BODIES, BORDERS, ARCHIVES: SPACES OF KNOWLEDGE
CONTESTATION AND AFFECTIVE TRANSACTIONS
March 23, 9.30- 13.00, Utrecht University, Drift 21, Sweelinckzaal (entrance through
University Library, Drift 27). More information: m.j.zarzycka@uu.nl
Speakers:

Ann Cvetkovich (University of Texas at Austin)
Marta Zarzycka (Utrecht University)
Luisa Gandolfo (University of Aberdeen)
David Bate, The Shattered Intention, courtesy of the artist
This one-day symposium investigates a variety of spaces—historical archives,
online image repositories, geographical zones marked by conflict—that are
marked by more or less visible and formalized lines of separation, difference, and
division. Along and across these lines, the contestation of established fields of
knowledge and formation of new ones take place simultaneously with affective
transactions between people, objects, and histories. The aim of the symposium is
to trace how feminist/queer/postcolonial theories account for these processes.
Archival Turns and Queer Affective Methods (Ann Cvetkovich)
This talk will focus on the recent proliferation of LGBTQ archives as a point of departure
for a broader inquiry into the power of archives to transform public histories. The push
for LGBTQ state recognition, civil rights, and cultural visibility has been accompanied by a
desire for the archive—a claim that the recording and preservation of LGBTQ history is an
epistemic right. Yet new LGBTQ archival projects must also respond to historical and
theoretical critiques, including decolonizing ones, that represent archives as forms of
epistemological domination and surveillance. This talk address these tensions through
case histories of actual archives, as well as projects by artists whose creative and queer
approaches to the archives are simultaneously critical and transformative.
Showing Corpses: Images of the Dead in War Reporting (Marta Zarzycka)
Almost since its beginnings, photography has documented the impacts of war and other
forms of mass violence on human bodies. In Western media today, photographs of
(predominantly non-Western) corpses are commonplace, serving as testimony to civil
strife and state violence. Referring to feminist work on emotions such as empathy,
repulsion, or horror, this talks addresses how communities of spectators— communities
sharing ideals, nationality, religion—are disrupted or brought together when confronted
with the blatant visual proof of death in war imagery. At the same time, it also follows how
photographs of corpses have become a negotiable, serviceable, and politicized
convention, exploited for the purposes of global capitalism and nationalist propaganda.
Balancing Power: Transactions and Negative Reciprocity in the Transition Zone
(Luisa Gandolfo)
In the context of conflict narratives, boundaries, and borders serve as facilitators or
inhibitors of peace. In Palestine and Israel, demarcation is enacted through the separation
wall, the Green Line, and the smart fence along the Gaza Strip. However, informal
demarcations are also perpetuated through processes of Othering, affective exchanges,
and the negotiation of physical space. Analyzing these demarcations, this talk will
deconstruct the intersection of culture, politics and place, and the means by which
reciprocity and transactions are traversed by the state, community and the individual.

Speakers:
Prof. Ann Cvetkovich is Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of
Texas at Austin. Her work focuses on how affects, emotions and feelings have become
tangible commodities in neoliberalism and late capitalism. She is the author of Mixed
Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism (1992); An Archive of
Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (2003); and Depression: A
Public Feeling (2012).
Dr. Luisa Gandolfo is Lecturer in Peace and Reconciliation Studies at the Department of
Sociology of the University of Aberdeen and the author of Palestinians in Jordan: The
Politics of Identity (2012). She has conducted research on expressions of nationalism and
gender and political activism within the Arabic blogosphere and social networks under
the auspices of the Centre for Advanced Study of the Arab World (CASAW), at the
University of Durham.
Dr. Marta Zarzycka is Assistant Professor in the Gender Studies Department at the
Institute of Media and Culture, Utrecht University. She teaches and publishes in the field
of photography studies and feminist theory. She is a co-editor of Carnal Aesthetics:
Transgressive Imagery and Feminist Politics (I.B. Tauris, 2012). Her current book-length
project, entitled Gendered Tropes in War Photography: Mothers, Mourners, Soldiers, is
forthcoming from Routledge and is supported by The Netherlands Organisation for
Scientific Research.