicherheitslos. Prekarisierung, die Künste und ihre Geschlechterverhältnisse held at Berlin University of the Arts in October 2011, initiated by Linda Hentschel and organized together with Miriam Dreysse and Kerstin Brandes. Taking up the ongoing debates in the arts, in visual culture, theatre and media studies, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and gender studies, it explored how systems of representation re/present, structure and stabilize precariousness, or rather: the precarity of life, but also and simultaneously enable interventions.